There’s an old saying that states “what goes around, comes around”. There’s another that reads “never say never” and I wonder if any of them ran through the mind of Mickey Rooney as he stepped onto the set of Silent Night Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker.
The franchise had seen some truly strange things occur through out its run of being starting as a hugely controversial Santa slasher pic to whatever the hell the series was now (it dropped the Santa gimmick to become a trippy anthology with the fourth installment), buy surely the presence of Rooney was one of the more confusing highlights when you take into account that he was one of the most vocal voices that spoke out against the original during its release.
However, Hollywood has no time for irony – especially when there’s cheap jack, surreal sequels to be made to cash in on a familiar brand name – so let’s unwrap the final present that the series has to offer and pray that somebody remembered to keep the receipt.
Little Derek Quinn has been traumatised into silence ever since he witnessed his father dying two weeks ago after a horrible “accident”. Of course those exclamation points obviously suggest that it wasn’t an accident at all and the fact that he was killed by a mysterious toy that was left on their porch means that Christmas has now become a terrifying time of fear for the poor child. In an attempt to help him, his mother, Sarah (who seems to have gotten over the whole thing impressively quickly), takes him to the local toy store owned by – get this – Joe Petto in the hopes it will break his silence, but as it seems to be as effective as curing claustrophobia by burrying someone alive, Derek isn’t magically cured.
However, while only Derek knows about the killer toy, other things are occurring in the background that hints of a bizarre conspiracy. For example, what’s the deal with Joe’s, teenage, weirdo son, Pino, who not only suffers at the hands of his father’s drunken, violent rages, but also has the rather unnerving habit of breaking into Sarah and Derek’s house because apparently he once used to live there. On top of that, there’s Noah, a man who not only has been watching Sarah and Derek from afar, but has been buying numerous toys from Joe Petto’s in ordervto take them apart to see how they work. Why is Noah doing this? Because he’s convinced that Joe is making booby trapped toys that can kill has his suspicions are given a hefty boost when his shitty landlord is murdered in his car by a toy named Larry the Larvae.
However, believe it or not, murderous playthings are only the tip of the conspiracy iceberg and the true secret of Joe and Pino are so outlandish, it makes the idea of a killer Santa seem as normal as a Hallmark Christmas special.
I’ve made much about the frankly whacko trajectory this franchise has taken from psycho Santa movie, to surreal anthology and back again, but as we find the Silent Night Deadly Night movies still clearly in their fucked up, anything goes, Brian Yunza phase, we might have found the most out-there installment yet. The previous installment (helmed by Yunza himself) wasn’t exactly an example of textbook seasonal horror itself with a trippy tale of feminist cults, spontaneous human combustion and the sight of Clint Howard impregnating women by sticking giant larvae up their hoo-hahs, but The Toy Maker ups the ante by being just so uncontrollably weird, you’re not entirely sure if you’re watching a real movie or just a fake one that somehow managed to get away from the film crew.
The notion of killer toys is something so 90s, it’s untrue and yet as far as I know, none of Charles Band’s endless Puppet Master series never actually thought to set any of their numerous sequels at Christmas time, so SNDN5 actually has a leg up with a genuinely creepy concept. I mean imagine your enthusiastic, pudgy-faced children opening their presents on Christmas morning only to find that their toy has been programmed to kill them in the most gruesome way possible – pretty gnarly, huh? However, The Toy Maker doesn’t seem particularly interested in teasing out that vision beyond its slightly awkward opening sequence and from there heads into a somewhat labored conspiracy thriller that eventually earns its keep with a revelation so fucked up, it might have you checking your eggnog to see if you’ve been spiked.
I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised, because the movie signposts it so painfully (Joe Petto and Pino? Are you fucking kidding?) I’m amazed it ends up being so alarming as it is, but maybe your attention is diverted by the fact that Mickey fucking Rooney is present playing an abusive toy maker who frequently gets smashed on booze and beats his teenage son in drunken fits of rage. Quite how this role is supposedly more wholesome than a killer Santa I’m not too sure, but I guess Rooney’s pay check was enough to calm any outrage. However, when it’s revealed that Joe built Pino out of grief for his long dead son, things get far stranger than just a bunch of killer toys and after years of abuse from a cantankerous old fuck who resents his own creation, the robot Pino has quite a few wires loose in that noggin. This means that he’s developed feelings for Sarah and has been sending those killer toys to her house to tale out her family so he can adopt her as his mother which presumably means that Rooney’s carelessly left his doll set to “oedipal”. Thus we get the film’s piéce de résistance where we get to watch a manical teenager dry grind on a screaming woman while he wails “I love you mommy!” and while it wasn’t exactly something I was expecting to see in my Christmas stocking this year, it certainly ain’t dull.
However, director Martin Kitosser doesn’t really have the same skill as Yunza to make this absurd shit sing half as well as it could and while the director of Bride Of Re-Animator and Society could have possibly turned in something special with the ridiculous materials at hand, the guy who wrote Friday The 13th Part V can’t really do much more than string some admittedly gory sequences together between Rooney’s drunken rants. Still, there’s plenty of curious shit going to hold the attention – for example, what exactly is the logic to have the lead from the previous film and the child she saved from a bug cult reprise their roles as random neighbours only for the kid to nearly bite it thanks to some rocket powered skates hurling him in front of a passing car? Also, the toy designs Joe Petto makes are so shit, I can’t imagine any kid being in any actual danger because they wouldn’t want the cheap fucking things to start with.
Utter trash, but imaginative enough to hold your disbelief, this festive freak out closes out the franchise in suitably confounding style, but surely the real Christmas miracle is how the franchise made it though five whole movies.
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