Review #287: Terror Toons (2002)
October 2024 Horror Origins Review #4 - Terror Toons (2002)
Here we are- the movie that started it all (according to me, anyway). And I'm covering it on my anniversary!
Back in 2005, my then-girlfriend Lisa and I were on a date, and decided to go to the Blockbuster down the street from my house (which later became a Honeybaked Ham store, and is now just a deli) to pick out a movie to watch. The topic of horror films came up, and both of us admitted that we gravitated toward the low-budget, "bad" films that you can laugh at to hide the fact that you're getting scared. So when we were walking down the aisles and I saw this one sitting on the shelf- I'd seen the DVD box plenty of times, and always wondered- it was a foregone conclusion. Fast forward an hour and fifteen minutes and we'd just finished the most ridiculous, low-budget schlock either of us had ever seen, and would see for a long time. That's the story of the first time we watched Terror Toons.
Terror Toons was (if I'm not mistaken) shot over a single weekend with a budget of around $3,000, and it SHOWS. It starts off with a sequence of "cartoons" (more on that in a bit), and then we're introduced to Candy, a girl who the movie seems to treat as a literal child but is played by an obvious porn actress (and her first scene is, of course, a nude scene). As her parents are leaving for the weekend, Candy gets a DVD in the mail alleging to have been sent by Satan, advertising a "new form of animation". Her (older?) sister Cindy, and Cindy's friend Amy, call up a couple guy friends for wine coolers and pizza and Candy watches the DVD in her room. Cindy and her friends play Strip Ouija Wegee while Candy is entranced by the "cartoons"; then a murderous doctor and his pet ape ("Doctor Carnage and Max Assassin") come out of the TV and kill her. Nobody actually gets naked during the Strip Wegee game, the pizza arrives but is eaten by Doctor Carnage, one of the friends laughs himself to death, another gets lobotomized, the other gets sawed in half during a magic show, and then Cindy, being the only remaining survivor, is taken to Hell where the devil monologues at her. Apparently in Hell you can give yourself superpowers, so Cindy gives herself superpowers (I'm not making that up, it's actually what happens) and kills the doctor and ape and goes to someone's garage where she destroys the machine making the evil DVDs. Cindy's parents come home to a house full of dead people and then the movie ends.
Let's talk about cartoons for a moment. I actually really like the idea of murderous cartoons coming to life and killing people- something like Roger Rabbit but horror would be AWESOME. But Roger Rabbit wasn't made on a budget of $3,000, you know? So the only "cartoons" this movie has are a small handful of clip art that alternates between two different frames to simulate movement. The entire rest of the "toons" portion of the film is human beings standing in front of a green screen and some basic special effect editing used to move them around while bright colors flash in the background. Obviously actual animation is out the window when the budget for the movie is so low, but I feel like that should have been an indicator that maybe a movie about killer cartoons wasn't really a good idea. But at the same time, the actual effect of what we got on screen has a certain charm to it; it's clearly very low-budget and it looks bad nearly every time, but you do have to applaud the director (to some extent, maybe don't go too far) for trying something impossible and ending up with a unique (if not good) product.
Another good thing this movie has going for it is the practical effects and kills. Almost every kill in this movie is pretty clever, and in most cases have some impressive practical effects and gore, especially considering the shoestring budget. Even if I ultimately think the movie is terrible (spoilers, I do) you can tell that the creators had some really strong ideas and they were actually trying to make a good product out of those ideas. Even if they cast several porn actors in this movie, even if the house they shot it in looks like a porn set, even if they put a scene where characters put on extra clothes to avoid having to take off clothes, even if the dialogue and acting and lighting and plotting and sets and sound and props and costumes and continuity are ALL terrible, you can still get some fun out of watching a girl get her spine pulled out so her body can be used as a ventriloquist dummy and then watch her friend get his head seamlessly cut off with a pair of cartoon scissors. It kind of makes you wonder what this movie would have been like if they had a real movie budget (in which case, you should read tomorrow's review).
Terror Toons is awful. There's no disguising that. But you WILL have fun watching it, and if you're like me, it might be the first step in a long journey of horror.
Overall Rating: 4/10 Exploding Donuts
Nostalgic Rating: 8/10 Cartoon Guns that Never Get Fired
Favorite Character BY FAR: So, the characters in this movie are uniformly forgettable (even the ones that actually have lines) except one. Around the halfway mark of the movie, a cop from the cartoon world shows up searching for Doctor Carnage and Max Assassin. He's only in the movie for a couple minutes of total screen time, but he is without question the most memorable character in the entire movie because unlike all of the others, he actually has character traits. He's a caricature of a police officer from a children's show, but that's a heck of a lot more than I can say about literally anybody else in the entire picture. He tries to shield Cindy and Amy from seeing Candy's dead body, he gives them a weapon they can use if they get in trouble (which they don't use, of course), he has a mission and is determined to complete it, and- like the caricature he is- he's easily sidetracked by a box of donuts. It almost feels like he's a remnant of an older version of the script, or maybe a late addition from a different writer? He feels simultaneously out-of-place in this movie, and also exactly where he needs to be. This movie should have had MORE of this guy and characters like him, and fewer monologues where the devil threatens to give people arthritis instead of just killing them!
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