Blade the Iron Cross

Blade and the crew deserve better than this.

The dumpster fire, that Full Moon has become, continues to burn. We need someone to step up and bring back FM to it former gory... errr... glory!

This stinker is bad. Really bad. The so called "plot" feels like it was written in one boring afternoon by somebody with very limited creativity. And it all seems so dreary - it has that "cramped stage with almost all action pushed up against a wall" feel. Camera work is constantly out of focus, sound is hashed up in places and the Set Props are beyond laughable! Yeah this one is a dead donkey and I do wish I could get back the time watching this horror-ible film. 1 star - as I can not rate it any lower...

Blade: The Iron Cross isn't the worst Puppet Master film so far - that dubious honour goes to the absolutely awful Puppet Master The Legacy - but it's close.

Tania Fox plays psychic newspaper reporter Elisa, who teams up with cop Joe Gray (Vince Cusimano), and puppet Blade, to take on the Nazis, who are planning to turn the US population into violent zombies using a death ray.

With an approximate budget of just $90,000, The Iron Cross looks and feels incredibly cheap, with lousy special effects and some of the worst green screen work I have seen in a recent film. The acting is atrocious and the direction ham-fisted. About the only positive things I can say about the whole film are that Tania Fox spends quite a lot of the time naked and the runtime is mercifully short - just 70 minutes.

The next film in the series, Puppet Master: Doktor Death, is also very short, which makes me wonder just how bad that is -- guess I'll find out soon enough.

A psychic war journalist, Elisa Ivanov, awakens Blade and together they begin a bloody journey to stop scientist Dr. Hauser.

Director John Lechago delivers a hokey instalment in the vein of the Axis of Evil trilogy in terms of production values and tone. Like the recent Band Puppet Master productions writers Brockton McKinney and Shawn Gabbori offer more warped Nazi science, a punishing puppet and a few Axis staple zombies thrown in for good measure.

Lechago does his best with the budget but if less was more we'd have nothing on screen, so credit has to be given. Blade is just off, his look, his size etc. Fans honestly have a better looking Blade puppets in their collections. Clairvoyant crusader Elisa played by Ukrainian actress Tania Fox is notable and out acts the majority of the cast both dressed and undressed with ease. Both Vincent Cusimano detective and Angelica Briones' Gloria deserve a mention.

The solid music score by Richard Band is the main reason to watch this Puppet Master spin off. Ultimately, it's in desperate need of a high budget remake of the original to reignite the franchise. It's unrecognisable when compared to Puppet Master 1 & 2. A Blade film could have been special but this just doesn't cut or hook the mustard.

Overall, as part of Full Moon's Deadly Ten sequels it's a good effort given the budget but it's clunky, rusty and the WWII story is tired. It highlights more than ever Puppet Master needs a serious reboot.

Its very low budget and has some problems with time period accuracy in regards to props and other things, but if you have a serious aversion to these kinds of issues then I'm not sure how you're even aware this film exists. This has the Full Moon charm without the trying-to-be-funny-bad-cheesiness present in so much of their modern catalogue. The story almost feels like some offshoot of Reanimator with the animation solution being used by a Nazi mad scientist to experiment on dead humans. I was expecting much worse, but this is an enjoyable late night viewing & the short runtime works to the film's advantage.