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Not really a horror film but operates on a quease factor that makes it an unwanted sleazo-melodrama cousin of the genre. Toys Are Not For Children will ultimately be a prime example of what a heroic job overt exploitation can do in allowing its audience to at least keep some kind of anthropological distance between it and whatever taboo subject matter it is peddling. And this film, in an act of Bizarro World perversity, will be very willful in giving us almost none of that.
Opening with a scene of a woman copulating with her childhood toys while fantasizing about her father, one would hope to get a sense that this film is targeting some very specific group of subterranean Weirdos. People who we can point to as the cause of such deviancy in our poor society. Definitely not us Hopeful Normals, who are simply watching out of harmless curiosity . But as the film carries on, soberly and competently telling us its tale of sexual dysfunction, marital collapse and family tragedy, it quickly becomes an affront to polite society that it doesn’t seem to have any intention to let us easily shame anyone else for its existence. It seems to have the gall to be telling Us this story. No drooling, sex maniac intermediaries required.
Without even the slightest trace of camp or amateurish weirdness to dissolve the awkward silence it creates between it and the viewer, what we end up left with is a movie that stares us straight in the eye waiting for us to blink first. And we definitely will. But when we open them back up , this film will not have stopped carrying on with its unbearably straight face. With nothing for us to gawk at, to point to as the hilariously awful reason we are here, we can’t help but wonder to ourselves exactly what we are doing here. How we are supposed to engage with something that is clearly aiming to unsettle us while keeping so much of what we were expecting to offend us hidden snugly beneath its flasher overcoat. Junk film afficionados are prepared for almost anything but the threat of contemplation.
There is definitely a perversity in how by keeping so much of its disturbed id buried inside of the psyche of its main character where we can’t get at it, that it somehow begins to feel even more gratuitous with its subject matter. Or maybe a film like this simply is exposing the sickness of general geek show filmmaking, where we only come to stare at the obscenity, claim it really wasn’t as bad as people say after all, then move on. It almost seems to be pointing at how unhealthy that is, burying the hard reality of these issues in our cynical mirth.
None of this actually makes Toys Are Not For Children a particularly good film. But it is shockingly well put together considering the type of theaters it would have played in. And the incongruency of some modicum of competence, mixed with remarkable restraint regarding its subject matter, offers us a curiosity without any catharsis. This allows it the weird feat of being boring without being easily forgotten. An accomplishment? I guess so.
Opening with a scene of a woman copulating with her childhood toys while fantasizing about her father, one would hope to get a sense that this film is targeting some very specific group of subterranean Weirdos. People who we can point to as the cause of such deviancy in our poor society. Definitely not us Hopeful Normals, who are simply watching out of harmless curiosity . But as the film carries on, soberly and competently telling us its tale of sexual dysfunction, marital collapse and family tragedy, it quickly becomes an affront to polite society that it doesn’t seem to have any intention to let us easily shame anyone else for its existence. It seems to have the gall to be telling Us this story. No drooling, sex maniac intermediaries required.
Without even the slightest trace of camp or amateurish weirdness to dissolve the awkward silence it creates between it and the viewer, what we end up left with is a movie that stares us straight in the eye waiting for us to blink first. And we definitely will. But when we open them back up , this film will not have stopped carrying on with its unbearably straight face. With nothing for us to gawk at, to point to as the hilariously awful reason we are here, we can’t help but wonder to ourselves exactly what we are doing here. How we are supposed to engage with something that is clearly aiming to unsettle us while keeping so much of what we were expecting to offend us hidden snugly beneath its flasher overcoat. Junk film afficionados are prepared for almost anything but the threat of contemplation.
There is definitely a perversity in how by keeping so much of its disturbed id buried inside of the psyche of its main character where we can’t get at it, that it somehow begins to feel even more gratuitous with its subject matter. Or maybe a film like this simply is exposing the sickness of general geek show filmmaking, where we only come to stare at the obscenity, claim it really wasn’t as bad as people say after all, then move on. It almost seems to be pointing at how unhealthy that is, burying the hard reality of these issues in our cynical mirth.
None of this actually makes Toys Are Not For Children a particularly good film. But it is shockingly well put together considering the type of theaters it would have played in. And the incongruency of some modicum of competence, mixed with remarkable restraint regarding its subject matter, offers us a curiosity without any catharsis. This allows it the weird feat of being boring without being easily forgotten. An accomplishment? I guess so.