Hello and welcome to another episode of Movie Mastery, the podcast where we watch the movies and master them. We have mastered the movies. Pray we do not come for you next. Question us at your peril. Yes, and a special little bit this time. Some business that we don't normally see on this show. Not on this show. This is more of a system mastery thing because it's got that big, nice, wide viewership that you can really rest on.
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All right. So without further ado, Friday the 13th, the series. Is that a thing? I did not wait. Hold on. That can't be a thing. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Okay. You've seen the room. You've heard every episode of How Did This Get Made? Now treat yourself to an entire TV series of ironic entertainment with a show they called Friday the 13th, despite it having nothing to do with the movies. Okay. By listening to our podcast, Friday the 13th, dot, dot, dot, the series? Question mark.
So wait, okay, hold on. Friday the 13th is Jason Camp Crystal Lake stuff. Yes, indeed. For the first time in my life, I'm going to correctly connect one of those to its corrected serial killer. Good job. You did it. So to have nothing to do with that, I just can't have Camp Crystal Lake or no Jason. Yeah. Which means it still could be connected. It could just be about Jason's mom. She's got it going on. She's all I want.
I'm your producer, Robert, and she's your host, Hill Street, and together we give a complete tongue-in-cheek synopsis of each episode followed by an irreverent discussion of a show that vacillates wildly between genuine competence and absolute train wreck. We're discovering the show together watching each episode for the very first time. Join us as we make predictions that miss the mark by a country mile and continually have our minds blown by each episode's unique and hilarious insanity. If you've ever heard Jeff and John discuss The Littlest Hobo, you already know exactly what kind of existential madness you can expect from 80s Canadian television. Yes, love it. You can find us and Friday the 13th.
The Series on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and pretty much everywhere else, including the Inner Demon Entertainment website. I keep hearing a question mark. Does it have a question mark? Yes, it has a question mark. Is that the actual title? Yes. That's amazing. It's Friday the 13th, dot, dot, dot, The Series, question mark? Okay. And even if you don't listen to us, go find the original show on YouTube and laugh yourself senseless. We yield the remainder of our time so we can get back to Jeff and John's unique brand of goofity nonsense. If you haven't already, leave those guys a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, that'd be nice.
So you can find them. Obviously, search for Friday the 13th dot dot dot the series question mark or go to inner demon entertainment dot com slash podcast. Find it there. Search them on YouTube. And of course, we'll have links to that as we normally do. We sure will. So.
Without further ado, what we did was a different horror thing. Yeah. Another entire series of horror nonsense. We watched Puppet Master 4. Woo, Full Moon Features! Which does technically occasionally have another thing to it. This normally is just Puppet Master 4, but it is also known as Puppet Master 4, The Demon. Okay, sure, because that big thing. All right. Yeah. I, okay, here's the thing. People who know me know that I love horror movies. Uh-huh.
Puppet Master is one of the series that I have fully skipped. This is my second Puppet Master movie. You have seen more Puppet Master movies than I have. Hooray! This is the only Puppet Master I have sat through the entirety of. I have seen clips from other ones because anytime people discuss, you know...
trash horror movies, Puppet Master tends to come up because there are a million of them. Yes. Well, what happened to cause me to watch one was just that I was like on Tubi watching something else and it auto put one on and I was like, kind of sick. So I was like, well, I'm not sick to change it. I'm not going to move. And also, isn't that the guy from The Room? And it was, it was Greg Sestero, the guy who's not Tommy Wiseau because I watched Retro Puppet Master. So I've seen one other Puppet Master movie. Which is great. Yeah. Love to see it. Uh-huh. You want to hear about the connections between the two? There's some puppets in them. Amazing. Oh, and they're both extraordinarily slow and boring. I mean, it's a full moon features movie.
We've done some Full Moon in the past. Yeah. Anytime you get a Full Moon Features picture, you are in for people talking and nothing happening. Yeah. And they've made so many more dumb series and things than you possibly even think. And they fight each other. You have Dollman, you have Demonic Toys, you have Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, you have Ginger Deadman, you have Evil Bong. Oh, yeah. And the Puppet Master franchise is so many movies. Yeah. There are, I want to say, at least a good baker's dozen of these movies. Christ.
I just don't even... Oh, that's wrong. There are 15 of them. That's a baker's dozen plus two, otherwise known as a baker's double dozen. A baker's dozen's delight. Yeah. Red skies at night, baker's dozen's delight. That's a baker's dozen plus reach around. So...
I did some research. I went and looked up the first three Puppet Masters. I wanted to know what led to this. I like how if you have not watched the first three, this is even more confusing than it has any business being. Oh, for sure. I will talk about my experience seeing this having not done that because I did it afterwards. Okay, that's fair. That's good. But Puppet Master 4, or Puppet Master 4 The Demon, is a 93 direct-to-video, obviously, as almost all of these are, sequel to the Puppet Master franchise, where this time...
It's personal. They've got other puppets to fight. Yes. So this is the first time where the puppets are like, oh, normally we're just killing dudes. This time we got puppets to kill. Yeah. I mean, I think normally the puppets aren't like bad guys, but they fight. They like help people against it. Maybe they're bad guys in like really early ones. I don't know. That's the thing is watching just this. You're like, oh.
if all you know is Puppet Master 4, you're like, oh, the puppets are good. And then you think, but wait a minute, aren't they supposed to be the thing that kills everyone? How did they get to this? Because Puppet Master 4, they are straight up just like, we're friendly and we're here to have a good time. Puppet Master 4 is like one gory scene away from just being pre-hysteria, which is another full moon features movie aimed at kids in which stop motion tiny dinosaurs come to life. Yeah, so this is, it's weird, it's bad, but I feel like...
This is probably the best case scenario for a Puppet Master film because the best scenes in this are two puppets fighting. Because anytime it's a puppet fighting a human, you're like, that's just some person wiggling a puppet around. You got a lot of being attacked by a Star Trek monster in this where you have to hold a puppet and just kind of roll it around. It's getting me. Oh, you really got me good on that one. Whereas with the puppets fighting each other, you're like, oh, we just have a stop motion fight. So that's fine. Yeah.
Although the worst parts of this are also just endless shots of puppets making their signature chuckle and or sigh noises as we pan slowly across them. The amount of time that this movie will spend doing back and forth shots between puppet, person looks at puppet, puppet, person looks at puppet, puppet, person looks at puppet. You're like, yeah, I got it. Yeah, but you know, it's Charles Band and his filmmaking philosophy, which is there's no movie that can't be improved by two more minutes of walking down a hallway. Oh, God. So, you know, spoiler free review is it's a full moon features movie that's in the Puppet Master franchise. Yeah. What the fuck would you possibly imagine it would be? Yeah.
