Demonic Toys

      After two decent movies in a row, I'm really hoping this one ends up being as bad as some of the others. Otherwise the title of the blog just seems petty and mean-spirited as well as misleading. This is also the second movie from this collection that has something to do (producing, writing, directing, whatever) with a guy named Charles Band. All four movies on the second disk have his name attached to them in some form so we'll see how this one turns out as compared to “Evil Bong”.

      I'm not sure when this movie was made, but the quality looks straight out of the 80s. Anyway, after a scene with two kids playing the card game War, we have a couple talking in a car and the woman tells the guy she's pregnant. He can't act so it's hard to tell if he's actually happy that he's going to be a dad or just pretending to be and is actually terrified by the idea. Either reaction is as likely. I guess they were waiting to make some big gun buy because some other 80s TV guys show up selling them weapons. It's okay, though, the couple are actually cops... although that doesn't help the guy survive as he gets shot right away and dies. I've seen enough 80s B movies and TV shows to know that this looks exactly like that so far. Hell, if Paul Gross was around I'd almost chalk this up as a bad opening to a Due South episode except with more gun violence and the word “fuck” in there. So I guess... 90s Canadian TV? It's pretty damn terrible acting and film quality whatever it's trying to be. Unless this is actually from that era. Then I suppose it gets a pass on the quality.
      Just looked at the movie case: it says this was made in 2005. This means that this movie is either a spoof of/tribute to 80s horror movies or my criticisms of its style and talent are valid. You know, as valid as random internet criticisms ever are.

      Back to the movie. We leave the middle of the gunfight between the female cop who's boyfriend/baby-daddy has just been killed and the gun-running thugs who shot him dead to watch a bored security guard order chicken. Talk about ways to maintain dramatic tension. Haha, the bad ass chicken boy just got asked if that was a cigarette in his mouth by his manager and responded by saying “no, it's you're dick”. Then burned rubber in the company delivery car listening to what sounded like a bad rip off of Guns 'n' Roses. You know he means business and is a rebel that plays by his own rules now.

      And now we're back to one of the criminals from the shoot-out who's dying (the dead cop shot him before being shot himself) and crawling into a warehouse full of toys and a mysterious bright light. And now that he's almost completely dead the toys start to move and laugh on their own. Child's Play came out before 2005, right? Anyway, the remaining criminal and the female cop have a fight elsewhere in the warehouse where she manages to cuff him after he rips her shirt (not in any revealing way, just enough to know that it was a fight: 80s style). In this time the dying criminal is being tormented by the toys (“demonic toys”, if you will) and... well... he's really just asking for what happens to him the way he goes up to the jack-in-the-box and holds his hand up to the teddy bear with ridiculously sharp teeth. Oh, and the demon possessing the toys shows up in the form of a kid.

      Remember that security guard from the scene that interrupted the fight before? I guess he's overlooking the warehouse where all this is happening... and misses all the shit that's going down because he's watching TV. This also means he doesn't see the lady cop and handcuffed suspect who are now... locked in one of the rooms in the warehouse? Where the criminal demands to be taken to jail because he “knows his rights”? Okay, why not? Chicken boy shows up blasting 80s rock and I start to think this actually is supposed to be a parody/homage to 80s horror movies. If the other two movies on this disk turn out to be similar in theme I'm going to call Charles Band a D-movie genius.

      So now the chicken boy and security guard are drinking together, sharing the chicken, and appreciating Miss July. They swap stories about how shitty life is and how everything tastes like chicken... except the fast food chicken they're eating. Then the cop shoots off her gun to draw their attention and, even though they hear it, the guard figures it might be a cat or something. Seriously? Either way, him and chicken boy go to investigate. At this point, I just need to say: I have no idea why or how the lady cop and gun-runner are locked in a room to begin with. It makes no sense.

      But yeah, they find the cop and criminal and open the door. Some terrible acting later, the security guard says he was in Korea so, judging by his age, this is supposed to be in the 80s if not earlier. Well played, Charles Band, well played.

      Oh shit! One of the teddy bears has a baseball bat! There goes the security guard's knee. Gun went spinning off to the side somewhere too (as is bound to happen in all movies). Now a doll is talking to him. A doll that grabbed his gun and then shot him with it. Okay, honestly, demonically possessed or not, if you're not able to fight off a teddy bear and a jack-in-the-box even while shot, you deserve to die. That's just natural selection.

      This is obviously the time for the gun-runner to try to make a break for it... while still in a locked room. Anyway, the cop subdues him (since he's an idiot and also still in handcuffs) before the toys try to break into their room. One of them seems to succeed since there's evil laughing from somewhere inside their room as the doll drags away the security guard outside.

      New character! She seems to know a bit. She knows the toys are alive and that they're possessed. She also makes a snide comment about chicken boy's combination of a fast food uniform and leather jacket. I'm betting they end up together at some point. There is all kinds of bad acting going on. Not even in the spirit of bad 80s horror like this is trying to be, just in general. Now the toy blocks are talking to them. Re-arranging themselves into messages and whatnot. Demon child just possessed the criminal.

