Review of Puppet Master 4 (1993) by Jean-Francois V — 04 Jul 2009

In the heydays of video rental, I must have seen about twenty of Charles Band's direct-to-video releases, none of which I have rated on this site because they have somewhat faded from my memory, though I still remember the gooey stuff at the bottom of the swimming pool in "TerrorVision"; I guess 2 or 2.5 would be the rating for most of them, with the occasional and probably undeserved 3 or 4 when Mac Ahlberg did the photography ("From Beyond" being the stand-out.) I even saw "Parasite" in glorious 3D on the silver screen! For nostalgia's sake, I was in the mood for another of Band's productions, of which IMDb counts no less than 240. What better than a sequel to "Puppet Master", with its endearing cast of doll-like killers ("wooden acting ahead", warned the Horror Channel...).

I got exactly what I expected, and I spent an enjoyable, if not particularly productive, one hour and sixteen minutes (still the old format, to the minute!).

"Puppet Master IV" has a completely ludicrous screenplay, in which, say, a scientist will receive what appears to be a figure from a sci-fi shop window and decide to put it -as if in a fit of absent-mindedness- into some kind of oven labeled "Top Secret". Or people will hear weird sounds from the floor above and rush downstairs. Or they will inject a fluorescent substance into puppets to make them come alive, and when the lights go out (but not the computers), simply decide to go to bed and sleep on it. It's that stupid. (It also has a "metaphysics" graduate who specialises in... channeling!).

But the film has its redeeming qualities, or at least quality: it is visually inventive, in a low-budget sort of way, even though much of its inventiveness is recycled (this may sound like an oxymoron, but at least its visuals were inventive back when they were invented.) The puppets are great, as are the little demons sent by the mail, and the dwarfish monks with luminous eyes from the cramped space set strewn with skeletons. The hero is not too bad (two pointless characters get killed before you realise he actually is the hero), but his sidekick is a Thomas Dolby look-alike who manages to be even more irritating than the original (though fortunately he bursts into singing "She Blinded Me With Science") and (spoiler ahead) gets killed much too late in the film (I think he should have been mercilessly slaughtered before I pressed the play button, but the five screnwriters couldn't reach a unanimous guilty verdict.).

What I particularly liked about the film was that the new puppet, Decapitron, was actually an adaptation of an idea that Band had introduced in a poster for a film that never got made, a poster I had chanced upon in a movie magazine of the eighties and forgotten. I think it was back during the Robocop / Terminator craze, when they came up with the idea of a robot who could change heads (the way the black guy in "A Man Called Sloane" changed hands; my God, how do I remember that?) The film was scrapped, but the idea was found so neat that the robot was downsized to become one of Toulon's puppets. (I read some reviews complaining that Decapitron never decapitates anyone. Probably the reviewers failed to notice that he owes the name to the fact that he decapitates himself.).

The film has a very 1980s feel (even though it was shot in 1993) and is just a complete waste of time building up to a duel between doll-sized monsters, but if you like that sort of silliness, you won't be disappointed.