And we will get into the full spoiler review after a little song and dance number. And we'll come right back and let you all know what happens in Puppet Master 4. The Demon? Question mark? We're back and it is time to talk about the puppet maestro. Aye, Captain. Tis. Yo-ho. Welcome to it. The system mustry. Shiver me yard arms and deep six the plank. I'm a bad. 86 the plank. We're all out of plank. So this movie starts incomprehensibly. As one would expect. Because you start in a weird...
underworld hell dimension in some weird ass hell dimension um and we start just with shots of a very competently put together uh crappy diorama diorama what's this demon puppet oh yeah you have a big demon puppet yeah which we have no idea his deal for like a good half hour of this movie there's a part where they say a name which you think is going to be him but then it's just like another toy like another puppet and i was i was disappointed i was hoping his name was decapitron no but sadly no no he is sutek oh that's sutek they mentioned sutek at one point i mean the the thing is when you open on this there is a like fleshy skeleton puppet with long fingers and claws with a mouth that looks like Mr. Anderson in the middle of getting his mouth shut in the Matrix. Yeah, yeah, he's got a very melt mouth. He's fucking weird looking. Way too close together of nipples. Guy's got like cross-eyed nipples. Oh, yeah. And is like sitting on a throne in this weird hellscape talking about like, they are almost to finding our power and the power must be maintained. Also, his voice, not even as cool as that, for a demon to talk about like, they are wrestling the power of hell. He's like, they've got the power.
We need to stop them from using the power. Get the power back, you goons. We need to stop them from having the power. Like, all right, dude, get anyone, anyone else to do this voice. Yeah, I would say the first 15 minutes of this movie writes a check that the rest of it fails to cash. Because we get that, we get the part where he's like threatening that, oh, starting with the legacy of the toy maker, Andre Toulon. He stole our secrets and now they are close to finding them. Right, which would theoretically have nothing to do with him because there's just someone else who's also researching algorithms or whatever that's going to lead him to understand the secret to artificial intelligence, I think. Yeah.
But, you know, he just has to mention that guy anyway because he's going to show up midway through the movie because he's the, I don't know, the Burt Gummer of this franchise. No, that would be the puppet Blade. Actually, Blade and Pinhead are the only two puppets to be in every Puppet Master movie. Oh, that's good to hear. Yeah. Blade does nothing in this. No, Blade is more of a mascot than anything, really. They never even say his name. They name several of the other puppets. Yeah, they do name drop the other main puppets. Yeah, Pinhead, Six Shooter, and Tunneler get their names set out loud. And, of course, we hear Decapitron. Decapitron, who I think is the new one.
is uh gets their name dropped but then there's blade you just have to know your puppet master movies and then there's also this fucking clown one yeah there's there's jester who doesn't do anything and is just around and another interesting thing jester around since the beginning uh never does anything is specifically until one of the very late movies the only one of the puppets in the puppet master films that never killed anyone okay he was like the one who was just sort of a friendly jester yeah and would just be watching as you know like tunneler digs into someone's head yeah Yeah, so there's several puppets, but they're not part of this for quite some time to come. No. Because first he has all this like, we must get the power and then we need to kill some people off to establish it's a horror movie. So we do a scene with like a scientist working alone late at night in a laboratory. Yeah. And this sets up the new thing for this, which is that apparently this formula that Andre Toulon got for like reanimating puppets. Yeah. Is apparently something that you can also just find that.
someone is trying to do for artificial intelligence. It's also, even though for him it's like green reanimator juice, it's basically ecto-cooler, it can also take the form of a string of numbers for the purposes of being a computer program. I mean, I assume it is just you are going to find the formula as a string of numbers and then use that as part of your program for artificial intelligence. Do you think there's a point where that Alex kid or whatever, oh Nick, Nick's the kid. Rick? Rick, I think it's Rick. Where Rick the kid is like gonna get that string of numbers from his random number generator he's using to test for artificial intelligence strings and come up with one and go like, wait a minute, this needs to be some juice. I need to juice this.
Now, here is where my information previous to this comes from. The juice is loose. It is made from brains. Oh, okay. And so that is essentially the impetus for these puppets to kill people in earlier films was we got to get brains to make more juice. Oh, they used bad brains. That's the problem. They used Abby Normal. And...
And the lore later on, I don't even think it's established in this, but maybe I think by the third one it was. But all of these puppets, instead of just being a puppet that then got juice in them and they came to life, have the soul of random people in them? Of course, why wouldn't they? So it's like, oh yeah, Blade is like some Nazi scientist that was trying to help Toulon and like all these various things. Like one of the ones that doesn't show up in here is Leech Woman, one of the only female puppets. Okay. Which was like, oh, it was Toulon's like wife or whatever. All right. So that's too personal to just show up in a random box in a hotel somewhere in the fucking Overlook budget. Well, also the...
bodega inn that they are at is the setting of the first puppet master. It's like where most of these are set. Oh, yeah. Except for the third one, which is a flashback to Nazi Germany. Yeah, so they're all set in this hotel. That's wild, because I was like, okay, I mean, Andre Toulon is your main character, and he's a Nazi Germany scientist. Except he is not the main character until the third one. Okay. It's just, oh, Toulon was a guy who had this chemical formula, and then a different guy finds it and then does his shit. Got it. So none of this matters, because instead, an ominous man with a box is walking into a building in which a lady is working late at night in a lab.
Now, she's not important yet, because first, a security guard has to have six fucking close-ups in a row between him and this guy walking in. For the first five minutes of this movie... Oh, I thought they were going to, like, fight or kiss. Yeah. No, the first five minutes of this movie is shot entirely in tight close-ups that make you think that something is about to happen. Nothing's about to happen. Yeah. I think it's just that it's also filmed in the hotel, and they're afraid to show that, so they're using super tight close-ups so you don't see as much of the background. But Dr. Piper, our soon-to-be-dead scientist, is also working on...
artificial intelligence stuff has a little robot arm that's like, oh, it can solve a puzzle. Yeah, which is funny that they're like, this thing's amazing. It can pick up colored blocks. 1993, I know computers weren't what they are nowadays, but I'm pretty sure you already could have computers sort things by color and shape. I'm pretty sure. I think there was an Excel formula for that already. Maybe. But she's like, the son of a bitch did it. This thing's sorting blocks by red, green, and yellow. Good for them. So it turns out that she works with the main character, but she doesn't really know him. He's like a reclusive super scientist. Because our main character, Rick Myers, is the like, oh, I'm the young super genius that's going to crack artificial intelligence. Yeah.
the guard brings up a box to Dr. Piper and she opens it and it has a weird, gross, giant action figure that I was like, dude, that thing rules. Yeah, that's pretty neat. Everyone who reacted to it reacted in no way that I would, not even that it was creepy, everyone picked it up and was like, what's this thing? And I'm like, no, if you open that box, you either go, ew, gross, or you go, dude, that's fucking rad. You don't just go, huh, and then set it down. I would look at it and go like, why am I getting fucking like Todd McFarlane toys? What did I do to deserve this? Oh, hell yeah, that shit is very spawned. And I was like, that rules. I definitely would have picked that up for like a hot topic. Let's see if I can get this thing to a Sam Goody for store credit before they go out of business.
