Starring Tim Thomerson, Tracy Scoggins, Melissa Behr, Phillip Brock, Phil Fondacaro, R.C. Bates, Willie C. Carpenter, Peter Chen
Directed by Charles Band
Featured Toys: Baby Oopsy Daisy, Jack Attack, Mr. Static, Zombietoid, Grizzly Teddy (flashback)
Expectations: Moderate. I liked Dollman. I liked Demonic Toys.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
Dollman vs. Demonic Toys serves as a sequel to three Full Moon films, the two in the title and Bad Channels. Following the events of Bad Channels, where an alien took over a radio station and shrunk beautiful women down to Dollman size, Dollman finds himself heading down the road to see if he can meet up with the girl who didn’t get restored to full-size. The scene that opens the film is the same as the one that follows the credits of Bad Channels. Meanwhile, Tracy Scoggins from Demonic Toys is staking out the toy warehouse where all the demonic shit went down. A bum dies and his blood gives life anew to the toys, who flee into an air duct before Scoggins can blast them like she did towards the end of Demonic Toys. Got all that?
All three meet up eventually and head to the warehouse to battle the toys. On their way there though, we are treated to multiple flashback scenes of the previous films. Dollman tells his story to Nurse Ginger (Melissa Behr) and we get a condensed five-minute version of Dollman. You get the idea. Wait, didn’t Ginger get restored to full-size at the end of Bad Channels? Yeah, she did… Bunny, the annoying girl, was the one left small. Somewhere down the line they decided the sequel would be better with Ginger and just went with it. The Bad Channels flashback is even cleverly edited to make it look like this is what happened at the end of the film. Honestly, I’m happy they went this route because I liked her character much more than Bunny’s. She plays off of Tim Thomerson well and they look good together to boot.
Demonic Toys fans will enjoy seeing their favorites return, with one notable exception. Grizzly Teddy is gone, replaced by a Duke Nukem look-a-like action figure with a constant battle yell expression on his face. Every closeup he gets during battle, he yells to go along with his face and it’s actually pretty amusing. When Dollman fights him they are comparably sized too, which I’m sure made the special FX that much easier. Throwing a big action figure mask on a dude and telling him to attack Tim Thomerson is infinitely cheaper than creating a stop-motion version or a puppet. The special FX are pretty good here too, despite some obvious shortcuts. The intro scene for Ginger, in which she wakes up in a kitchen drawer and then wanders around on the counter, looks fantastic because they actually built a large-scale kitchen countertop and stuff to populate it! It’s awesome and easily one of the best scenes in the film.
For some reason Baby Oopsy Daisy is less annoying here than in Demonic Toys. Either his lines are better or I’m used to him. In any case, this is a good thing because he’s in this one a lot more. The other toys are basically the same as they were in the previous film and Dollman’s still a badass. When he got shrunk down to thirteen inches, his gun that exploded bodies on his home planet got reduced in power as well. I’m very happy to report that when fighting toys, the gun’s power to explode seems to have returned! Even if the explosions are stock footage from Demonic Toys, I’ll take it!
Fans of the previous three films or Full Moon films in general will get a kick out of this mash-up film. There’s not a lot of new material here, with a runtime slightly over one hour and multiple flashbacks to scenes from the previous films, but there’s a lot more good than I expected. The plot is basically a rehash of Demonic Toys with Dollman in the hero role, but there’s more than enough fun to be had for genre fans so it doesn’t matter too much.