Director – John Lechago, Screenplay – Roger Barron, Producer – Charles Band, Photography – Howard Wexler, Music – Richard Band, Visual Effects – Juan Patricio, Makeup Effects/Puppet Creations – Tom Devlin’s 1313FX, Production Design – Billy Jett. Production Company – Full Moon Features/Charles Band’s Deadly Ten.
Cast
Tania Fox (Elisa Ivanov), Vincent Cusimano (Detective Joe Gray), Roy Abrahamson (Ingenieur Erich Hauser), Griffin Blazi (Barney Barnes), Bobby Reed (Agent Prok), Todd Gajdusek (D.A. James D. Madison), Angela Briones (Gloria Vasquez), Derek Petropolis (Muller), Cyrus Hobbi (Klein)
Plot
It is 1945. Former Russian national Elisa Ivanov has moved to the USA, bringing with her the living puppet Blade, created by the puppetmaster Andre Toulon. She works as a journalist for The Daily Herald where her psychic powers give her hunches that allow her to scoop sensational headlines. This leads her and police detective Joe Gray on the trail of Nazi scientist Erich Hauser who is attempting to use Toulon’s formula to create zombies.
This was one of the films from Full Moon Entertainment, the company headed by Charles Band. Full Moon has produced a good deal of low-budget genre material for the video/dvd market since the 1990s, including the various Subspecies, Trancers, Gingerdead Man and Evil Bong films, among others. At Full Moon and the earlier Empire studio, Band has produced a number of films centred around malevolent dolls beginning with Dolls (1987) and including the likes of Dollman (1990), Demonic Toys (1992), The Creeps/Deformed Monsters (1997), Blood Dolls (1999), Doll Graveyard (2005), Dangerous Worry Dolls (2008), Devildolls (2012) and Ooga Booga (2013).
Full Moon’s single greatest success has been the Puppetmaster films that began with Puppetmaster (1989). The series extends to Puppet Master II (1990), Puppetmaster III: Toulon’s Revenge (1991), Puppet Master IV (1993), Puppet Master V: The Final Chapter (1995), Curse of the Puppet Master (1998), Retro Puppetmaster (1999), the compilation film Puppet Master: The Legacy (2003), Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (2004), Puppet Master: Axis of Evil (2010), Puppet Master X: Axis Rising (2012), Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017) and Puppet Master: Doktor Death (2022). Blade: The Iron Cross is a spinoff from Puppet Master: Axis Termination, giving a solo film over to the doll Blade and Ukrainian-born Playboy Playmate Tania Fox as Elisa Ivanov (who spends a reasonable portion of the film undressed).
Elisa Ivanov (Tania Fox) with Blade
Most of Full Moon’s films are cheap. Blade: The Iron Cross is no different to these others but is undeniably well made. It brings together an appealingly creative mix of elements – Nazi mad scientists conducting experiments in torturing people, killer dolls, zombies, a heroine with clairvoyant powers who works for a newspaper and uses her powers to obtain entertainingly lurid headlines. There are a variety of colourful henchpersons – one who wears a gasmask with attachments; the Latina newspaper associate who turns out to be a Nazi spy with scars and cuts all over her body.
Director John Lechago does an entertaining job of stirring such a mix. The period setting is well achieved on a low budget. All of the cast deliver exaggerated characters that manage to seem grounded without being too cartoonish. There is quite a degree of effective gore when it comes to the zombies and corpses, while even the puppet effects are not too bad. Lechago stirs everything to a rather entertaining climax.
Director John Lechago has previously made the horror films Blood Gnome (2004), Magus (2008), Contagion (2010), Pigster (2019) and joined Full Moon to make Killjoy 3 (2010), Killjoy Goes to Hell (2012) and Killjoy’s Psycho Circus (2016).