Now, these are our film bad guys. These are the totems, which they don't ever really get named, but it's what they're called. Yeah. But they are sent by Sutek, I guess a demon, maybe an Egyptian god. Those nipples, again, are so close that they're practically kissing. Practically kissing. Kissing nipples. They're certainly staring deeply into each other's nipples. And yeah, this one not only kills this doctor, but then for some reason...
they're like, oh yeah, and then it like sucks her soul out. Yeah, it basically does the dark crystal thing where it like sucks her life force out through her eyes. Yeah. Which to me was what I was talking earlier about how the beginning of this movie writes a check and then the rest of it doesn't catch it, is after we get a long extended sequence of her trying to open her door, which is magically locked, and roll around on the floor with a puppet on her back pretending it's alive and bothering her in any way, she finally dies, the thing sucks her soul out, and then we zoom out to reveal that we've been seeing this through like a magic pool where there's like three of Sutek's henchmen watching. Yeah, because they can watch through the thing. His three henchmen...
are the ones controlling these totems. Because when the totems die in this, one of the henchmen dies. Yes. So they're all connected to it. Yes, but when this one doesn't die, it just kills her. And as it comes out, we get Sutek saying like, yes, yes, take her power. Give me the power that she has. So I have her power and she has no power. I must have the power and no one may have the secret. The power is mine. The power is not yours. Fuck you, Captain Planet. He goes on like this for a while. I was like, oh God, is that what this movie is going to be? It's like a series of vignettes of like characters in places getting killed by these things.
cutting back to him watching it on the screen and being like, yes, yes, all of this is a connected story and not just a series of shorts we did. See, whereas I was like, oh, this guy's gonna have to show up at some point. Yeah. Like, the puppets are gonna kill these other evil puppets, eviler puppets, I suppose. Yeah, they're not supposed to be puppets, I think. I think they're supposed to just be, like, fetish objects. Yeah, they are just totems for these little henchmen to possess. Yes.
But yeah, it's just so you can set up toy fights. But I thought it was going to be a, oh, and then Sutek himself will show up and you've got to have like a showdown with a big fucking demon or some shit. Yeah. The best part of this sequence is when there's one point where she manages to get her hands around the puppet that's on her back and throw it across the room. And when she does so, it smacks into the wall and we finally get a shot of it moving. And it's like the only shot of one of these really moving in the entire movie. They do a CGI shot of it standing up and then it turns back into a puppet and, you know, a camera runs really fast at her instead. So that's a weird moment where you're like, oh, wow, those things are bendy. Oh, no, wait, that's CGI. Okay. We also get...
Dr. Baker, one of the other ones. He's the next guy, yeah. He is another scientist also working on the AI thing for Phoenix Division. Omega. Well, it's the Omega Project in Phoenix Division. Okay. Sorry, I will never question you again. How dare you? Mr. Hazelwick, are the IMDB page open? I mean, I also just remembered it was Omega Project in the Phoenix Division.
And I'm like, because one of the things when I was watching it was like, you should have just picked one of these names. You didn't need to have both of them. That's fine. But he does probably the smartest thing someone in this movie could possibly do is someone's like, well, Doc, you got a crate here for you. And he opens it up, finds a weird, creepy doll and goes, I don't fucking want this and throws it in an incinerator. That incinerator should have been the rest of the movie. It was called like the top secret.
top secret nuclear-powered incinerator. But it's just a little oven. It's just a little door with a little turny hinge on the front. Yeah, it's like, do not operate unless door is closed. And it's just like, oh, this is an easy-bake oven.
It's like the kind of little fire pit you'd buy that you can keep on your table in your back porch. But they just put a plaque on it that's like top secret nuclear incinerator. He opens it while it's active because he hears the little guy in there going, meh. And he's like, well, time to open up this top secret nuclear incinerator. Not going to turn it off first, obviously. Currently in operation and just peer inside. Ooh, what's going on in this incinerator? And he, as well, gets murked and his soul taken away from him. Yeah, and the demon's just fine. Now, at this point, I mean, the totem does get...
fucked up a little bit like it's burnt yeah it's burnt but it's fine but i assume it comes back because when we find the other three totems that will show up that we mainly just have three of them like none of them start injured so i guess they regen yeah but uh we then finally go off to young rick myers our main protagonist and you're gonna really wish he wasn't He is trying to conduct his experiment on AI by having a laser tag fight with two robots. Two crappy little robots. And he has to do the laser tag fight while he plays generic heavy metal music. Yep. And he is dissatisfied after his little laser tag fight because he's like, oh, these robots were predictable in how they tried to shoot lasers at me. And that they never did. They never once tried to shoot a laser at me. Oh, these guys suck. So he's like, oh, boo. But his...
girlfriend question mark i have no idea what these two's relationship is there's at the beginning there's a part where he's like oh you realize if you come late you may get stuck here and have to spend the night and when she's like i know he's like yes but then later in the movie she's the one who's like oh i ever i wish you were ever so romantic or interested in anything other than having like the other two people that show up i think cameron and lauren yeah it's lauren or laurel something like that uh go off and they're like oh those two are gonna go have sex and basically she's just like oh i wish you were romantic i'm like i thought i didn't even get that you were together it sounded like rick was like yeah here's my chance to make a move on her yeah but then there's a point later when they arrive it's the weirdest thing because we get a long scene of him goofing around with his two robots deciding that he did that the plan is that he didn't find the right set of numbers but then his for his potential girlfriend we have no idea what the relationship is is gonna show up and when she does she just brings two people without asking permission yeah she's just like hey i brought friends i hope you don't mind here's lauren my friend and here's cameron her boyfriend but also someone you know fairly well already and but i didn't know that you two knew each other yeah because cameron
When he shows up, he's like, hey, Ricky, you fuck. And it turns out that they both went to the same university, but Rick is younger and smarter and was just like, oh yeah, Cameron was the big man on campus until Rick showed up and was just a super genius. And despite John's giving him a tough guy Bronx accent, he actually kind of is supposed to look like Val Kilmer from LA Confidential. Yes. So, because he's like severe and thin and he's got the spiked up hair and the big glasses. But he is this movie's, the closest thing to a bad guy that's not Sutek, the demon that stays in his underworld. Yeah.
