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?
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.
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.