Full Moon Video | Buy at Amazon | Review by Sinferno
There is NOTHING I like better than a Titan Fight and by that I am not talking about Holyfield vs. Tyson or any such pairing of any two real life gladiators in a sanctioned real life sporting event, past, present or upcoming live on Pay Per View. When I say Titan Fight I am referring to two Sci-fi titular characters each with few movies of their own detailing their private exploits who somehow meet on the same stage (lucky for us, the world bending occurrence of such a chance meeting is no problem for the static loose reality shifting rules of Sci-fi). From there the two protagonists brutally fight each other to the death. And while experience has taught me that ALL such bad guy beat downs always end up in a draw with both characters limping back to their own series of films none the worse for wear as if the fight never even occurred, it truly is a forum where anything can happen, at least in theory...While a straight to video release, the DOLLMAN/DEMONIC TOYS boxed set does capture the spirit of the greats, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Aliens vs Predator, and Freddy Vs Jason. Granted the boxed set contains three films; DEMONIC TOYS, DOLLMAN and DOLLMAN VS. DEMONIC TOYS. And while this pales in the size and scope of the filmography and legend of every single one of the characters just mentioned, sometimes it is nice to have a complete experience available that doesn't require watching 50+ hours of film to view in its entirety. It is a fight of tiny titans, with a combined discography of a few titles, but being that they are about a horde of demonic toys and a guy the size of a homicidal Ken Doll, this small cinema allotment serves their story well, almost symbolically-at least at first...
DEMONIC TOYS
A mortally wounded bad guy stumbles into a toy factory and his spilled blood awakens a room full of toys who now crave blood and seek the unborn child of a woman so they can inhabit his body. Yes, this is essentially the Same plot as Child's Play. But while Chucky was a single doll, the tiny terrors in demonic toys are a four piece squad of playthings that crawl, bite and kill: Baby Oopsy Daisy is a cute doll with black soulless eyes who stabs people while dropping cute pull string one liners. Jack Attack is the mutant offspring clown of a jack in the box and a rattlesnake who constricts his victims and tears into them with a playful grin bristling with mischief (not to mention razor sharp fangs). Grizzly Teddy is a stuffed bear who can grow several times his size until he can actually outsize the human victims and able to rip their entrails out like so much fiberfill stuffing. Mr Static is a mute, silver robot who at first seems like a harmless wind-up tin toy from the 1950's who shoots devastating plasma bursts from his twin cannons. Much like the dolls in PUPPET MASTER (who these guys have fought before in a previous titan battle) they are ill tempered, vicious and utterly hilarious. Security guards, robbers and just about anyone else who cross their path are dispatched with mechanical efficiency and much dark delight by these devilish dolls. But there are problems, parental warnings written on the side , that you should read before purchasing this veritable DVD toy box. Because this is a budget title, you must accept the fact that these devil's playthings are manipulated explicitly at all times by obvious forms of puppetry, stop motion or remote control. Also, as many budget titles, the entire bulk of the movie takes place in a single setting, the toy warehouse itself. But if you can accept that it is a direct rip off of a work of a major studio, and the poor production value on these puppets themselves are longer than the strings of your own suspension of disbelief there is much in this one to awaken some really sinister play value for your inner problem child. Like any popular toy line this product survives on the strength of its own novelty, irony, gimmick and tie in to an established genre or licensed character (Even if that character is owned by MGM). At least it doesn't take itself too seriously. A small featurette on the disk shows the director and actors working with a fun, fanatical zeal that far exceeded their budget on this one.
DOLLMAN
And in this corner... DOLLMAN is the story about a law enforcement officer from the planet Arturus, Brick Bardo; a man who is one part Dirty Harry and one part Boba Fett. While chasing his arch-enemy Sprug through a dimensional space anomaly they both crash land on earth only to realize that Earthlings are in fact roughly six times their size (who say's it's a small world after all?) After a brief action sequence where he crawls our of his tiny ship and saves a community crime activist from being burned alive, Dollman, (with the aid of his comically/astronomically powerful handgun) starts cleaning up our streets one thug and one slug at a time through some pretty grisly and insanely humorous gunfights. But meanwhile Sprug has also allied himself with one of the stronger gangs and threatens all of the Bronx with the doomsday class bomb he smuggled from their world. From there it's a series of action that takes place with Brick (Tim Thomerson) skulking around "giant" sets, posing in front of a green screen and dropping ball busting one liners as Dollman takes out various baddies, like some deranged GI Joe with post traumatic stress disorder. If it sounds fun, it is, but you should know that there are many problems with the cinematography in this one. For example, because the character of Dollman is often represented by a doll and then by a live actor, there were numerous times in this movie where continuity errors popped up such as the time it seemed that Dollman kept magically putting on and removing his shades between lines. The one thing that saves this movie is the acting of Thomerson himself, who is very convincing as the last pissed off little man in a big bad world (however literally). Even when the special effects fell short, Thomerson's curmudgeonly, rage filled portrayal of Dollman himself was larger than life, so I stayed tuned. While it will never win any awards for being the most classic, popular, or genre shaking portrayal of a Sci-fi universe about a vertically challenged man that THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) was, this film is so much more fast paced, modern and slapstick ; easily enjoyable by most modern audiences and I recommend it as long as you don't look down upon it for the bizarrely wrong special effects and miniscule budget. The movie, like the character of Dollman himself packs a bigger wallop than you might otherwise suspect. And after having seen both this film and DEMONIC TOYS I have to say that personally, my money's on the "DM" (even though I know these films ALWAYS end in a big cosmic draw with no clear winner declared).
