DEEP THROAT's Gerard Damiano gives new meaning to the term "rod puppet" with LET MY PUPPETS COME, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

When Ned, Fred, and Red, the three CEOs of Creative Concepts Systems & Procedures Brothers Unlimited Inc. of New York, get a telegram from angel investor Mr. Big who wants to collect on his $500,000 loan, erstwhile courier Jimmy suggests making a fuck film as a means of raising easy money in a day. When their collective fantasies, along with those of hanger-on Gramps, prove juvenile or outright obscene, Jimmy tracks down navy documentary cameraman Lash who operates a sex toy shop. Lash in turn brings in Gepetto and his son Pornocchio who makes his stars out of foam rubber, wood, clay, and glue. Competing visions and unsolicited input threaten to derail the project as the threat of death looms over the brothers.

Less interesting as a film itself than for its origins, Gerard Damiano's LET MY PUPPETS COME complicates what could have easily been a pornographic puppet variation on the old "let's put on a show" plot; indeed, after the first forty-five minutes, it seems to drift away from the main storyline, but it echoes some of director Damiano's own feelings about the lack of ambition in pornographic films as product. On the commentary track, film historians Heather Drain and Samm Deighan suggest that the Gepetto character is a stand-in for Damiano (who has a cameo appearance during the opening sequence) and that the film inverts the tone and the perspective of Damiano's darker and more dramatic SKIN-FLICKS in which Damiano played a loan shark drilling into the filmmaker protagonist the bare minimum that he is paying for in a porn film. Although there are some human characters, all of the film's pornographic acts are carried out by the puppets, including an act of bestiality that might have been judged obscene at the time if it were live action and probably would have prevented any label from putting this out now. The benign non sequitur "Smile" musical number by puppet Diana Boss looks and sounds like something out of a Muppets show or SESAME STREET cutaway of the period, but the addition of a couple dirty commercials (including one for "Lusterine" featuring Screw's Al Golstein) functions as both padding for the film – which began as a short subject to be screened with Damiano's darker THE STORY OF JOANNA – as well as padding for the film-within-a-film as the filmmaker discover that thousands of feet of raw footage does not necessary mean a feature-length film.

Released on VHS by Cabellero, LET MY PUPPETS COME comes to Blu-ray in a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer from a 2K scan of 35mm archival film elements. Although some light to heavy scratching pops up around the reel changes, the image is generally clean and colorful, with the use of puppets and the need for both life size and scale sets meaning a greater degree of focus on color scheme than one expects from most porn films of the era. With characters that are mostly puppets, texture is a greater concern than skin tones and skin, and the high definition presentation truly turns the phallic puppets into what Deighan and Drain call "nightmare fuel." The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track is clean, with even the few moments of print damage either not touching the optical track or the digital audio cleanup managing to scrub them without producing additional artifacts. Optional English SDH subtitle are included.