TOYS OF TERROR (2020)

 

(TV/Syfy Channel Original film; director: Nicholas Verso. Screenwriter: Dana Gould.)

Storyline

A family (two adults, three kids) move into a mansion with the intention of flipping it, unaware of its angry, active-spirits past.

Review

The building that once housed the Saint Germaine Children’s Hospital (established in 1918) has long stood empty─all because of one night, years before, when a black-robed and -masked figure left a trunk with a dead boy’s (Jason’s) toys on the doorstep. Now, a house-flipping couple (Hannah and David) and their three children (Alicia, the teenager; Zoe and Franklin, pre-tweens in serious need of discipline) have moved in. Strange things happen─ghostly look-away-and-they’re-gone figures in the mirrors; toys that appear where they weren’t seconds ago; etc.

The children are the first to notice the toys, who encourage the children to misbehave, angering the adults (including their nanny, Rose) who don’t understand why the children are acting badly. It’s not long before the adults understand, too, after Rose is almost knocked off the second story bannister OMEN-style, their handyman (Emmett) is horribly killed in front of them, and then it’s Christmas Eve. . . when bad situations explode in films like this.

This being a Syfy Channel Original film, there’s a certain level of cheesiness to the special FX (some are practical, as opposed to CGI) and story padding to flesh it out to ninety minutes. Thankfully, this is one the television channel’s better and more imaginative films, its screenplay written by comedian Dana Gould (STAN AGAINST EVIL), with occasional lags in the story (due to the aforementioned necessary padding), but mostly Old School Horror fun, not gory and laugh out loud funny in parts. The acting is mostly solid though a few scenes are not only CGI-bad they’re acting-bad (e.g., when slivers of shattered Christmas ornament are slicing Hannah’s cheeks─sans blood, because it’s TV-14-related television─and she doesn’t even flinch).

Mostly entertaining despite its tale-longish running length, sometimes cheap FX and not-great acting, TOYS is worth watching if you are a connoisseur of genre-smart writing, and low-budget flicks.