“The Magic Has Changed Over”: Breaking Down the Final Battle of ‘Puppet Master 5’
Puppet Master 5 is one of my favorite entries in my childhood favorite franchise, but I don’t think that’s a hugely popular opinion and I understand why. It is the last of what I’d say the largest chunk of fans consider the “good” Puppet Master movies, and in some ways that’s appropriate, as it was intended to be the final entry altogether. The original title on the VHS tape when it first released was Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter. But that’s obviously not the way things went and was never all that accurate to begin with, considering the fact that Full Moon planned to follow it almost immediately with the unmade Puppet Wars trilogy. Puppet Master 5 was the first Puppet Master film that I actually owned on VHS, and I was as obsessed with the action figures as I was with the movies themselves. Whenever I played with those toys, I was pretty much emulating this film every time. More than anything, Puppet Master 5 is most remembered by those who have seen it as being an extended third act to Puppet Master 4. And that’s fair, because that’s what it is.
Puppet Master 4 and 5 were originally planned to be one movie, and it was going to be a big event for Full Moon, as it was going to be their first theatrical feature. To double down on that event mindset, it was given the head-scratching title Puppet Master: The Movie. Once the theatrical approach no longer seemed feasible, Full Moon head honcho Charles Band decided to split the film into two parts and shoot them back-to-back. This became a frequent thing for Full Moon in that era. Subspecies 2 and 3 and Trancers 4 and 5 did the same. The great Jeff Burr, who we sadly lost last year, wound up directing Puppet Master 4 and 5 which took a much more sci-fi/fantasy than outright horror direction. By this point, Full Moon was in its superhero era with movies like Doctor Mordrid, Mandroid, Invisible and Dark Angel: The Ascent. The puppets had already been the good guys in the previous entry, fighting Nazis in WWII, so the transition toward fighting little demons instead of going back to killing innocent people honestly made sense.
I prefer Puppet Master 5 to Puppet Master 4 even though it is truly just an extension of that movie. It’s not without its faults, of course. For an 80 minute movie it doesn’t really get going until almost the halfway mark, and one of the survivors of the previous entry has been relegated to being comatose in a hospital bed just to wake up screaming at regular intervals, but there’s a lot to love about it, too. It sounds absurd to say considering both movies were shot at the same time, but Puppet Master 5 has a more polished, distinctive visual style than Puppet Master 4. We’ve got more stylized lighting and those big round windows reflected on the wall, which are absent from 4 and almost make the movie look like a comic book — which it pretty much is. Those differences, visually, as subtle as they might sometimes be, do so much to separate the two films. Plus, Puppet Master 5 has Torch, whereas 4 did not, and the puppet fights are better overall.
That’s what I really want to highlight here. I don’t want to just hang around and talk about why I love Puppet Master 5, I could do that all day, I want to specifically walk you through the finale, the big final battle between the puppets and the Totem (the demon Sutekh possessing his Totem body, but over the years marketing has just labeled him The Totem and it’s easiest to refer to him as that) which is one of the most dynamic and impressive sequences in the entire franchise. Considering that Puppet Master 5 was the last Puppet Master of the Paramount era, it really is a final chapter of sorts, especially since it was the last entry to feature the work of the late, great David Allen and his whole team at David Allen Productions. They were the true geniuses who did so much, crammed together under desks staying just out of sight, to bring these puppets to life. And this sequence is truly a last hurrah for that whole gang and everything they brought to these movies.
So, to kick off the scene, The Totem has our heroes cornered and then Decapitron makes his grand entrance. This is where things are markedly different from the get-go. With the slowly closing elevator door, Totem’s surprised turn and the lightning, the scene has a sense of immediacy and drama that had been missing from really all of the fights in Puppet Master 4 & 5 up to this point, as fun as each of them were. The flash of lightning illuminates Decapitron, The Totem even looks almost scared and that lets you know this is it. It also really helps to sell Decapitron as the secret weapon, the big guy, which both movies tell us a lot without really doing much to show us.
In the next moment, a single blast from Decapitron sends Totem across the lobby and he goes limp, and it’s hilarious to watch that demon puppet fly through the air, but it also makes the fight look over before it begins. After all, in the previous movie, they fought several Totems. Now they only have to take care of one, and even though he’s got magic powers, they have Torch on their side for that extra dose of, well, firepower.
Totem gets up and claps back at Decapitron by hitting him with a blast of energy and Decapitron has an incredibly dramatic reaction. But this is nonetheless the biggest thing I wanted to comment on here, this is why I’m writing this in the first place, because there are several different kinds of puppet effects happening here, and they’re blended together remarkably well. Obviously, there are the magic energy optical effects. But more than that, there’s a terrific blend of stop-motion and traditional rod/cable-control puppetry, so that each effect helps to sell the other. Totem is a regularly puppeted creature as he turns to blast Decapitron, and then the shot of Decapitron falling dramatically to his knees is stop-motion.
