Full Moon Video’s new 8-part Bunker Of Blood aims to provide gore fans with something of an all-encompassing “greatest hits” collection, with each instalment centred around a specific theme or franchise. Kicking off this latest venture is Puppet Master – Blitzkrieg Massacre, a 60-minute compilation of marionette mayhem culled from nearly 30 years’ worth of Puppet Master movies.
Introduced with comic book slides specially drawn for this presentation, we’re told that an unknown drifter is being held captive by The Circle Of Psycho Surgeons, a secretive bunch of sinister doctors who are experimenting with humanity’s threshold for pain and suffering. Hearing the call of “The Gore Collector”, the drifter makes his escape and pays him a visit, ending up watching a videotape which aims to warp the drifter’s mind to the point where he eventually becomes as twisted as the Gore Collector himself. Bonkers. The illustrations themselves are nice enough, but the voiceover is… shall we say less than stellar? And while it’s a nice premise, it’s all done within the opening two minutes of the film, with the rest of the story set to play out through future Bunker of Blood intro scenes.
The hour of death and chaos that follows is entertaining enough to begin with (although often more for the dodgy acting rather than the inventiveness of the carnage itself), things start to feel a bit tiresome long before the halfway mark. Around the 15 minute mark there was a temptation to hunt for a box of matches and watch the rest of the hour Clockwork Orange-style… Toulon’s puppets are equipped with a variety of implements that give plenty of scope for inventive carnage and humour (both intentional and otherwise), but there are only so many times you can see Tunneler drill through some nameless person’s stomach or Torch set a random dude on fire before the longing for something slightly more meaty starts to kick in.
There’s definitely enough weird and crazy content for someone with a bit of creative nouse to make something genuinely trippy with, but scenes are included here in their original form with no snappy cuts or edits and some of them drag on far too long. What we end up with, on occasion, is 5 minutes of faffing around while we wait for yet another character we don’t know or care about to meet their maker, with the end product coming across more like a haphazardly cobbled together Youtube playlist rather than the “all-out assault to the senses” promised by the back of the box. At least 20 minutes worth of fluff could have been removed without anyone noticing, potentially resulting in speeding up the overall presentation and turning it into the madcap experience we were expecting. Not the most thrilling of starts then, and while it’s not necessarily something to completely avoid, it’s certainly a difficult one to fully recommend.
BUNKER OF BLOOD CHAPTER 1: PUPPET MASTER – BLITZKRIEG MASSACRE / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR: VARIOUS / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: BLADE, PINHEAD, JESTER, TUNNELER, LEECH WOMAN, TORCH / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
