Michael's Trash Horror Lase-O-Rama: Demonic Toys (1992, Full Moon Entertainment)

Source: LDDB.com

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Judith Gray (Tracy Scoggins) suffers from a recurring dream: she sits in a room decorated like a nursery, surrounded by clocks all telling a different time, and watches as two children, one fair-haired, one dark-haired, play the card game 'War'. Each child plays a card of the same value, thus causing them to "go to war", upping the stakes. The dream ends before they turn over the final card, and she awakes not knowing who won.

She's trying to explain things to Matt Cable (Jeff Celentano), her partner, while they wait for someone to arrive. She's just revealed that she's pregnant with his child when the second group shows up: a pair of low-rent arms dealers. Judith and Matt are cops on a stakeout, but the arrest goes south when Matt is killed and the thugs break into a nearby warehouse to hide, pursued by Gray. As one of the bad guys crawls across the broken concrete floor, blood dripping from the gunshot wound in his chest, the toys on the shelves and in the boxes surrounding him start to come to life before his very eyes. A demonic Jack-In-The-Box, a psychopathic baby doll, a fanged teddy bear, and a killer remote-controlled robot all make quick work of the would-be arms dealer.

The dying man's blood has awoken a demon laying dormant for the past sixty-six years, buried under the foundation of the warehouse. At present, his power is weak, only able to manifest itself by controlling toys, but if he can find a host to merge with, he can be born into the world anew and command his full power. Judy Gray's month-old fetus is just what the demon ordered. Now, trapped in a locked warehouse with one of the thieves (Michael Russo), the night security guard (Peter Schrum), a hapless delivery boy from a fast food restaurant (Bentley Mitchum), and a homeless runaway (Ellen Dunning), Gray has to use every resource at her disposal to survive the night and outwit...the Demonic Toys!

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Full Moon studios were a low-budget yet big-hearted company who churned out an insanely diverse array of films in the 80's and 90's, many of which have become cult classics of trash cinema today. Full Moon's goal was to give their direct-to-video titles an A-list look by pumping up the special effects budget, and this formula lasted them well into the mid-90's, with franchises like Puppet Master, Trancers, and Subspecies all resulting from their distribution arrangement with Paramount.

Demonic Toys from 1992 involved ripping themselves off, as the idea of 'toys killing people' had already been explored in 1989's Puppet Master, but while that franchise used animated marionettes to do the dirty deeds, Demonic Toys took a page from Child's Play, bringing otherwise kid-friendly objects to life to harass the protagonists. The idea is ridiculous, the acting is what you'd expect, and the story has all the staying power of wet tissue paper, and there's the obligatory T&A scene you know is coming as soon as you see the name 'Full Moon' on the jacket.

Naturally I loved it.

Despite characters so thin my old Geometry teacher could use them as examples of planes (Hi, Mr. Graham!), the movie's got a sincerity about it that pushes it from "so bad" into "so bad it's good" territory. Nobody looks at that cover and reasonably expects Oscar-caliber performances, but the animators for the different possessed toys do a fine job, and the models themselves (especially Baby Oopsie Daisy) showcase a wide range of facial motions beyond just opening and closing mouths.

Scoggins does fine for the most part, although the script does have her delivering some truly cringe-worthy lines a few times, and behaving in ways utterly unbecoming of a police officer. The one performance I really have to give credit to is Daniel Cerny, who has a grand time parading around as the child-sized incarnation of the demon who wants to be Judy Gray's literal kid while maintaining a suitably menacing and other-worldly look. Cerny didn't do much acting over his career, but has been very active in Hollywood nonetheless, working as a writer, editor, and director in the intervening years. It's a shame, because he's really good here. Additional props go out to Full Moon favorite Peter Schrum, who makes Charnetski the night watchman into a guy you really want to root for, even though you know he's there to get slaughtered by the special effects.

But be honest: nobody's tuning in to a movie called Demonic Toys for the human element. As with Puppet Master, it's all about the toys, baby, and while the effects are dated, a lot of them still hold up. Full Moon got miles out of their practical effects, and these props are an excellent reminder of an art form which has now been replaced by computer animation. The toys drive, crawl, slither, jump, bite, and stab their way across the set with glee, interacting with their real-life counterparts seamlessly. There's even a nice bit of stop-motion animation used to animate a little toy soldier, which is something you really don't see nowadays.

But for me, the best thing about Demonic Toys is the dream sequence which opens the film. It's perfectly executed -- this actually feels like a dream with all of its bizarre, just-the-wrong-side-of-normal symbolism. I saw this back in 1992, when I was in 8th grade, and that opening sequence gave me nightmares. It's the sort of thing we as adults can shrug off, but is utterly terrifying to a younger, more impressionable mind, and it dug its claws into me but good.

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The Demonic Toys LaserDisc is presented in CLV format on a single two-sided disc. Since this was a direct-to-video presentation, it uses the 1.33:1 standard aspect ratio, which is cropped for later 16:9 'widescreen' releases, and a two-channel Ultra Stereo mix present on both Analog and Digital tracks. It features the full Charnetski death sequence, which was shortened by a few seconds in some versions. It also includes the eighth installment of the Full Moon Videozone, a twenty-five minute feature of behind-the-scenes content, interviews, previews of upcoming Full Moon films, and trailers for their other productions. These were standard content on the various Full Moon video releases, but it's impressive to see a company go to this length with their art, when most A-list studios didn't bother with this kind of thing:

While it is available on Blu-Ray, Demonic Toys is one of those films which I feel isn't improved by the upscale in resolution. Make the scenes with the puppets too clear, and you can 'see the magic', as it were. This is one time where the LaserDisc's lower resolution actually works in its favor, especially considering this film was shot for home video audiences, not for mainstream theatrical release. If you like low-budget, schlocky horror with some comic bits thrown in, and aren't put off by some gratuitous nudity or the idea of a foul-mouthed psychopathic baby doll, you could do a lot worse than Demonic Toys.

Three giant exploding chickens out of five!

Now enjoy the trailer!