Kyana Teresa

(On Cable TV, July 2021) One of the differences between a successful film and one that doesn’t meet its objectives is unity of tone, or rather the ability to make it look as if something produced over multiple months involving a crew of hundreds can carry a singular, unified creative vision. Most films that make it to a wide audience manage the trick, although not all of them so successfully. And then there’s Toys of Terror, which stumbles on its own blend of tones, makes baffling creative decisions and never quite manages to get out of the humdrum goals it sets for itself. The discomfort starts early on, with a very conventional opening that has us stuck with a reassembled family as they head to an isolated manor for Christmas, grumbling all the way. We eventually understand that the manor is the family’s Hail Mary shot at a payoff as long as they can flip the ramshackle mansion into something worth selling. Alas, there’s a rather vexing obstacle in the form of evil toys lurking in the house, eventually wreaking all kinds of havoc. It’s not a promising premise, and director Nicholas Verso’s execution is lacking in many ways — first with made-for-TV dialogue and characters, then with tepid pacing. I like Kyana Teresa and Verity Marks, for instance, but they don’t have much to play with (so to speak). But Toys of Terror gets much, much worse once the toys make their introduction, because they’re portrayed in what looks like stop-motion animation, which only reinforces the unreality of the execution, constantly punching holes in the film’s already-tattered ability to suspend our disbelief. But the nail in the coffin is a script that doesn’t quite figure out whether it wants to be a horror film or a comedy — the horror is tepid (the family even survives, although the film’s classicism is shown in how the hired help doesn’t) but the humour is even less effective. The film is billed as “comedy” in the TV guide, which is a misrepresentation bordering on lies. Unfortunately, it’s hard to call it a horror film either — Toys of Terror simply doesn’t work, no matter which side of the aisle it plays. It’s actually rarer than we think to see a film like this screw up so completely at such a basic level — it’s almost interesting to see it happen.