      Chicken boy makes a good point about not wanting to crawl around in air conditioning ducts with “those things out there”. Despite that, him and the new girl go in there to find their way to the security office leaving lady cop behind because she “needs to bring [the gun runner] in! Because it's [her] job!”. This is all well and good until he picks the handcuff lock with a knife she apparently didn't search him for in all the time they were locked in the storage room.

      Demon boy starts talking to lady cop in a dream-like state “inside the doll house”. He then changes shape in a full 80s style effect to show her he's got powers. One of the new forms is a zombified version of her partner/boyfriend, the other is of something looking law-suitingly close to the crypt-keeper before going back to the child and explaining that he wants a body to move about in. Time for some back story, folks:

This is just fucking dumb. I'm not even going to go into this mess. it's fucking stupid. The point of this is, I guess: she's pregnant (as was established) and is going to give birth to the demon who is currently possessing the toys and talking to her because he needs to be born and... yeah, it's fucking stupid but whatever. Moving on.

      Back in the air ducts, the new girl and chicken boy are being attacked by the toys. Including a robot that fires lasers! Special effects budget here we are! No worries, though, an air-isol blowtorch takes care of those toys. Now chicken boy has a shotgun... but new girl is being bitten by the jack-in-the-box so he drops it to help her. And then she lets the jack-in-the-box bite him as she just stands there rather than return the helping favour. Good thing that blowtorch didn't kill the doll after all since it stabs her in the face several times to teach new girl not to just stand around doing nothing. Chicken boy kills the jack-in-the-box, but misses the doll with the shotgun. The demon kid then taunts him over the TV screens by quoting the fast food options he told customers in that first scene. Very clever.

      Lady cop now wakes up and finds gun runner missing and the door open. So she draws her gun (that gun runner failed to take from her after he took the key to their locked storage room off of her), and goes out into the warehouse to try to find him. All this while chicken boy is hallucinating Miss July in the middle of the warehouse. Then he sees new girl with her eye/face carved in. That'd kill the mood pretty damn quick. Gun runner then smacks him in the head and takes his gun. And calls him chicken boy!!! Did I call that or what? Lady cop shoots gun runner after that, but still: I called him chicken boy before the movie did. The rest of the scene is full of bad acting so we'll skip ahead to the demon kid sitting in a pentagram in the warehouse and looking at a box that has a toy soldier jump out of it. Why not bring some more toys in?

      Now all the toys start to be possessed. Chicken boy and lady cop spend some time shooting as many toys as they can. More than you'd expect they had ammo for, but this is supposed to be the 80s when all guns had infinite ammo unless it suited the plot. For some reason the doll is the only one that survives multiple gunshots from them, but even it finally gets blown up by the shotgun. Then the teddy bear with teeth grows up to bigger than human size and starts chasing them. Again, why not? It looks like a terrible werewolf from Ginger Snaps or American Werewolf In London or something.

      Now lady cop looks to turn the gun on herself to stop the demon from taking control of her child... only to have the toy soldier motion for her to follow him out. Which makes sense. I mean, when a bunch of toys have been possessed by a demon bent on taking over your unborn child in order to possess human form and move about in our world, why wouldn't you follow a walking toy soldier? So yeah, the demon gets a hold of her and brings her into the pentagram that all demons need in order to do anything climatic in movies.

      Chicken boy manages to make it out to his car, though. But he has a change of heart as he hears lady cop screaming and comes back to rescue her. Which ends with Teddy Werewolf tackling him and knocking away the shotgun. Chasing him back out to the chicken car. Where he... has the shotgun again? Why not?

The demon is now in adult form and talking about “doing the nasty” to lady cop. He's taking his damn time taunting her, though. If he's been waiting “sixty-six years” like he keeps saying, he's sure hell bent on waiting even longer than he needs to.

      Chicken boy shotguns were-bear, then hits him with his car. And it turns out the toy soldier is a good guy 'cause he shoots the demon with his toy gun and then unties lady cop. Then he transforms into the other kid from the first scene that I forgot to mention. Anyway, the toy soldier was the good guy, the demon kid was the bad guy, they were playing war with lady cop sitting in the background and chicken boy just shot the gas tank of his car to blow up the were-bear in a totally 80s-style explosion. That's pretty much the end of the movie.

      I don't know what to make of this. It's pretty God-awful acting, the story gets resolved in a completely unsatisfying way, and it's just plain brutal by any reasonable standards. And yet... in the tradition of Creepshow and stuff like that... this isn't too bad. Especially considering I just saw the end credits and it turns out this was actually made in 1992. Why would the DVD case lie to me like this? I mean, in this context, the whole thing seems to suck less. This was an era when Vanilla Ice was “cool”, remember. Standards were different.

      I'm more than a little disheartened to say this, but... given the context of its time... this movie didn't suck as much as it should have either. With the time this movie was made factored in, this collection comes out with a score of 3 good/at-least-watchable movies vs 3 terrible movies. The fuck? I bought this DVD as an excuse to get drunk and mock terrible movies not be mildly impressed with half of the movies on here because I've lowered my standards as to what I should expect. There are two more movies left in this collection to review before I start looking at other knowingly terrible movies. I just pray to god they bring the average down closer to where it should be. One of them is described as being about a “vampire preying on strip club patrons while keeping her part human/part reptile ex-lover in a bird cage” so that should help.