Demonic Toys

Dir: Peter Manoogian

1992

****

 Good old Full Moon Film Productions. Not only do they spoof/rip off/parody other people’s films, they also do the same to their own. 1989’s Puppet Master, which Charles Band produced, and was influenced by many a killer toy film of the 1980s, was quite serious in tone looking back at it, so it felt right to address the balance and make a rather light-hearted version. It’s no masterpiece but it has a fair bit of charm about it, especially considering it’s a low-budget, b-movie horror parody of a low-budget, b-movie horror. It begins with a fast-food Chicken delivery boy arriving at Toyland Warehouse to deliver Chicken to his overweight and rather rude security guard friend Charneski. Outside the Warehouse, two undercover police officers are ready to arrest a couple of gun dealers. While waiting for their marks, Officer Gray (Tracy Scoggins) and Officer Cable (Jeff Weston), who are both lovers, discuss living arrangements after Grey announces that they are expecting a child together. The bust goes wrong and Cable gets killed and Gray follows the dealer that shot him into the warehouse. Meanwhile, several killer toys in the warehouse start to stir and decide to kill the gun dealer as he hides from the police. A baby doll called Baby Oopsy Daisy, a robot called Mr. Static, a Jack-in-the-box called Jack Attack and a teddy bear gone bad called Grizzly Teddy draw a pentagram around their second victim’s body and begin their night of terror. A teenage runaway who has been hiding in the warehouse’s air ducts also gets involved in the mania and the remaining humans struggle to stay alive, difficult when the warehouse doors won’t reopen until morning, part of the plot that refuses to give good reason for but it’s fine, we would all rather they were trapped. There is a lot of running around and being killed by the slowest, smallest and easiest to get away from bad guys horror has ever seen but the humour and gore more than make up for how ridiculous it all is. It is the ridiculousness that makes it so entertaining to be honest. All is made clear (ha!) when the film suddenly goes into haunted house mode and Gray accidentally gets trapped in a doll house where she meets a demon who is living in the spirit of a child. The demon child explains that he needs her unborn child as a vessel in order to be reborn, he tried it 66 years previous without any luck and has been buried under the warehouse for many years. It was the blood of the injured gun dealer that had awoken him. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Then things get even weirder. Officer Gray finds herself attacked by Grizzly Teddy who has turned into a fully sized bear and just as she contemplates suicide, a toy soldier, fed up of watching the massacre happening in front of him, jumps to her rescue. The rescue is short lived however, and the demon, who somehow has turned into a man, tries to rape her, forgetting that she is already pregnant, but forget the details. The toy solder helps her again and then turns into a boy, as does the demon. The two boys fight, and Gray remembers that this was something she had seen in a dream before and once the good boy wins and send the demon boy to hell, he reveals he’s the spirit of her unborn son, waiting in heaven to be born, see you in nine months. As plots go it is pretty ridiculous. I’m not sure killer toys really need but of an origin story, at least not until the sequel, prequel or reboot. At least it’s unpredictable, and unpredictable goes a very long way in cheap low-budget horror films. The puppetry is crude but I quite liked it in a Troll kind of way. Chucky remains king of the killer toys and the Puppet Master films remained unhurt but Demonic Toys hold their own. Indeed, they take on Dollman and the Puppet Master toys in further sequels and got another go at it a whole eighteen years later.