OMGJeremy

Movie Review: Terror Toons

Hi everyone. I was going to write about the new Nightmare on Elm Street movie, but then I actually went and saw it. It’s actually not that bad. Don’t get excited, it’s in no way even close to as good as the original, but it’s still better than 4-6 and New Nightmare, which is really not much of a feat to accomplish. