Demonic Toys
It’s a nightmare she has had for years, two children playing cards as she quietly watches them, empty rocking chairs swaying and the clocks ticking forward towards eternity as they approach their endgame, both declaring victory; trying to explain it to her boyfriend, the two of them together on a stakeout to trap an arms dealer, it is a prelude to Judith telling Matt that she is pregnant, but the arrest goes badly and he is killed.
Pursuing the suspect to the nearby warehouse of Arcadia Toys, night watchman Charnetski is indifferent to any professional responsibility he may have, drinking and paying no heed to the CCTV monitors, waiting for his fresh chunky chicken to arrive courtesy of delivery driver Wayne, but the warehouse is home to something older, a demonic presence waiting to be reborn which traps them all inside.
Directed by Enemy Territory’s Peter Manoogian from a script by Foundation’s David S Goyer based on an idea by Castle Freak producer Charles Band via his Full Moon Entertainment brand, Demonic Toys never feels more than that half-written idea, the monstrous mini-terrors of Baby Oopsy Daisy, Grizzly Teddy, Jack Attack and Mister Static, resembling Logan’s Run’s box and just as murderous, more interesting than the story they have been placed in.
Starring Babylon 5’s Tracy Scoggins as Judith Grey, her condition making her an ideal candidate to be vessel for the demon which has lain within the foundations of the warehouse since its last attempt at manifesting sixty-six years earlier on Hallowe’en night of 1925, she is underwritten to the point of incompetent, failing to call for back up when Matt (Blackwater Lane’s Jeff Weston) is shot then locking herself in a room with the killer.
Exhibiting the urgency of a grouchy sloth, Pete Schrum plays to type as the diligently derelict Charnetski with only Sometimes They Come Back’s Bentley Mitchem displaying any charm as the driver of the chickenmobile whose only involvement was being in the wrong place at the wrong time yet who handles the situation better than either of the professionals, Ellen Dunning’s homeless girl introduced solely to deliver backstory then die and Michael Russo’s Lincoln indistinguishable between possessed or just psychotic.
A mosaic of ideas with potential, the Demonic Toys play in the cracks with little structure or coherence between the parallel stories of cops and robbers and the dwellers of the doll’s house on the astral plane and Playboy models, the dynamic animatronic puppets seeming to belong to a far more impressive production though the ultimate effect is akin to a particularly and unexpectedly violent episode of Play School, though when released straight-to-video in 1992 it was successful enough to prompt seven sequels and a spin-off television show.
Demonic Toys is available on Shudder now
