Review #289: Terror Toons 3 (2015)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #6 - Terror Toons 3 (2015)

(Unfortunately this one is not available to watch anywhere that I could find, nor was I able to rip it myself. If anyone finds a way to stream this, please let me know!)

Man. Where do I even begin talking about this? Just to make this a little clear: this movie is two completely unconnected stories, with one shoved in the middle of the other for some reason. I will try to start at the beginning.

Terror Toons 3 tries to pick up right where Terror Toons 1 ended. Since they apparently thought viewers might not have seen the first movie, it starts off by showing basically the entirety of the first movie (they don't show all 74 minutes of it, but they show clips from literally every scene to clue you in on every single plot point- as if any of it is going to matter). We then get a loooooong POV shot of an ambulance arriving at Cindy's house right as the first movie is ending (complete with archive footage of the mom character "visible through the window"). We then get taken to a hospital, where the paramedics have brought every body part of every dead character including Doctor Carnage and Max Assassin (and apparently they try resuscitating them, despite Doctor Carnage having his head cut in half). Cindy shows up still as a superhero, finds a magic wand (?) and starts magically resurrecting everyone that died in the first movie (except Rick and the pizza guy I guess). They then leave the hospital (and the movie). Meanwhile, Doctor Carnage and Max Assassin sort of come back to life (?) and they start doing cartoon shenanigans to kill people around the hospital. Even though that's basically the entire plot of that story, the movie takes an intermission and starts telling a completely different story for the next half hour.

The next segment is itself also kind of a story-within-a-story (as if this wasn't confusing enough) where horror director Herschell Gordon Lewis reads a fairy tale to the camera about the Three Little Pigs. Except it's also Little Red Riding Hood, and also neither of those. The "pigs" are cops (real clever, huh) and they start hassling a gang member named Red and his buddy Wolf. (Also, despite Herschell Gordon Lewis making a joke about how the three pigs aren't little, for some reason most of the scenes show the characters as being tiny, driving around toy-sized cars. But sometimes they're normal-sized. Because why not.) Wolf dies but comes back for some reason, the "pig" cops show up at the gang hideout and then get attacked by some other cops for some reason, then some cannibal magic happens and Red & Wolf get washed out to the forest by a river of blood and a witch shows up to kill an eldritch abomination but then Red & Wolf end up in a building where a bigger wolf guy tears their clothes off... and then that story ends, after an intermission-within-an-intermission-within-a-story where Herschell Gordon Lewis roasts a pig in his oven but then gets killed.

Back in the hospital (as if there was more story to tell) everyone gets killed. The most noteworthy part of this final segment involves a woman getting a breast augmentation- Doctor Carnage shows up and attaches a hose to her boob, it starts inflating, and then it keeps getting bigger and bigger until it's so big it crushes the hospital. And then the movie is over.

This movie is an absolute mess. There is simply no other way to put it. The story (stories?) is nonsense from beginning to end, which shockingly was not something that could be said about the two previous films. As bad as those were, at least they had something resembling plot structure- yes much of their runtime was "This person wanders off and dies. This person gets killed by cartoon shenanigans. This person does something stupid" but in Terror Toons 3, there is no plot structure. Every scene is "This happens. Then this other thing happens. Then this other thing happens. Then it's over." Nothing is connected, nothing has a purpose, nothing makes any sense from moment to moment. This is all compounded by the fact that this movie is absurdly CGI-heavy- to the point where for many, many shots of its runtime, I couldn't even tell what I was looking at, let alone why or how it was doing what it was doing.

Speaking of CGI, I am incredibly conflicted about its use here. When covering the last two movies I proposed the idea that maybe the director was leaning into the bad animation and the fact that its "cartoons" were anything but, because he had to take it in a different direction for budgetary reasons but still wanted to use a particular vibe or aesthetic. Here, they've completely cast aside any pretense of using drawn animation, instead replacing it 110% with dark, grimy CGI- to the point where virtually every scene was just shot in front of a green screen so they could replace all backgrounds and props with CGI. Nothing that happens has any weight or consistency or logic, because instead of having Doctor Carnage throw a physical buzzsaw to cut a fake head in half, we just see a CGI buzzsaw slice a CGI head in half. Things happen with no rhyme or reason, no sense of scale, and no coherence whatsoever. It's awful every second of the way.

But, like I said, I'm conflicted. I'm conflicted because when trying to figure out how to describe how bad the CGI makes every scene look, the only words that I could come up with were "it makes everything look and feel like a cartoon". Which.... I feel sick to my stomach saying this, but I think that was the director's intention. And if that's the case, then he succeeded with flying colors. And that pisses me off.

Seriously, this movie is terrible. It is awful. It actively punishes you for trying to pay attention to it.

But I kind of think that's the point.

Don't watch this movie. Or do, I don't care. I'm not a pig.

Overall Rating: 1/10 Homicidal Red Blood Cells

Nostalgic Rating: 2/10 Giant Boobs that Roll Around and Kill Everyone

My Viewing Experience: There wasn't a good place for this up above, but I first found out they made a third Terror Toons movie right around the time of the COVID-19 lockdown. I re-watched the first two by myself (at the time, all three were just up on YouTube) and got Lisa to watch the third with me. While we ruminated over how terrible this movie was, we went out for a nighttime drive listening to a podcast that covered it and then let our dog run around a nearby playground in the dark. It was one of the first times we had gone outside since everything locked down, and as such, I have unreasonably happy memories attached to this awful, awful movie.