And he's mostly, I mean, it's basically in like any given horror movie where you go, we need to have someone where it's good and you cheer them when they die. Yes. So he is just a huge asshole. His whole entire defining character trait is he's kind of a dick. Yeah. But also this is just this endless series of weird coincidences because he comes, he's like, oh, I already knew this guy. Anyway, let me tell you, I recently got a job working for something called the Phoenix Division. You've never heard of them before. Super top secret and hush hush. And I'm working for someone named Pipels or Pepper. Pepper. And he's like, no, it's Dr. Piper. Dr. Piper. Cause she works for me. You work for Omega Project. It's my project. Yeah. You are working.
debugging shit that she sends you and i'm what she is working on you are two levels below me yeah but it's like like uh that's a lot of coincidences at once but it's fine who cares only six people in the world yeah it doesn't fucking matter because it's not like the whole ai thing will ever matter in this movie there is no point where again i was like oh he's gonna figure out the code or use the juice on these robots he had two robots he tried to do laser tag with he's got the secret to fucking ai now they keep talking about how he's gonna have this power to like He's going to use these fucking robots. They're going to fight like Zutek at the end. He built two little robots. He's going to go put some of the juice into their little battery packs or whatever. AI is going to matter at all. Robots are going to matter at all. No, they will not. No, not even one. There's only like five toys. We've got to focus on these fucking toys. No, man, this is the fourth Puppet Master. We've got puppets. We don't need to introduce robots. They've made 15 of the fucking things. We've got puppets. We have no reason to introduce new characters. Just keep making the puppets. Just take the puppets we've got. Until someone buys a shirt with a six-shooter on it, you don't get to introduce new characters.
Six Shooter only introduced in the third movie. Interesting. He is a fairly newcomer. He's such an iconic looking character compared to Tunneler and Blade and so on. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, you can tell he is a newer one because he isn't just, oh, this is a very...
minimalist design. Yeah. Because all the original ones are like, what's this? Oh, it's a regular ass marionette and they put like a dagger hand on it. Yeah, yeah. The six shooter is a bad guy bandit style cowboy, but he has six arms. Yeah. Despite the name and despite the fact that there is a scene in this movie where one of the human characters picks up one of his tiny six shooters and looks down the peril of it, he will never use one. No, he will never shoot his guns ever. And let me tell you, one of the scenes in this is fucking Rick after they discover these puppets and like put some juice in them to wake them up. He's like, oh, I should test if these guys have AI.
by doing a laser tag thing with two of them. Am I going to pick the one that is a shooty guy? No, I'm going to pick Pinhead and Tunneler. Tunneler, for those of you who don't know what the fuck Puppet Master is, let's just go through these real quick. Tunneler looks like a little Nazi, but he's got a drill head. He looks like if Peter Lorre was a tiny doll who had a drill head and was a Nazi. Pinhead is basically the big doll. He's got a tiny head, but he's big and strong. Six-shooter is a bandit with six arms and theoretically a gun. Blade is in... V for Vendetta guy. He's got a fox mask. He's the black trench coat, black hat, dagger hand, and claw hand. Yeah, he's one hook hand and one dagger hand. And when he's...
Fighting little spikes come out of the eye holes of his Guy Fawkes mask face. And Jester is a jester who is in this movie but does nothing. Yes. So there you go. That's all the puppets that you need to know about. Yeah. Now, the whole thing with fighting the puppets, again, very weird because Lauren, it turns out, Susie, the love interest.
Lauren is psychic. Yes, she works for a psychic company. She's a channeler. Yes. And I don't know what that means, but apparently the first movie was all psychics, so I guess it's just taking the whole thing is like, yeah, sometimes psychics show up a lot in this. It's one of those things where I almost want to watch Species, too, just to see if the whole, you know, remember Forest Whitaker was a psychic in that? I want to know if they kept that line going as well, or if they were like, yeah, that was bad. That was weird. Why did we do that? We should have done that.
But Lauren, after they discover, because Blade is out and about, because he's sort of the mascot of the series, he was not hidden away. Rick had just found him in the hotel. And he keeps mysteriously moving. Ooh, where did you find him this time? I think he's got some sort of servos or whatever. Yeah. But as soon as she picks him up, she's like, oh no, I'm getting weird vibes off of this doll. I need the box he came in right away. We need to put him where he belongs. And she manages to find a trunk that is the iconic Puppet Master trunk. Yep.
And as soon as she finds it and touches it, she begins yelling and screaming and being like, oh, no, it's evil. It's so evil, which is weird, given that in this entire movie, no, they aren't. They are fully just nice puppets. Yeah, they never do a single mean thing to anybody. Yeah. Unless you count little demon totems, who they are very mean to. Yeah. But yeah, she gets desperately scared of it. And then because this is a horror movie from 1985, even though it's from 1993, both of the male characters have to be like, she's being stupid. Everyone's afraid of the unknown for no good reason. We're going to break into that trunk right in front of her. Oh, yeah. I'm like, goddamn, if someone...
even if you are, because Rick's whole deal is like, huh, psychic, huh? I believe in science. Yeah. Even if you're like, I don't believe in any of that and I'm kind of disdainful. If she's like, oh my God, I'm freaked out by this trunk. Don't open it. And you're like, huh? And then it is fully locked and you can't get it open. Why would you be like, hey, fuck you specifically. I'm going to do literally everything in my power to open this. And not only that, but also work with someone who for the moment they've been introduced in this movie to this exact moment has been nothing but an antagonist slash foil to you that you do not like. And is this person's boyfriend and is like,
Hey, baby doll, fuck you. I'm gonna open up this trunk. But for the moment he meets Cameron, he's like, ugh, you brought Cameron here? God, I don't like this guy. And he's like, yeah, Ricky, I don't like you either. Where's my food? Where's my dinner, Cameron? I can't, or sorry, where's my dinner, Rick? I came to your place unannounced. How come you haven't fed me dinner yet? Hey, let me steal your files, Rick. Hey, Rick, I want all your stuff. Rick, you and I are enemies, you piece of shit, Rick. Oh, wait, hold on, hold on. I'm hearing an opportunity to belittle my own girlfriend. A woman is saying something? Men are talking. We need to shut that down right away. That's where male solidarity comes into play, right, Ricky, buddy? Hey, you and me, we're gonna open up this trunk. Best friends forever! Yeah.
And they try to hammer it open and use like a screwdriver until eventually Rick gets a bottle of acid that he squirts on it to loosen it up. And then they open the trunk and, you know, there's some puppets. But they don't care about the puppets. They take turns pulling tiny scrolls of paper out, unfolding them, and then throwing them away without reading them. That's how they explore the chest. They're just like, oh my god, look at this. Roll. Look at this one. Over here. Roll. Nothing. Wait, I found another one. Roll. Nothing. They just don't care. I think it's just business. They're like, don't get the puppets out. They're very fragile. They're proprietary. You are not allowed to handle the puppets. You can get these scrolls out. You are not the techs who do puppet stuff. Well, like...
Two of the scrolls they take out, I believe, are probably references to the third movie where it's Toulon's, like, actual show. Right. Well, of course, yeah. At least one of them that they do look at is showing, like, hey, look, this guy is traveling. Oh, it says here he's a Nazi. And then they find another thing. Oh, no, it's because they find a passport that was from Nazi Germany. Like, this guy was a Nazi. And, of course, Cameron's like, oh, I hate Nazis. Yes. I'm like, good. That's one point for Cameron. You've got one point on the board so far. Sure. He's just like that mobster. You're also a piece of shit, and you suck at being a boyfriend, but you do hate Nazis. He's just like the Joker or that mobster from the end of The Rocketeer. Yeah. Everyone hates Nazis. All the good people. Boy, I sure wish that was true.