DOLLMAN VS. DEMONIC TOYS
In this film they meet. I can't imagine a viewing more experience more surreal than watching this film without having seen the other two films in the boxed set, even so there might even be a fourth film (not included) that you might want to check out if you insist that all of this somehow make sense. It seems that Dollman meets a woman named Ginger who was shrunk by aliens in yet another Full Moon Features classic, a movie named BAD CHANNELS where several women are kidnapped by aliens and shrunk to better facilitate transport to the home world (apparently to keep them bottle to brothel fresh). Apparently Ginger wasn't able to be restored by the close of the film, but if you have seen the movie BAD CHANNELS, it is actually "Bunny" who is left small at film's end (if this type of non continuity upsets you, you might want to stop reading/viewing now). At the start of the movie Dollman is looking for the famous shrunken woman. Meanwhile in a distant warehouse the toys reanimate after a hobo bleeds to death onto a concrete floor, awakening them, Hellraiser style. But not so fast, the police woman Judith Grey from the original Demonic Toys movie is on the scene, hunting them down almost as soon as they appear. But unfortunately she is pending a psyche review after her last run in with the toys and because of such she has been suspended from the force barely having the right to carry a gun anymore, much less visit the warehouse. Just as our intrepid female cop corners the toys she herself is arrested and suspended. Somewhere Dollman finally tracks down the tiny hottie from BAD CHANNELS and their individual stories are told with footage from their own private movies. Character exposition being complete they have hot sweaty rodent sex in a desk drawer as the police woman walks in on them and explains her dilemma and the horror of the Demonic toys. While Ginger is dead set against helping out, the character of Dollman still has a cop's sense of duty so he volunteers to accompany Ms Grey in one more raid on the warehouse. Ginger accepts, being a nurse and all, and for five minutes this film almost seems to make sense. But that's when the plans, plot and the general structure of D. VS. D.T. goes to hell. There are all sorts of plot developments I don't want to spoil for you, but the long and short of it is Dollman gets captured, tied between two remote control two monster trucks as Baby "Oops A Daisy" mocks him, bragging about how he is personally is going to rape Ginger at midnight and the child conceived will be the spawn of Satan (an endeavor similar to the evil plot that they tried in Demonic toys and failed). I don't know if the world is ready for any movie that shows a hot blond nurse handcuffed to a bed in a dollhouse and clumsily groped by a giant vinyl live action baby while her boyfriend watches helplessly but it actually was one of the more lucid, sensible moments of actual crisis in the film which more often than not itself seemed like a series of trailers and stock footage from no less than three different movies, two of which were included in this very boxed set and certainly needed no further exposition. This feature runs less than an hour and it disappointed me, partially because there was so much unused potential. For the first time in a Demonic Toys film the playthings were not exclusively represented by small crude puppets but also by gigantic, costumes (to better grapple with Dollman) and the backgrounds actually approached a level of sophistication not before seen in either of the previous films. Yet, by the time they all meet and square off, the film is all but half over and some of the surprising depth of the previous two films never materializes, partially, because in a movie this visually bizarre, crude and otherworldly it is impossible to achieve any dark irony or subtlety of wit that made the other two so watchable and fun. Tim Thomerson is still deadpan in his portrayal of Brick Bardo, but the silly nature of his foes kind of limits the play value to small audiences indeed and by that I don't mean children, either. Dolls and toys that they were, these two franchises didn't play well together and should have remained sold separately. Though both DM and the Demonic Toys will live to fight in future films, (told you) this liaison damaged; muddied their unique characterization in unseen ways which may even effect their portrayal in future films.
| Yucko/Neato Factor: Aliens and Witchcraft themes ultimately mix as well as science and magic and by that it means that the finale was a goofy mess in a world with no rules and therefore no drama. Some figures not for use with some sets and the two universes probably should have never met. DEMONIC TOYS was derivative but watchable, DOLLMAN was a bigger, badder and better hero than I was expecting and while his antics loomed large, the finale let me down like the broken toy it was. |
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| Production Values: At least it had special effects. But tiny rubber monsters make both careless children and directors choke after too much unsupervised play. |
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| Realism: Like everything else in the series, this too was very little.... |
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| Value for Price: $39.95 Had they thrown in Bad Channels, I would have added a finger for sealing the box capturing the complete experience and filling the proverbial toy-box of the completest kid in all of us. |
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| Plot: Envision Pixar's TOY STORY as written by homicidal mental patients and yet somehow without the use of any computer rendering whatsoever. |
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