The stop-motion even helps to sell the very old-school optical magic and electricity effects, because emulating the vibes of yesteryear really feels like the point of this sequence and is a big part of why it’s so effective. This is Puppet Master doing a full-blown Ray Harryhausen monster brawl, and doing it remarkably well.
The blend of stop-motion and puppetry is even smoother when Six-Shooter shows up and starts blasting away at The Totem from the bannister. He’s twirling his guns and we even have a few different angles of stop-motion Six-Shooter, which is rare and impressive for the amount of time they must have had for these shots. There’s a wide shot of him twirling his guns and then two separate close-ups of him laying into the Totem. The shots of Totem reacting to this, conversely, are all puppetry. A stop-motion shot of Six-Shooter sliding down the bannister while continuing to fire at Totem was storyboarded, but ultimately scrapped. Once again, Totem seems wounded and drops, and this time it looks like he might be down for the count.
There’s a comical, quiet moment in the action as Blade pokes Totem to see if he’s dead. These softer beats in the fight not only do a lot to serve the scene narratively, they had to be a life-saver for the effects crew, knowing that this is a puppet Battle Royale where stop-motion still, realistically, had to be used sparingly.
This whole scene is also great for Blade as a character, who had a one-on-one fight with the last Totem in the previous movie and got literally slapped around before being thrown across the room, letting out a groan, the whole moment played for laughs. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s confusing for the flagship character. You’d never see an X-Men movie decide to devote the cool moments to everyone but Wolverine. And Blade still loses this quick skirmish, but the puppetry looks much more fluid here than in 4.
Blade comes through, though, as The Totem zaps him with magic only to find it’s no longer working. The little shot of Blade holding his arm up in front of his face, realizing he’s unaffected, it’s small but it grants him the hero moment he didn’t have in 4, as the puppet to realize they’ve suddenly got the upper hand simply because he was willing to take the heat of that blast. That also just serves this film pretty well by itself, without taking into account the larger franchise, considering that Blade was basically our only puppet for the entire first act. Plus, it just looks so fluid, such a weirdly naturalistic movement from a puppet that can only emote from spikes in its eyes.
There’s a lot of animated effects from this point as The Totem attempts to use the last of his magic reserves to open up a portal back to his dimension, so that he can return fully charged and return to take the puppets out when they truly don’t have a chance. There’s still a nice blend of stop-motion and puppetry here, really seamless as Totem is stop-motion from behind and the shots of his face are all puppet.
We round this whole fight off with an emotional beat that I’d have to think could not possibly have been intentional. None of the people who made this movie have been shy about admitting they couldn’t make heads or tails of the plot. Between five writers who were not working in tandem and this being one movie split into two, Puppet Master 5 has its story issues. Yet having said all that, it’s easy to read into what’s happening here even if it wasn’t intentional. Decapitron overloads himself and basically turns himself into a bomb. He is sacrificing himself to stop The Totem, Sutekh, from escaping this dimension and thus saving the other puppets and the new puppet master, Rick. Each of the puppets are human souls possessing a puppet body, and Decapitron is the original puppet master, Andre Toulon. Had this been an actual final chapter, what a way to end it.
The very first scene of the first film showed Toulon shooting himself before the Nazis could capture him, sacrificing himself to keep his puppets from falling into the wrong hands. Dying to protect them. In Puppet Master 5, even though he is now a puppet and the genre has changed almost entirely, we wind up in the same place we began. The whole series comes full circle. Except of course for the fact that this time, he survives. Decapitron is pretty dinged up, but he survives the blast, killing The Totem but not himself in the process. He survives specifically because he is repaired by Rick, the new puppet master. In the original movie, Toulon sacrificed himself that first time because he was so afraid of his secrets falling into the wrong hands, and survives a second time solely because he was willing to entrust his secrets to another. Intentional or not, it is a terrific balance. What a note to go out on.
Even if these thematic elements were unplanned, everything else in that hotel lobby showdown was planned. It’s the last David Allen Productions sequence of the entire franchise, and they went for broke. Almost every kind of effect that Allen and his crew pulled off across those five movies (stop-motion, rod puppets, cable-controlled puppets, etc.) are there, all together, all at once. Each is cut terrifically from one to the next to blend them all together in the eye so that nothing stands out to the viewer, nothing takes you out of the action, as any single element so easily could if lingered on for even just a second too long.
To me that puppet brawl perfectly captures just how magical David Allen was and what a crew he had, even if the attitude, for a crew working that much on so many movies had to be “Oh God, another Puppet Master,” if that was the attitude, you don’t feel it at all. The two leads have already left the hotel by the time this scene occurs. That whole finale is all puppet and yet the emotion, context, and drama are sold nonetheless. It’s the single best sequence across both Puppet Master 4 and Puppet Master 5, two very fun and unexpected entries, that have always been — to me — somewhere between Puppet WrestleMania and the world’s smallest kaiju movies. I love them dearly for that.