That everyone hates Nazis. Not enough people hate Nazis anymore. But yeah. Yeah. But then he's like, oh, no, wait, I found another piece of paper that indicates... We have a journal. Yeah. And it says, oh, he just got someone to forge a passport so he could run away from the Nazis. Yeah. Honestly, what is a journal but an especially complicated piece of paper? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Just a single piece of paper is a journal. Effectively. Effectively. Yeah. You know, a sandwich is a single discrete element, despite the fact that it has two pieces of bread in it. It's made of a multitude of tiny different things. So it's fine. A journal is just a piece of paper.
Sure, why not? I mean, if you think about it, a journal is just a sandwich. A journal is basically just a tree going through some shit. I mean, if you think about it, a journal is a taco. Yeah, you put enough hot sauce on there, yeah. So, they find all of this, but then they also find the little box with fucking reanimator juice in it, and reading through, they're like, oh, this juice apparently is what wakes up the puppets, and since they already have Blade, who's sort of awake, they're like, okay, well, I'm gonna try putting this juice into these guys and see if they wake up. I do like that they don't even try to find, like, a juice port on the puppets, like, you know, just undress them a bit and try and find the spot where you put the juice in, and they're just like, no, you just inject them. They're made of meat. You just give them shots. So, they're...
I mean, not to give credit to this movie, but while he's doing it, Cameron is sort of looking at the journal and he is pointing at places on like, oh, the journal might say like, oh, you've got to inject right here on the puppet. That's where the port is. That's fair. That's the injection port. Yeah, but he gives them all shots. And sure enough, they all start coming to life, starting with Pinhead. Yeah, they all get up and.
And then from this point forward, 40% of the runtime of this movie is going to be panning across them as they make their individual signature noises. I mean, mostly, it's just Six Shooter. Six Shooter and Tunneler. When you pan to Six Shooter, he's always... Over and over and over again for the rest of the movie. And it is a lot, given how little Six Shooter is going to do from this point. Oh, yeah. Six Shooter has no fucking business in here. Yeah. And that's so weird. Which, again, the fact that after this, Rick decides to do the laser tag test.
and did not use six-shooter as one of them. One of the most offensive things to me. I mean, I kind of get it, because if you're like, well, I'm going to get in a laser tag fight with these tiny robots I just discovered and don't know anything about and run on juice. Well, the guy who has six arms and six guns, that's definitely hard mode. That's round two. I get that. I can't fight Blade because he doesn't have any hands. He just doesn't let knives. I can't strap a gun to him, really. I'm not fighting that fucking clown, because the moment he wakes up, he just kind of goes, and then hides in the corner. Yeah, so we're done with him. But this guy, this guy's like the boss.
The boss of shooting stuff. Except he never shoots anything. No, he doesn't. But you're just looking at him, you're like, that guy's the boss level. But then that's just, yeah. Once he gets in this fucking laser tag, he's like, wait a minute. These things might be artificial intelligence. We may have cracked the secret. This guy, you've got to, Cameron, you need to read this journal until you figure out the secret to artificial intelligence. I love that the other women accuse Rick of being mean because he keeps making Cameron read the journal. Because Cameron's like, I've read this thing cover to cover. There's nothing in there. It's just a story about this guy. Yeah, there's nothing. He's like, read it again. I'm sure it's in a code. It's gotta be in there somewhere. Maybe it's in a code or something. Come on, you're smart. You can figure this out. And the women are like, quit pressing him. Don't force him to read a journal.
And it's weird that Cameron isn't more like, oh, yeah, obviously I'm going to. We've sort of established that I'm trying to have a one-upsmanship with Rick because I feel bad that he showed me up in college. Yes. So the fact that he is currently holding what might be the key to artificial intelligence or reanimation of non-living tissue, so I guess just animation of living tissue, is in his hands. And he's like, well, I don't want to read this book. He throws it at Rick. He's like, yeah, we're done. Fuck this. And the two of them start going head to head. And then they're like, wait a minute. And then the power goes out, I think. When the power goes out.
They go, okay, well, I guess we're all going to go to bed. Here's a flashlight. And you get Cameron being like, is this the only light we have for the entire hotel? Are you kidding me? And he's like, yeah, that's your light. Don't you have a generator? Yeah, it's hooked up to my computers. Stay away from that. I'm not unhooking it from the computers because I don't want to lose memory. It's 1993 and a computer is basically just a guy sitting in a box. Just like artificial intelligence is now. Yes, exactly. Except he's a really, really dumb guy.
But yeah, they're like, oh no, it's just that artificial intelligence now is some guy making minimum wage. Yeah. Was that the thing with Amazon, right? Every single artificial intelligence in quotes is just 10,000 people in some other country doing the work of it. See, the thing is, I think that the story about that, that was like the Amazon store where they were like, oh, it turned out it wasn't doing that. It was that there was a, it was an Indian call center that was responsible for doing all the pricing. It was a misleading headline. The Amazon store did work. It was just that camera footage and logs were checked by that call center constantly to refine the process. No, but it is also like anytime they go, we're using AI to make sure that like.
the system doesn't show you these pictures they're like no you're not you're sending it to minimum wage workers that have to flag things yeah that is true yeah it's bullshit and it sucks yeah that's also why anytime you get one of those like click everything in this that has a motorcycle in it it doesn't matter what you click yeah they don't care no one gives a fuck so yeah rick and suzy stay upstairs while he does his stupid fucking laser tag thing meanwhile cameron and lauren go downstairs and cameron has brought what basically looks like a weird board game that they found in the trunk and it's like oh i think this rather than the journal is the thing that has the key to what we're gonna do but I think it's a Ouija board and I need my psychic girlfriend to channel the old puppet master to tell me the secret. That fucking part where he unfolds it, Cameron unfolds it, and Rick looks over and goes, huh, that looks like a Ouija board that I had when I was a kid. I was like, dude, that looks nothing. No, that looks like Monopoly with hieroglyphs. What are you talking about?
It does not look like one of those. Yeah, it looks just like one. Like, maybe if when he unfolded, like, the planchette was there, too. You're like, oh, there's one of those planchette things from Ouija boards. Yeah, except it has the exact same Monopoly thing of, like, there's symbols along the outside edge and nothing in the middle. To me, it looked like a trouble or a sorry board. But, you know, maybe he's only ever, that's the only board game that Rick ever saw in his life was an old Ouija set. Guy who has only ever seen Boss Baby. I'm getting real Boss Baby vibes off this movie.
