"When puppets were made of wood... and anger."

An old sorcerer flees with the Egyptian secret that protected the god Sutekh and his priests. To defend their treasure, three mummies are reanimated and are sent to pursue the old man. He, on the verge of death, finds refuge in and old puppet theatre where he meats André Toulon, an adolescent in front of a troop of puppet masters.

The old sorcerer tells André his secret, just before passing away. The formula consists in giving life to unanimated objects. The mummies attack and kill André’s friends before going after him. However, André waits for them with his regiment of murderous puppets.

This movie is the seventh in the series and while the quality doesn’t get any better, we feel the effort that was put into this episode. Its predecessors featured sensibly the same puppets and soundtrack. Unfortunately, it seems no one ever thought of re-recording the soundtrack or even remixing it. Retro Puppet Master counts six puppets, in beta version. They are adapted to the time.

It is interesting to learn more about the puppet’s past. Sadly, this movie creates contradictions with Puppet Master 3: Toulon’s Revenge on many aspects. For example, the ancestor of the puppet named Blade is present but should only have been possessed during the Second World War by a Nazi general, some fifty years later. The same goes for Pinhead’s ancestor, who should have borrowed the soul of a truck driver, which is not the case here. We are left to believe that all the retro puppets were all crushed and that Andre Toulon rebuilt his collection.

Anyways, because of the obvious fake French accent of the bad actors, we quickly forget these small details to concentrate on the evident problems this movie has. The worst of them all is that the film is ruined by second-hand visual effects, used here and there throughout the movie.