Demonic Toys

Two police officers botch an undercover gun bust that ends with one of them dead, and one of the illegal gun sellers wounded. The surviving officer, Judith, chases the two criminals inside an old toy wearhouse and manages to apprehend one of them. The wounded one, however, ends up wandering off on his own, where he stumbles upon some animated toys that seem to be out for blood. Turns out, Judith and her quarry have wandered into not just any-old toy warehouse, but a haunted toy warehouse that just so happens to be occupied by a demon. What with the sudden influx of useless idiots now running around in the middle of the night, said demon has decided that now is the perfect time to enact his resurrection plan, first by using his assortment of evil toys to kill all the aforementioned idiots so that he can gain more power, and then by possessing the soul of Judith’s unborn child so that he can have a human body to walk around in. So now it’s up to Judith, and a very bewildered food delivery boy, to either stop the evil or escape the warehouse, before the demon can complete his wicked plan.

Aw, and he was such a cute little demon, too…

All right Full Moon, it’s been a hot second since I’ve seen one of your flicks, so I’ve decided to give you another go. I don’t know yet if that makes me an idiot or a masochist. Jury’s still out on that. Anyway, Demonic Toys is Full Moon’s other killer toy franchise, behind it’s much more popular Puppet Master series. But unlike that behemoth, this particular franchise is a lot shorter, with only 5 films to its name, including the next two films which are both crossovers with other Full Moon franchises, a properly numbered sequel, and finally, a spin-off. The only other film in the series I’ve seen has been the Made-for-TV crossover with the Puppet Master series and, while I did find it stupidly entertaining, I still wasn’t all that impressed with what I saw. Because while I think that Demonic Toys does do a few things better than the first film in the Puppet Master series (Seriously, I still can’t see how that movie spawned a single sequel, much less 14…) , it’s also so derivative and full of painful oddities and cliches, that I can easily see why this series didn’t take off like its big brother.

Although, I did get to look at Tracy Scoggins a lot, so that was nice.

Issue #1? The titular toys they made for this film are just downright…fugly. And, you know what, I get it. They’re “demonic” toys and I’m sure they’re probably supposed to be absolutely hideous. But there’s a way to make things look like they’ve suddenly become “possessed” while still keeping them aesthetically pleasing, and this film kinda misses the mark in that department. And I say ‘kinda’, because the Jack in the Box toy actually does manage to check all the boxes of being ugly and evil, and even very creepy and scary looking, while still looking pretty decent. In short, it looks like a simple toy that became possessed by a demon. But good design still doesn’t keep it from being ugly as sin. This just ain’t the kind of shit even a lot of hardcore horror fans would want to buy a poster of to hang up on their wall.

Look, I’m just saying that if you can make a sweater wearing, child-raping burn victim look sleek, you should be able to do the same thing with some friggin’ children’s toys.

It also doesn’t help that the puppetry behind these things is not what one would call “impressive”. Since this is an earlier Full Moon film, the company actually did have the funds to fully animate one of the latter toys that shows up in the film. So that’s nice, and the animation looks nice, so bully for them. But that’s all they ended up animating: One. The others weren’t so lucky. You can also tell right off the bat that of the main four Demonic Toys seen in the movie poster, two of them are literally hand puppets, and a third is nothing more than a souped up RC car. The only one with any “real-life” movement is the trash talking Oopsie Daisy and his automated mouth, and THAT THING is so poorly implemented that the filmmakers couldn’t even fully film around the disturbing separation of his jowls as his little animatronic mouth moved. So yeah, one of the toys looks like it can ‘realistically’ talk, but it often also looks like it’s mere seconds away from opening its inhuman maw and screeching at you like some creepy, miniaturized human version of The Predator and that’s…not so great.

So yeah, I’m not shocked at all that people weren’t clamoring to see more of these things.

Gah! Be gone, animatronic hellbeast!

Issue #2? Everyone in this movie is a flipping IDIOT. And not in the amusing “ha ha” way that you’d expect from a film trying to be a horror comedy. No, it’s more of a “I wanna reach through my screen and viciously smack every character I see” kind of way. What’s worse, is this feeling starts right off the bat, in the very first scene, where Judith’s baby daddy proves himself to be a completely useless twat by suddenly announcing himself as a police officer, while both the criminals he and Judith were arresting were standing behind them. My first thought was “wow, what a rookie mistake.” But then I realized that that was an insult to rookies, cause I choose to be optimistic and believe that 99.9% of them would know not to try to arrest people you had your back turned to. But apparently Matt didn’t know that, and he died, and that pretty much sets the stage for the IQ rating of every subsequent character. Except for maybe the demon, because he does successfully manage to kill several people and almost fulfill his evil plan, but yet this is also an unholy creature of unspeakable hate and torment from the bowels of hell that twice refers to sex as “doing the nasty”, in a film that’s already rated “R”, so I do still have some lingering doubts about his competency.

This was avoidable, Matt! This was completely avoidable!

Other than that, Demonic Toys is your typical direct-to-video Full Moon feature. Meaning that, for the most part, it looks okay, it sounds okay, the acting is cheesy as hell, and while the plot is perfectly serviceable, it’s also filled with a bunch of visual and story oddities that’ll either make you scratch your head or outright laugh out loud at their absurdity. A prime example of this, and perhaps my favorite WTF part of the movie, was about halfway through the film when three of the character are locked in a storage room and one of them asks what the hell is going on, when some random homeless girl literally pops through the air duct (there’s those stupid air ducts again…), and jumps down into the room to explain the plot to everyone inside.

I think her timing is supposed to constitute “comedy” in this film.

And, as far as I can tell, that is the sole purpose for her inclusion in the story: to randomly show up and explain the plot. Not to explain the plot to the audience, mind you, because they already know what’s going on at this point. No, she’s just meant to get the three chuffs hiding in the storage closet up to speed. Like, that’s the kind of story and not-so-intricate plotting details you’re working with in this film. So if you feel you can put up with things like that, then feel free to give this one a go. It’s not great, and it’s kind of predictable, but it does have a few amusing moments if you’re a fan of cheesy B-horror films.

Demonic Toys is available on a variety of streaming services.

Demonic Toys is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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