So he takes it and he's like, all right, Lauren, I got to tell you, you need to channel Toulon for me so I can figure this out. Because, you know, Rick's been laughing at you this whole time. He's been making fun of you. And this is our way. Lauren, you got to channel a dead guy for me, Lauren. Yeah. And finally, she gets badgered into it. And indeed, she does channel something. But instead, it's just Suchet. It's Suchet, yeah. Although, Toulon has been showing up. Like, he was standing outside in front of the hotel at one point. Oh, yeah. He will, again, a thing I don't know if this is a reference to the other movies, but he is constantly just going, I am with you. Yeah. You must defeat them.
i am i am with you you are i am with you you are nearly to the power i am with you and then disappears and then comes back 15 minutes later do not worry blade i am with you yes yeah and at one point he gets his head on decapitron's body and it looks this it's great it's supposed to be like the moment this is the big moment of this movie where like these new characters get to meet the one from the previous films and it looks so silly it's bad so in channeling sutek uh She manages to cause the pyramid in the middle of the board game to crack open, which allows several of these little totem monsters to show up. In addition, one of those totem monsters was delivered, which I want to know, who's the delivery guy for Sutek the Demon? Yeah, we don't know who that is. Just some guy shows up and delivers them to a couple people. Because it's the same guy. And I'm like, who you got on retainer, Sutek? I think the answer is, don't worry about it. That is the answer. I mean, that's the movie's answer. So now there are three of these little totem monster things running around.
Like, Cameron goes upstairs and is like, oh, fuck you, Rick. I'm out of here. There's demons and shit here. Yeah, he's like, two of us are fucking going. Susie, you can come or you can stay, but I'm getting the fuck out of here. Goes into her purse, because again, Susie drove them. Uh-huh. And Cameron just goes in there, grabs her keys, and is like, you can come or not, but I'm leaving in your car. Yes.
And she's like, no, I'm going to stay with Rick, who was not afraid in the slightest. After one game of laser tag, Rick has bonded with these puppets to the point where he knows them all by name, and he talks to them as if they were talking back to him. Well, he also is like, oh, you're scared of evil spirits, huh, psychic? Meanwhile, I, a reasonable intellectual, know that if you inject enough ecto-cooler into a puppet, it'll come to life and play laser tag with you. Nothing weird about that. Fully scientific.
So the two of them, Lauren and Cameron, run out to the car and, you know, horror movie shit. It won't start. Oh, no. And there's a totem in the car. Oh, no. But the totem doesn't turn up until after Cameron goes into his evilest phase of all, which is the car won't start. So he's like, Lauren, get out and push in the driving rain. She's like, I don't want to get out and push. Get out and fucking push. Do it. Do it. And when she gets out, she's immediately like soaked with rain. She's up comfortable. She's like, I want to get back in the car. And he locks it and keeps going, pointing to the back. Yeah. Piece of shit. And that's, I mean, that is the movie going, hey.
Big flashing lights. We are going to kill this guy now. He has to be as big of an asshole as possible before we do that. Yeah, he has this coming and this is what you wanted to see. This is the big cheer moment where you're like, good, fuck this guy. Yeah, they have to do shit like that because if they wanted to just rely on the spectacle of this guy getting killed by one of those totem things, then, you know, they can't. Because there's not enough room to film in a car, so he can't even do convincing rolling around with a puppet on his back or anything. So most of the shots are just him going, ah, it's getting me. Oh no, I'm slamming into a wheel. It is biting parts of me that are just off screen right now. Oh, that's definitely slicing into my flesh somewhere. An evil puppet and my friends are just off screen laughing with me.
So he eventually gets sliced up enough that he dies. And that is the end for old Cameron. We're done with, although his corpse is still important in the movie because it turns out that he had stolen some of the formula. Yeah, he had absconded with some ecto cooler. Yeah. Lauren, of course, comes back in and no one else will die in this movie. Yeah, we're done with we're done with kills. At this point, we do get a fight between the demon that just attacked Cameron.
and three of the puppets. And it's so boring. This is what you've been waiting for, the whole movie, to watch these little puppets fight these other little puppets. Oh boy, I cannot wait. And they just sort of idly grab it and put it against a wall and then Tunnler drills a hole in it. Yeah, they're in the kitchen and they just kind of like...
Get it? They just sort of gently get it. Like, there's no fight. There's just no fight. They're just gonna go. Fucking, like, Pinhead grabs one arm and Blade just uses his hook to pin his other arm against the wall. And they're like, all right, Tunnel, fucking take care of it. And he drills into him. Yeah, it is so boring. There are only two of these. There are only two scenes in this movie where puppets fight the other puppets. And both of them are so boring. It's unfortunate. Because I was like, oh, you could have a stop motion fight. At least then you're in control of things and you don't have to worry about, like, having someone flail around with your puppet. Yeah.
That's the point of this, right? That's why you'd introduce puppets as the villains for these puppets. So you could do a full stop motion fight. So that it would look better than someone just holding a doll to themselves while they roll around. And instead, except for like one shot of Tunneler drilling into the one puppet, you like never see them in the same frame. The second fight features no puppets in the same frame as each other ever. I mean, no. It's played in the totem in a fist fight. Oh yeah, no, I'm sorry. There is that. There is that fight where he just kind of idly waves at him for a while. But the one where Six Shooter just catches one with a lasso and then electrocutes him is like, it's like 10 fucking minutes. God, that one is awful. Because that is what is going to be essentially the rest of this movie is...
Totems will run around and menace our three surviving humans as they scream and run away and then either get away or puppets kill the thing. The one that Jeff was talking about is they're trying to set up to reanimate Decapitron or whatever. Yeah, because that's what Toulon wants. Toulon is trying to guide everybody to reanimate one more puppet. Yeah, it is time. Now you must get Decapitron, who's super cool, you guys. Yeah, he's so important. And in order for Decapitron to come back, he can't just get juiced up.
He has to get the full Frankenstein treatment where he needs to get electrocuted and juiced at the same time. Uh-huh. So since they have, like, all the wires and everything and Pinhead, like, wraps some wire around the, like, lightning rod on the top of this inn. Yeah, and then it's just a bunch of fucking shenanigans where they're setting up to animate this puppet, who, by the way, if you're curious, is supposed to have the soul of Toulon in it, which is why his head shows up where this puppet's head at various points. Yeah, I mean... Because all of them have a soul in them. I guess it's...
Like, I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be when it does the, like, morph into Toulon's head if, like, that is actually happening or if it's just the ghost going, anyway, I'm here, hi. Hello, it's me, Andrew. This looks really bad, doesn't it? I feel like this probably looks really bad. I probably should just show up as a ghost instead of, like...
morphing the head of this doll into me. It looks weird. I don't think he has a choice because it's supposed to be his soul in there just like how Leech Woman was his wife or whatever. It makes it even weirder that this is the introduction of Decapitron and yet we don't bother putting Leech Woman in this so we can have a reunion of the happy couple. I'm sure it happens in like Puppet Master 12. I think Puppet Master 5 is a direct sequel to this because most of the puppet like 1, 2, and 3 like 1 and 2 had some sequel stuff to it like one character showed back up but 3 again was just a prequel like Nazi Germany thing. Yes. So I guess the fifth installment it probably just keeps
our boy ricky doing stuff more ricky can't wait to see more ricky and his girlfriend who is apparently some sort of like iron man competition bodybuilder but she doesn't look like it definitely keeping her in as loose and close as possible so we don't have to address that whole situation oh yeah because we have one throwaway line was like oh you're still training you'll be running or whatever and she's like yep i'm always doing that well they ask her if she's had enough to eat or is she currently on a training diet she says i'm always training yeah yeah but but yeah they uh they are going to reanimate decapitron but as they're trying to do so this fucking other pup this totem runs in menacing. And Six Shooter goes for 20 fucking minutes while he fashions a lasso out of wire and throws it to this completely non-resisting in any way whatsoever. Totem was just like, oh, this got on my head. Yeah. And we cut back to fucking Six Shooter who uses a little clip to attach it to the shielded part of some wires, which is very funny. Love that. You know, you don't notice because you're busy going, wow, this guy sure does never stop giggling.
