Main cast: Tania Fox (Elisa Ivanov), Vincent Cusimano (Detective Lieutenant Jonas Gray), Griffin Blazi (Barney), Roy Abramsohn (Ingenieur Erich Hauser), Bobby Reed (Prok), Angelica Briones (Gloria), and Todd Gajdusek (District Attorney James D Madison)
Director: John Lechago

Blade the Iron Cross is a sequel of sorts to Puppet Master: Axis Termination, which makes sense, as unlike Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, these two movies are from Full Moon Features. Unfortunately, this means that this movie has the puppets being the “good guys” now, an arc that is never interesting to me and led me to ultimately quit the franchise. I like it when the puppets were killing people because they were, well, killer puppets. As the series progressed, things just got more bizarre, maybe because the folks behind this franchise were hoping to market the puppets like superhero action figures to kids.

So this time Eliza Ivanov is back. talking to Blade the Michael Jackson puppet most of the time like she’s reading aloud lines from a grade school read-along book. “How… can… you… do… this… to… your… country…” Tania Fox will intone with zero emotion, maybe because she is feeling right into her bones that her largest role to date is this character in this franchise, and it’s not a nice feeling. Eliza is psychic, which means many scenes of her in bed thrusting her crotch up into the air because she is seeing things in her sleep. She and Blade are pitted against a bunch of Nazi mad scientists hoping to control and animate corpses into ravenous, monstrous troops for the upcoming war.

This show is, I’m sad to say, super boring. It’s all mostly people acting and uttering their lines like they are in a cartoon and must speak slowly so that the young kids watching the show can understand every word. This, however, clashes pretty badly in terms of tone to the occasional brutal kills that take place on screen. Sadly, these more adult moments are few in between, perhaps because the budget for practical and special effects is limited, and hence it’s cheaper to show these twits talking or walking around or arguing with one another all the time. Ms Fox’s bulk of the screen time here is her talking out loud to a puppet, mind you.

When Eliza finally falls into the clutches of the bad guy, I look at the clock and realize that there is only less than 30 minutes left on the runtime. By that time, I am so bored out of my mind that I actually stop watching, and I realize I don’t care at all how the last 30 minutes or so will turn out. The puppets look dead and lack whatever screen presence they had in the past, the acting is all around awful, the plot is a big who cares I’m bored, and all in all, this movie is a painful, dated, and cringe-filled amateur hour car crash.

Really, just let this franchise die already.