Full Moon Video | Buy at Amazon | Review by Sinferno
They're back and they're pissed. What else is new? Not as much as I would have liked but lets crack open the cellophane box of this plaything and see how much fun we can have with an hour-and-a-half of these bad, broken toys. After all, idle hands and all that...
The film begins where all other DEMONIC TOYSflicks do. Broken scattered and strewn about on some warehouse floor, they toys are animated by arcane and evil magic, or in this case the needle and thread of a toy collector. No matter, they won't be "alive" until twenty-five minutes into this thing, so please forget about them for now.
The real focus here is not on "Baby Oops a Daisy" or "Jack Attack" the reptilian clown jack in the box, but on their new playmate, Dioboletto, a carved devil doll in a tiny monks cloak who is the piece de resistance for the toy collector Dr Lorca (A character from the Full Moon feature HIDEOUS! who likes collecting things he shouldn't). At the start of the film he arrives at the exact same castle SKULLHEADS is filmed in and we are introduced to the following characters: Lorca; Lauraline, his raven-haired, slutty fiance who is there for all the wrong reasons; Lillith, his personal psychic; Eric, his hired grunt (Lauraline's real lover); and, David, his whipping boy stepson, twice removed who came with Lauraline. Lorca and his retinue wish to purchase the doll from a young pretty museum curator named Caitlin and her effeminate authority on strange and foreign toys Mr. Butterfield (make your own joke here). After some strange introductions, heated dialogue and the usual moments of forced character exposition that always come when you are force-fed six characters in as many minutes we finally get to meet Dioboletto, the devil doll that comes to life. What? YET ANOTHER killer doll in a Charles Band movie? The Hell you say? I am not gonna buy that... well, unfortunately for everyone in the castle, Dr. Lorca does purchase Diboletto and that's when things got to hell in a toybox, (in more ways than one).
Dioboletto soon escapes after activation and awakens the other demonic toys and the movie starts to tread the familiar ground of the other films. Far from being thankful for being awakened, Baby Oops a Daisy informs the new toy that he himself is the leader and that he better do exactly as he is told, not to get in the way and basically just to fuck up. Dioboletto does exactly that and for the bulk of the movie he behaves like a stock killer toy, silent and completely mute except for some mad cackling and some noises of his doll mechanics as he moves. Following horror movie canon the toys start to pick off most of the human hosts one by one, usually a scene after you find out that they are really not very nice people and are there for ulterior motives all their own which have nothing to do with the simple transaction they are apparently there for.
DEMONIC TOYS is my favorite Full Moon series of films involving mean puppets reviewed thus far, but this one is an absolute mess for the following reasons...
For the first thing Dioboletto sucks. The whole cool thing about the concept of a "demonic toy" is you have a common, cursed plaything like the clown doll from POLTERGEIST who suddenly becomes very evil and dangerous, a scene from that film that EVERONE remembers. Similarly, in previous DEMONIUC TOYS outings all of the demonic toys were twisted versions of a very normal plaything on American toy shelf that would just become very hazardous to children of all ages which is stark visual irony incarnate. Diboletto, however, looks like a devil dressed in a Gregorian monks outfit, which is something no parent from any century would buy their kids. Despite this, once he is activated all he does is cackle monosyllabic and sneak around with the other two on their raids. Whatever Lorca is paying for this thing, it is way too much.
On top of that we get less toys than before. Every DEMONIC TOYS movie before this had four different toys, each with a different personality. Zombietoid was a GI Joe who didn't know the meaning of the Geneva convention. Grizzly Teddy was a cute bear that could morph into a human-sized werewolf, and Mr Static was a clunky 1950's tin windup robot with a high-tech plasma cannon that could blow off your arm. A band of marauders should always have a varied skillset and personality traits which allows them to play off of one another as well as the antagonists in a work of drama. It's this banter and dialogue which kept people watching stupid shows like the A-Team seven years, long after they realized how stupid and unrealistic the action scenes were. As Jules said in PULP FICTION, "Personality goes a long way". Yet in this film, only Oops a Daisy has any sort of personality to begin with (his deliciously filthy mouth) and with two mute drones that do nothing but cackle and follow his lead, there is a distinct loss of wit and horseplay among the bad toys that is somewhat evident in the other two films.
Another problem is that the special effects suck. And yet they are computer-rendered. I feel like I take some sort of responsibility for this, always encouraging directors to upgrade to digital effects over puppets. To complain about them now just makes me seem insane or impossible to please. Yet they are awful, simply the wrong kind of terrible for a horror film. At one point David and Caitlin are attacked in a cave by night-breed and it was about as scary and realistic a depiction of bats in flight as the opening sequence of the 1970's Scooby Doo cartoon I saw as a kid.
When Eric gets a knife through the boot go ahead and pause it – the scene looks like it was cobbled together with MS paint. Violence has never looked this bad and I say this with no moral tincture to my tone. The effects of the toys scampering around in the background while giggling menacingly were better; in fact, they were the only moments of this film which made me feel like I was watching a DT movie and I can tell they were probably done by a different effect artist.
Unfortunately, there was just too much hocus-pocus crap going on in the plot. Good horror/supernatural movies usually only have ONE thing about them which is supernatural or sci-fi. If properly done this is enough to satisfy an audience and slaughter a screen full of victims. The Toys are already Demonic, why do they need this thing to take place in a haunted castle with an active demon running about? Too much of bad thing... is just terrible.
Finally, there are too many damned people in this film. I know this flick needed a steady supply of blood to grease the wheels of its threadbare plot, but why not use less characters and have them die very slowly, desperately, increasingly grotesquely like a SAW film? Horror has changed. Modern audiences want more than the "one and done" shot with a knife through the neck. Even FINAL DESTINATION, in later installments, has learned to tease us a bit. The "schwinggg and your dead" formula is so 1980's. So Jason Voorhees. I miss the stalking, and the screaming from the old black and white serials with the emphasis of terror over horror. Take that away and all you have is scenes of people being filleted and haven't we seen enough of that by now? But this is a problem indicative to all of modern horror not this movie so I will get off my popcorn box pulpit now.
| Yucko/Neato Factor: Maybe it's time this franchise picked itself up and put itself away? |
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| Production Values: In the grip of a skilled handler and professional FX department, puppets can have more personality than their human counterparts. Ditch the fakey digital death sequences and please go back to them. |
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| Realism: The real toy being played with is your suspension of disbelief. This one broke mine. |
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| Value for Price: For $14.98 this should be bought only be completists. |
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| Plot: Director Charles Band: I have the utmost respect for you, and I have cut my teeth watching your older films, even ones I was not quite old enough to see at the time. Let me write the next DEMONIC TOYS and save this series. I will bet my entire video collection I could do better than this. |
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