This guy thinks everything is hilarious. Just constant. And then the little fucker gets struck by lightning and I think that one explodes. Either he explodes or he gets knocked away and it's not... I can't remember if that one dies or if it doesn't. Yeah, that one dies. Because there's also another one that fights Decapitron that also needs to get hit with lightning a bunch of times. Yeah, well, Decapitron shoots electricity out of his head. Yes. But the third one who has the surprise comeback where we thought he was dead is it was attacking Loren and...
Susan shows up and pours the, you know, Chekhov's acid onto the doll. Yes. Which burns it, but doesn't kill it. Now it's just kind of like... We think it dies, but instead it comes back all melty and is like... And that's where we get the fight with him and Blade, where he slaps the shit out of Blade several times with slap sound effects. I'm like, you're two dolls. Why would it make slap sounds? Well, I mean, yeah. Also, they shouldn't have put a Blade fight in this because it looks so bad. Blade is always just kind of... He has very little articulation. No, he's mostly there to be like, oh, I'm kind of a cool looking concept for a doll. Yeah. But as soon as it's like, ah, you need to fight with this fucking weird...
spiky action figure and you're like oh neither of you can do anything and this is just bad yeah it just looks awful he just keeps waving around near they're just gonna go near each other and not actually doing anything and then eventually decapitron is brought back online they take off his creepy black head and put on his robot power station citadel head yep he has a weird like tesla coil head thing going on where as soon as he gets that he shoots electricity at this last remaining totem and once he shoots it like five times because this movie can't just have and action and things happen, it must do the back and forth a bunch. Yeah. I looked up a site that just has a list of all the puppets and the only thing I can get about him is that he was only in four and five. Oh yeah. He has a cameo in another one, but otherwise he's only in four and five. And I feel like based on Decapitron and the fact that he can pop his head loose and put on this robot thing, that his gimmick is that he has a replaceable head. But I'm curious if they ever give him another one. In this, this is the only head. And he never takes it off again. Oh yeah. It gets replaced with Andre Toulon's ghost head for a minute. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is just the zappy bit. Yeah. Just the head and the zappy bit, but weird.
Uh, so yeah, they finally do that. And like the end of the movie, after they managed to murder all these little totems or whatever. is uh toulon speaks through decapitron he like morphs his head into his and he's like hey uh you were on the verge of discovering the secret and it would be ai but also now you've just got it you're whatever your shit's good you're in charge now you're the new puppet master imagine what you'll be able to accomplish with the power of the power and the source of the puppet power is you you you now have custody over my puppets i let fucking do whatever i don't give a shit have fun i was the bad guy in the second one of these uh but And then we also do have a shot of Sutek after all of his minions have died just standing alone in his own room. No, goddammit! Ah, what? No! Fuck shit! I'm probably back in the fifth movie! I'm sure that's how this goes. Yeah, I mean, looking at the poster for the fifth one, it looks like he is the... Like, they just give a version of him, the doll. Oh, okay. That makes sense. I guess. I don't know.
I do appreciate that the other puppet that predates these, Scorch, the one that's like a Nazi helmet. Torch. Torch, Torch, yeah. It does appear in this movie, but only as an image on a poster in that trunk. Yeah, he first appeared in the third one. Yeah. And so it was just a picture from that movie. God, this is so weird. I think some of these puppets were also in retro, which I... Yes, there were versions of them in there. So Retro Puppet Master had retro versions of Blade Pinhead.
Tunneler, though he was called a drill sergeant in that one. Yes, that's what I remember, which was weird because it's set in a time when that would not make any sense. Yeah, and then I think you get Retro Six Shooter as well. Yeah. So those four that are in this one get retro versions. Yes. And only Retro Tunneler gets a unique name for some reason. The other ones are just Retro Blade, Retro Pinhead, Retro Six Shooter. Right, which two of those names make no sense at all because it's set in like the fucking 1600s or something and now you've got a guy named after a gun that hasn't been invented yet and a guy named after a job that hasn't been invented yet or at least hasn't been named that yet. Yeah.
No one's got the job of Blade anymore. You're not going to have him until the vampires show up. No one's got the job of Blade. He's a rake, a fop, a dandy. We have yet to invent Blade. Ugh.
So yeah, there you go. That's basically how it ends, is just setting up Rick to be the new puppet master. God, please save me from that. And it also really sets up the puppets as being, these are good guys fighting against bad puppets. Yeah. And it's just a wild choice to take the series to be like, we're going to turn our weird murder puppets into weird murder puppet protectors? Uh-huh. I don't know. Boy, this guy's still working. He's been working the whole time. The dude who played Rick Myers, I was curious about. Oh, yeah.
He was on several of the Left Behind movies. I feel like not the one that we watched. We watched that weird Nick Cage Left Behind, but he's in that other one. The one that's like a series of them. Yeah. He has been in all of them as Nikolai Karpathia. Oh, so he's playing the bad guy. Good for him. Good for him. I was curious to see if I had personally seen him before, and it's looking like I might not have. Probably not. I mean, he is apparently in My Blue Heaven, so if you've seen that. Oh, he's in Mutant X, though. Dude, he's in Mutant X. We can check him out in that in some way.
All right, let's go ahead and get into our bests and worsts. What is the best part of Puppet Master 4 for you? Sutek and his weird little hell dimension with all the skulls sitting everywhere. I mean, Sutek is a pretty rad little puppet thing. It's a cool looking puppet. If they had sent Suteks up to the surface to fight the little toys, that would have been fine instead of these little one point of articulation shitty dolls they send instead. Yeah. So anytime that Sutek's on screen waving his big arms and wings and shit around and looking kind of cool except for his nipple situation. Hey, don't shame a guy's nipple situation. They're too close together. I can't deal with it.
Man, I saw a nipple situation open for red jumpsuit apparatus. He looks like if King Hippo lost a shitload of weight from like a surgery or something. It freaks me out. So yeah. But anytime you're down in his underworld dimension and it's just like piles of skulls and shit, and they did a good set dressing job, and then also he's cool looking and has a lot of articulation and puppetry to him, that's definitely the best part of this. Yeah. What about you? I mean, that honestly is the best part of that to me. Like, Sutek was probably the coolest looking thing they did in this. Yeah, for sure. So visually, he's the best thing. And I mean, I...
