Review #290: Terror Toons 4 (2022)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #7 - Terror Toons 4 (2022)

(Unfortunately this one is also unavailable to watch anywhere that I could find. If anyone finds a way to stream this, please let me know!)

I'll be perfectly honest: I went into this with VERY low expectations. I won't say that it was good, but I enjoyed myself... for parts of it, anyway. Some parts of this movie were garbage, some parts were genuinely surprising and creepy, and some parts had no business being in this movie at all. Buckle up.

The trailer for this movie brings it front-and-center that this is going to be another anthology (like the third movie seemingly tried to be), rather than one single story. However, the trailer says it's four stories, which feels misleading because there's five distinct named segments (one of which was its own movie from 2018 that just got shoved into the middle of this one?). I considered going through them out-of-order since most of them are forgettable garbage but there's a twist at the end that kind of ties it together so I'll stick with the order presented. There will be some spoilers in here, so if you (for some reason) planned on watching this movie, maybe skip to the end.

The very first segment is titled "Attack of the Killer Bees". I honestly think they either forgot about this one or it was added at the very last possible moment, because it gets its own credit sequence at the start of the film and is entirely absent from the credits at the end. It's a 99.9% CGI animation of some astronauts finding a giant beehive in space, which then sends bees to Earth and they kill everyone. It was not enjoyable in the slightest and really made me dread what was coming next. If you skipped this entire segment (like the rest of the movie apparently did, it's only like five minutes long so it's easy to do) you wouldn't miss out on anything of value.

The next segment is called "Dr. Carnage: Origins" which might lead you to believe that this is an origin story for Dr. Carnage. (It isn't, because it clearly takes place after the first movie and the villain has a completely different design than Dr. Carnage.) Instead, we start off following a social worker named Melissa who has a terrible nightmare where Fake Dr. Carnage is terrorizing her in a weird facility, so she runs back to bed and wakes up from the nightmare. She goes to visit the house of a child that has been acting up at school, but while the kid's dad is out of the room she realizes the child isn't a child at all, but rather some sort of a mannequin- and the house isn't a house at all, it's some kind of a weird facility. Melissa meets some people (and monsters) trying to escape, we see the kid's dad is actually a mad scientist who creates an ape-headed assassin and then gets transformed into Fake Dr. Carnage, she finds her mom (?) strapped to a table and it's implied this is all happening because Melissa watched the Terror Toons DVD. Melissa wounds Fake Dr. Carnage and runs away, soon finding her bedroom- at which point she runs back to bed and wakes up from the nightmare. Except maybe she's still in the nightmare, and maybe she's just a toy being played with by some kid. Who knows? Not me.

This segment was actually genuinely pretty good. The bit at the start where she finds out the kid is a mannequin was legitimately creepy, and although the rest of it was all a bunch of nonsense, I was shocked at how little CGI was used. Most of the scenes took place on an actual set (a sparse and cheap set, but a set nonetheless) and most of the action was practical. This was the exact opposite of what I expected after the Killer Bees segment- and although I wouldn't call it good as a whole, it was leagues better than anything that happened in Terror Toons 3.

The next one is called "Personal Demons", and it follows a washed-up actress getting out of rehab who moves into her late aunt's haunted mansion as she prepares for a role. After reading some latin in the script she accidentally summons a demon, who tries to tempt her with drugs and alcohol- until she figures out how to take control of the demon and use its power for her own gain. 

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this segment; on one hand, it's really weird that it's part of Terror Toons 4 because it was a separate short film that already came out several years earlier (though, granted, most of the people who worked on it also worked on the rest of the Terror Toons series). I also disliked how, similar to Terror Toons 3, Personal Demons was entirely shot in front of a green screen, with only the bare minimum of props and everything else added in using cheap CGI. But here's the thing: while this approach is undeniably lazier and cheaper than actually shooting on an actual set with actual props, I'm not trying to say that it's inherently or intrinsically bad. (Terror Toons 3 would not have been anything I would call "good" if it was shot on an actual set.) I just think it encourages laziness and cheapness in other areas, which IS bad. Terror Toons 3 was a whole bunch of nonsense from beginning to end for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that I doubt anybody (the actors, the director, even the editor) knew what anybody was doing in any given scene at any given time, because it was all going to be added in later. Personal Demons doesn't have this particular issue- I can tell a lot of work went into the writing and even the continuity while they were filming. In fact, even though I am hesitant to say I liked this segment, I am genuinely impressed that this short film was able to accomplish everything it did with such a small cast and crew. I do look forward to a day when people are able to make projects like this on a shoestring budget and with basically just one or two people and a green screen in their garage, but I think that day is still a ways off even though so many people are still trying to make it happen today. In short, I think this segment was punching a bit above its weight but I appreciate the effort.

The next segment was called "The Hands of Mr. Switch" and was another whole lotta nonsense. This one follows a group of dudes on Halloween night who go out into the woods to have sex with a blow-up doll (except the blow-up doll is inexplicably a sentient human woman, played by the porn actress from the first movie). None of them are able or willing to perform, so instead they each wander off into the woods, where a dude wrapped in chains with interchangeable heads kills them all. The segment is only a few minutes long but it gets less and less coherent as it goes on, and then it just abruptly ends with no resolution whatsoever. This segment was pretty bad and pretty forgettable.

And the final segment is called "The Clucking". It's very short, and consists of some people on some kind of a dance competition show while Dr. Carnage sneaks around and poops out eggs, which then hatch into chickens that kill everybody. That might sound interesting but it's 90% CGI and none of it makes any sense so no, it's not interesting. The only good part about it is the very very very end, right when the world is getting destroyed by giant eggs and giant kaiju chickens, when Melissa (from the earlier segment) wakes up in her bed yet again, with the Terror Toons Live DVD menu playing on her TV. It took me by complete surprise and almost (almost) made the segment worthwhile.

So that's pretty much all of my thoughts. This movie is generally pretty bad, but parts of it were actually something you could follow. I feel like an idiot saying this, but I wish Joe Castro would go back to making the kind of movies he made with Terror Toons 1 & 2, because once he got access to cheap CGI it's like he doesn't really care what makes it onto the screen, as long as he's able to pump out 70 minutes' worth of computer-generated carnage. I think this series peaked with its first entry, plateaued with its second, and we're just now trying to claw our way out of the pit that the third left us in. Supposedly there's plans for a fifth, so time will tell whether the fourth left us on stable ground or if we're about to dive back down to the bottom.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Mouthfuls of Sulfur-scented Oil

Nostalgic Rating: 4/10 Candy Corn Heads

Free Trial: Something VERY weird happened on my copy, which might lead to me demanding a refund. Terror Toons 1-4 are not streaming anywhere online that I could find (I had ahem acquired a copy of 1 & 2 a while back, which I hopefully have been able to upload to YouTube for followers of this blog to watch), and the only way I was able to watch the third or fourth movie was to buy the Blu-Ray boxed set on their website for over a hundred dollars. At one point during the Mr. Switch segment, a scene transition was replaced with a big pop-up that announced that the editor was using an unlicensed copy of Magic Bullet Suite (their editing software), and they were encouraged to use the Maxon App to purchase the full version. I am utterly baffled as to how this product made it to a public release without anybody noticing and fixing this glaring problem, and considering how it's impossible to watch any other way, I can only imagine EVERY copy that is currently purchasable has this problem.