Puppet Master 4

When I look back, the finer details of the Puppet Master movies tend to blur together. Each review I post on Readers Digested, from here on out, marks only my second watch of each film. Over a decade ago, I bought a nine-pack for five bucks, containing most of the Puppet Master movies packed together in a flimsy black DVD case. It isn’t nearly as cool as the Toulon Truck that Full Moon sells online, but it is a couple hundred dollars cheaper.

Back then, I had heard of Full Moon Features through a DVD called Boogeyman: The Killer Compilation, which, true to its name, was a compilation of different horror characters from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. It had your usual suspects like Freddy Krueger and Leatherface, but it also had some lesser known movie killers like Simon from The Ugly. Anyways, while I had heard of Full Moon Features, it wasn’t until high school I started to dig in and see what they had to offer. When I watched them back then, I remembered Puppet Master 3 as the diamond in the rough for a series with less than the best quality control. Revisiting them, my opinions haven’t really changed. I’m, perhaps, a little more positive about the series altogether, but my opinion has largely held steadfast. The third film marked a tonal shift for the franchise where Blade and friends stopped being depicted as these generic killer dolls as they were and began being treated more like hired guns for their master’s bidding that can be dissuaded sometimes if it goes against their moral compass. The back of the DVD set I have even started to refer to them as “pint-sized heroes” by this film.

As for Puppet Master 4, I remembered liking it, … I think.

This one’s directed by Jeff Burr, who also directed its sequel, along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and Stepfather 2. 

The film starts with makeup design for a group of demonic creatures that look like something out of a Power Rangers movie, and, with the way the story unfolds, it is clear they are going full hog with their new direction for the Puppet Master franchise.

There’s homework, if you want to do it, for why everything happened the way it did – something about Puppet Master crossing over with Demonic Toys (another of Full Moon Features’ movie franchises), and them meaning to position Puppet Master as the good guys versus the bad guys, but none of that ultimately came to fruition.

Personally, I’m not too concerned with why it happened, but I think the pivot was necessary. Puppet Master 4 is more like an Amblin movie than a slasher flick, more Small Soldiers than Child’s Play, and, really, I think that plays more to the franchise’s strengths.

The film follows a young scientist named Rick who has been working on a project meant to instill sentient behavior into robots, a project he is finding faces serious roadblocks. All while that is happening, a new demonic puppet, brought out by the evil Power Ranger creatures I mentioned earlier, has appeared and is wreaking havoc. In time, Rick and company discover Toulon’s Truck, as well as his puppets and the serum he used to re-animate them. In need of little convincing (this is, for all intents and purposes, the very thing they’ve been trying to instill in their robots, after all), they immediately use the serum to bring the little guys back to the land of the living. This pits Blade, Pinhead, Six-Shooter, and the rest of the puppets against the dastardly demon that’s killing everything in-sight.

As a whole, it can sometimes be difficult to find a general consensus for a Full Moon film or a specific series in their catalog – then again, I will admit that I don’t look very hard. You will find a hundred-something people calling one film a classic, a couple hundred who call every film with Charles Band’s name attached to it ‘outright garbage,’ but there isn’t a large-scale, universally accepted stance for any movie or decision. It’s very niche. I feel like there are a lot of people who likely prefer what Puppet Master was in the first two, but I personally think I prefer them as protagonists – if nothing else, it’s different from a lot of what was already coming out at the time. Also, to reiterate, I think it simply leans more into the things Full Moon Features does best – charm and simple wonders.

The film is more Small Soldiers than Child’s Play. I said that already, but I think it really holds true to what this film is going for. The human characters are simple and straightforward.

Rick is a brilliant scientist whose characterization is a little fuzzy. Sometimes it feels like they’re trying to portray him as one of those troubled, on the spectrum, genius types who offends people because he isn’t very aware of their feelings, other times, you’ll see him shooting lasers at his robots and feeling like he’s meant to be a major source for the film’s fun. He’s alright, for the most part. The rest of the characters are pretty one-note overall. One fellow scientist named Cameron doesn’t like him because he perceives him as pretentious, but it doesn’t add up to a whole lot as far as the story goes. The other two characters with them are just really there for cannon fodder.

Suffice to say, the characters aren’t exactly layered and the layers they do have, don’t really add up to a whole, whole lot, but Puppet Master 4 remains a fun film. Richard Band does the score and the puppets move around and are entertaining to watch. The technology at work isn’t exactly cutting edge by today’s standards and, in fairness, was far from cutting edge by the standards of the era, but the novelty is apparent and holds to this day. Decapitron is a silly, but fun foil to the puppets – the character was originally meant to have a movie of its own, even if there isn’t much to the character besides that he’s a little, evil demon creature, and what more do you need for a film like this?