I kind of like that they were like, oh, whatever, let's have a psychic in here. We had psychics in the first movie. We should just throw psychics in here. Just keep some psychics. Why would you stop using psychics?
So, yeah, I think Sutek is definitely just overall the best thing in this. Definitely the best part of this. Like, he's just a cool-looking vision where you're like, anytime you see me, you're like, oh, that's so cool. It's so, like, 80s sci-fi puppetry. It's a neat visual thing. Yeah. What was the worst part of Puppet Master 4? I mean, I'm just gonna say the disappointing puppet versus puppet fights. Sure. They're just not interesting. Like, I don't like any of the human characters. I don't like any of this. This was all very, very bad. I mean, it's full moon. It's gonna be bad. Yeah. But I would say the part that was most disappointed by it was a couple times the puppets have to fight the totems, and it's just not even interesting enough to get you to pay attention to what's going on even a little bit. If you have, for example...
happen to be playing this on one screen or watching this on one screen and kind of doing a little bit of work on a project on the other screen, then anytime that popped up and you're like, oh, this is going to be the thing. I got to pay attention to this. You quickly realize, oh, no, no, I don't. I can keep writing what I was writing. Uh, sad. Yeah. So that's my least favorite. What about you? I mean, it's for sure the fact that they didn't use fucking six shooter to A, shoot anything. Shoot stuff. Or B, be in the fucking laser tag thing. Yeah. I was so, I, it was the one part of this movie that made me sit up and actually engage with it because I was so angry at it for wasting that potential. Yeah. I'm looking up how Sutek worked and he's a rod, he's a Japanese style rod puppet, which means that he was acted out by a human actor. Named Rod. Named Rod. Who are quite common in Japan and were in antiquity. No, but the way it works is he's connected by rods. Like he's basically, like imagine a stiff, sticked marionette. Yeah.
That's really neat to think about. So now I'm excited because whenever they'd show him, it was like, oh, they've got like his three little minions who are people in masks. Yeah. Like this guy is huge. Yeah. You know, he's a full size thing. Yeah. So that's cool. I'm glad to see that that was how they did it because he's a really cool visual effect. Yeah.
But let's give our final rating, each giving it a rating from 0 to 5 for a total out of 10. Jeff? That's like a 1.5. Like, there's some visually interesting stuff to see, mostly in the Zutak sequences. Yeah. But otherwise, it is a pure avoid. These are so boring and so slow. The fact that there's a million of these, I don't know how these work. Like, financially, do they still make these kinds of things, or is Full Moon done? Like, I feel like the only way they worked was the blockbuster era.
Like, if you couldn't see these in a video store, they might as well not exist. Puppet Master colon Dr. Death, the latest one, came out in 2022. Jesus mother- You know what? It's because shit like Tubi and so on, right? Because as soon as Blockbuster died, Netflix replaced it, and it was like, yeah, we still need crap. Yeah, we can just shove this wherever. Where's Full Moon going these days? Is it going to Redbox? God, Blade got his own movie. That is wild. Well, John, Blade got three of his own movies.
He didn't even want the third one. The 2018 Puppet Master is Puppet Master The Littlest Reich, and I gotta tell you, part of me wishes we had watched that instead. I'm sure it's way worse, because you know they've moved on to CGI. So, I will give this movie... God, I'm probably gonna have to give it a...
It's probably a one and a half as well. I feel like it's dead on. I mean, I'm tempted to go to a one. I could go to a two. Yeah, which is fine. You know what? Let's fucking do it. Because it won't change the score. Yeah, sure. Because this was so boring that I actively disliked how boring it was. And if you want to go to a two for visual inventiveness, that's fine. But ultimately, I think both of us giving it a one and a half is also right. Yes. I think a three out of ten is pretty much where this should sit. Yes. It's got just enough visually that you're like, oh, I can watch this. It's not like unwatchably bad or offensively bad. It just sucks. Yes.
So three out of 10 for Puppet Master 4. There you go. Don't watch. Avoid at all costs. Unless you're, I guess you're going to run the series, in which case, God bless you. A stronger man than I. Yeah.
Thank you so much for joining us. Of course, we will be back in another couple of weeks with more movie mastery. But if you want more content or you just want to help support us, you can head over to patreon.com slash system mastery and supporting us at any level helps the show. Let's just keep doing what we're doing and get you bonus content. Any of the levels will unlock something from one of our various shows. And we have been doing these bonus content things for years. So you will get just.
days of content to listen to. Yeah. So we'd really appreciate if you did that. And the current level you can support us at is the $10 is the one we're going to push because that'll get you TV mastery. That's right. At the $10 level, you unlock everything, including TV mastery, where we are continuing our look at WMAC masters. One of the most wildest shows that we have done in here in that it is in concept, ridiculous and interesting and in execution.
Kind of lame. Yeah, yeah. It's like the best and worst idea we've ever had. So join us for that. And if you can't support us financially, then you can always just, you know, give a rate or review wherever you're listening to your podcast. Help people find us. I would point out that as much as I love it when you rate and review our podcast, that's a big help. What would also be an absolutely enormous help from our listener base is if you could give us some reviews on our books. Yeah, we've got a ton of books. If you look up The Dungeon Meister or just look up Jeff Aldrich or John Taylor on Amazon Books. John did not actually write a book about stealing cars. That's another John Taylor. Weird that they attribute it to me, but whatever.
Well, I think they technically attribute our books to that other guy. I forget which way it goes. But yeah, that is a huge deal, much more so than podcasting. If we get more reviews on those, then it helps push them up the rankings and we sell more books and it keeps us in business longer. Even if you haven't bought them. Just go in there and go, this is amazing, five stars. You can do it. And I'm not saying that you should do that because it's disingenuous because you can always download the preview, like the first 10 pages of the book and read it and see how wonderful it is and then review those 10 pages. That's right. That's what I'm saying. That's my suggestion to you. Please give us five-star book reviews so we can sell a few more books and keep doing what we do. Oh, man. You know what the director for Puppet Master 3 in Nazi Germany was David Dakota.
Well, I mean, to be fair, but David Dakota had a long career of doing actual films before he settled down to making softcore gay porn in his own home, which is all he's made for the past 20 years now. Also, he is the director for five of these movies. He has done a lot of Puppet Masters. What was the last one he did? 2010's Puppet Master Axis of Evil. Oh, my God. Okay, that makes sense for 2010. Because at a certain point, he was just like, no, from now on, I make Frankenqueen and D.B. Cooper versus Bigfoot and shirtless dudes in a hot tub, the movie. Yeah, I got it.
Just know if Puppet Master Axis of Evil is like, these puppets are going to get these hot dudes that are showering. Well, like I was saying, if you look up David Dakota, he has a full career from before the very weird era he's entered into now. Yeah. Well, that was just a little tidbit of information for you. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back in two weeks, and you all have a good one.