Directed by Peter Manoogian
Featured Toys: Baby Oopsy Daisy, Jack Attack, Grizzly Teddy, Mr. Static
Expectations: Moderate, it’s one of the more well-known Full Moon titles.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
Yet another film in Charles Band’s long pedigree of films featuring pint-sized murderers, Demonic Toys has a lot to live up to. Because so many of his films share these mini-attackers, they could easily run together if you’re not careful when crafting them. Demonic Toys actually manages to set itself apart from the crowd pretty quickly, thanks to hard-edged dialogue and a fair amount of graphic gore and fun special FX.
The story falls into two general horror categories, the “People Stuck in a Location” old standby and the lesser used (but still popular) “Fetus That Will Be Possessed and Born as a Demon”. Not to mention the obligatory mini-attacker sub-genre Full Moon made famous. Combining the sub-genres is a novel idea and I have to give them credit for selecting a location to get stuck in that I’ve never seen in a horror movie. A toy warehouse. I’d like to imagine they shot it in the actual Full Moon warehouse to cut costs, but I have no way of proving that.
The film moves at a brisk pace through the first forty-five or so minutes. It drags a bit in the middle, but the last twenty minutes are pretty much non-stop carnage and it’s damn fun to watch. If you’ve ever wanted to see toys get shot in the face with shotguns, then this is your movie. The toys mount a massive uprising to overcome two of the trapped humans, but the humans retaliate with a barrage of 9mm shells and shotgun blasts. It’s ridiculously satisfying. The cherry on top was when Baby Oopsie Daisy takes a direct shotgun blast to his foul-mouthed face, causing his head to explode into a glorious white mist.
Overall, Full Moon heaped a ton of different ideas into this one and they surprisingly work well together. Peter Manoogian handles the camera with a steady hand and captures the feeling of being trapping in an old, filled-to-the-brim warehouse of toys. There’s even a couple of callbacks towards the end to the old Empire film about killer toys, Dolls, which I thought was a nice touch. It’s trashy, it’s over-the-top, but it’s pretty fun if you dig this sort of thing.
Next week, I’m gonna hit the airwaves with another 90s Full Moon classic, Bad Channels!