Demons and Puppets

 For a more comprehensive review of this bonkers Puppet Master 4 (1993) try here

I just wrote up a review for my Letterboxd and took a deep breath and said to myself, "Well that was a lot to try and unpack". A demon god with puppet demons sent to disrupt the Omega Project, set up to develop a superior AI, eventually involved in a battle with Toulon's animated marionettes, discovered by a brilliant robotics scientist wunderkind, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's friends. This wunderkind is caretaker of the Bodega Bay, and the fourth film takes place during a dark and stormy night. A Man in Black is delivering wooden boxes with the demon minions (reminding me of a demonic form of the Zuni warrior creature from "Trilogy of Terror"), letting them loose on scientists at the Omega lab and in the Bodega Bay hotel. Another psychic in the Bodega Bay (friend of the wunderkind's girlfriend) sort of serves as a callback to the first two films. The demon plot really isn't my jam. I can imagine no one who worked on the first film thought by the fourth film we would be spending time with a demon god hanging out in some Egyptian styled cavernous hell. The stop motion animation is still quite good with moving puppets engaging with demon puppets. Tunneler is back, but Leech Woman is not...Letterboxd reviewers were not happy about Leech Woman's absence much to my surprise. The demon god is like the lifesized puppet with muscled shoulders, skeletal head, veiny arms and hands with long, sharp talons...that must have been a bitch to operate, considering its size. Headless Rolfe offering advice to the young laser tag hero while morphing out of a blob hooked to a puppet body is just bizarre...had to get Guy in there as Andre Toulon somehow. Toulon had the ancient magic the demon god didn't appreciate. There is even a demon Ouija board that the psychic summons demons out of. Wacko script totally goes in a different direction than any previous entries.