Being sold as the goriest film ever, I have to say, no. It's a Puppet Master film if you've never seen any of those it's hard to say you MUST see this one as you probably don't have to. But if you have seen them you'll see this as one of the better ones, it drops the annoying Gremlins sounds that, for me, pretty much ruined the first film, and for the most part the rest were all down hill in budget and quality with part 3 being probably the best of them. Like Part 3 in a way this deals with the Nazi backstory of the Puppets and even this time deals with the Holocaust and Nazi agenda the puppets are carrying on. There is humor but it's played straight which helps, the main humor being from several super gorey show stopping moments--though most of the gore is pretty routine--within the context of gore done in say the 1980's way--practical effects as they call it now.
The downsides to this film is that is has virtually no visual style at all and is dingy looking, the actors all look old and haggard most of the time, and for some of the old actors in particular this does them no favors as it makes them look really old. The old horror name actors all do well, aside from looking kind of dreadful, but be warned UDO KIER has very little to do. Crampton is quite good.
They story does stop for awhile when the movie turns into a series of gore scenes, but the story is frankly pretty good.
The Puppets are seen rarely for much of the film, and often are used the way MUPPETS are--there is sadly no, from what I can tell, animated Puppets in the film---the brief stop-motion moments in the original films were all highlights and you'd hope a done real, not CGI, reboot would take the time to do some stop motion animation--but strangely they don't--which mostly keeps the puppets from doing much that is new, or even as good as, the best moments from the original series.
Music score, by another Horror name, is too sparse as the film feels very flat for much of the first 30 minutes.
But the film does build well and has a great post credit scene, so be sure to stay turned for that. It's a reboot in mostly a good way and certainly, though low budget in look, done better than original producer Charles Band is able to do these days.
So a decent start for what hopes to be a new series of films by a also rebooted brand name Fangoria. This film is also better than the previous attempts at film production done under the Fango banner in the early 1990s.
