The ancient demon God Sutek is finally angry enough that Andre Toulon (Guy Rolfe) stole his life-giving formula that it sends some demons (tiny, of course) to the "upperworld" to get those responsible. Somehow that means scientists from a Government company, despite them having nothing to do with it. Who is involved is kid genius Rick Myers (Gordon Currie),who has discovered the puppets while doing his experiments at the Bodega Bay Inn while acting as a caretaker. Running only 75 minutes, this mess of a film actually has 5 screenwriters credited with the nonsense plot. The main point seems to be about resurrecting new puppet Decapitron (a hold over idea from Band's Empire days) and Toulon telling Rick he is the new puppet master. About the only good thing in the film is the stop motion work by Dave Allen and his crew, but it seems to be less and less with each entry. This marks a turning point with the tiny terrors being full blown good guys now. This was also the first in the PM series to feature no nudity. PUPPET MASTER 4 came out in November 1993 and the fifth entry, despite being filmed back-to-back, came out almost a year later in September 1994. Felton Perry has two scenes as a murdered scientist.

The evil Egyptian demon Sutekh (Jake McKinnon) dispatches several tiny but NASTY creatures called "Totems" to various locales to attempt to get back the magic that was stolen from him long ago by Toulon (Guy Rolfe, "Mr. Sardonicus"). The Totems begin to terrorize young scientist Rick (Gordon Currie, "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan") and his friends. But fortunately for Rick and company, they've come into possession of those puppet characters we know and love so well: Blade, Tunneler, Pinhead, and Six-Shooter. And so these puppets that have been villains previously in the series are now in the position of being heroes.

The cast also includes Ash Adams ('Ryan's Hope') as insufferably obnoxious Cameron, Felton Perry (Johnson in the "RoboCop" feature films),and lovely ladies Chandra West ("White Noise"),Teresa Hill ("Bio-Dome"),and Stacie Randall ("Excessive Force II"),but the human characters are just not as interesting as those puppets, who remain cool and fun to watch. Joining the fray is a new puppet which gets dubbed Decapitron, which can swap heads for more lethal killing implements. The script, credited to no less than five people, builds a little on the mythology of this series while telling a fairly compact and straightforward story. It's no great shakes, but it does deliver some entertaining action for series fans. The creature design is fun, especially the Totems, appropriately hideous things. The Richard Band soundtrack and the Adolfo Bartoli cinematography are assets.

"Puppet Master 4" is regarded as part one in a two-part story by its director, genre sequel specialist Jeff Burr ("Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III", "Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy", etc.); Currie, West, and Hill reprise their roles for "Puppet Master 5".

Six out of 10.

And back again - well not in the Nazi Reich anymore that is. Which was the previous entry. Don't be dissapointed or excited yet - we'll get back there, if you hang and watch on that is. Because there are a couple of those movies still to come. It's interesting that someone wrote in one of the series reviews that most of them are not connected.

I mean you can watch them without any prior knowledge (though you do have the one that kind of has the first 10 minutes retelling the previous one, and I think it's number 5 in the series that does that).. I don't find that to be entirely true. You get kind of the same puppets (at least until number 7) with a few additions here and there. Here you also have evil puppets from beyond ... whatever that means to you. They have some sort of plan, but I couldn't spoil it to you, even if I wanted to.