Curse of the Puppet Master is set in a small American town where the ever so slightly dim Robert 'Tank' Winsley (Josh Green) works as a lowly gas station attendant for $30 a week, that is until curio collector & owner of a museum of oddities Dr. Magrew (George Peck) & his lovely young daughter Jane (Emily Harrison) stop for gas. Magrew notices that Robert is an extremely skilled carver with an exceptional imagination & offers him $35 a week to work for him, with the $5 a week pay rise too much to turn down Robert accepts. Dr. Magrew show's Robert various living puppets made by puppeteer Andre Toulon that he brought in an auction some years previous & ask's Robert to carve the perfect puppet which Magrew hopes to inject with life & recreate Toulon's success...<br /><br />Curse of the Puppet Master was the fifth sequel to the rather splendid killer puppet flick Puppetmaster (1989) & apparently had the working title Puppet Master 6: The Curse but by this stage it was probably a wise decision to stop numbering them & thus try to fool a few unsuspecting buyers. The first three Puppet Master films were really good & I think they are all great although Puppet Master 4 (1993) & Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter (1994) were pretty bad apart from some impressive stop-motion animation effects & the nicely atmospheric Bogeda Bay Inn setting which are both absent here from Curse of the Puppet Master as the ambitions of the filmmakers & the budget gets increasingly lower with each new entry into the franchise. Directed by David DeCoteau under the name Victoria Sloan one of his many pseudonym's he had actually directed Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991) but there's no repeat of his earlier magic & Curse of the Puppet Master is pretty dire stuff & even at a paltry 75 odd minutes in length the script feels padded & uneventful. There's no continuity to the earlier films at all, there's no mention of the green life giving serum & Curse of the Puppet Master changes the whole central concept to animating the puppets with a human beings soul which is transferred into the puppet thus giving it life instead of the serum from the previous films. To be honest it's a lame story which is supposed to unfold as some sort of mystery but it's pretty predictable & the single worst aspect of Curse of the Puppet Master is that it relegates the killer puppets to no more than bit parts who do virtually nothing the entire film. There's no explanation of why the puppets obey Magrew or why they suddenly turn on him at the end & like the previous two films they are nowhere evil enough. Another thing is while Magrew makes Robert carve a puppet out of wood the puppet Magrew uses at the end is actually made out of metal is some awful looking tank like creation with a couple laser guns for arms. The ending is awful too & is one of those occasions where the film just literally stops dead & your left thinking 'is that it?' or 'what happened?' or 'did my DVD player just skip a chapter?'.<br /><br />The puppet special effects are the worst of the series so far too, there's a few seconds of stop-motion by the vast majority of the effects work is simple poorly operated rod puppets which look still & have very limited movement. The opening credits have a montage of special effects shots from the previous five films & they beat anything else seen in this. For some reason the puppet Torch is ditched even though he appeared in Puppet Master 5 while Leech Woman makes a reappearance for the first time in the series after having been burnt in Puppet Master II (1991). The film is gorier than either parts 4 o5 although two bloody murders don't make this particularly good, there's some slashing & bloody cuts & Tunneller sticks his drill into some guy's groin & his wedding tackle. The whole film & production just looks cheaper than the previous entries, the moody setting & lighting have all but gone & there's a bland visually flat & dull look to it.<br /><br />With a supposed budget of about $250,000 the budgets were getting lower & lower & it show's frankly. Apparently shot at Canoga Park in Los Angeles. The acting is forgettable from no-one I have ever heard of before.<br /><br />Curse of the Puppet Master is worse than the five previous Puppet Master films & to be honest they should have stopped making them after Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge while the series was on a high. The only Puppet Master film I have left to watch in the series now is Retro Puppet Master (1999) which I can't say I am particularly looking forward too.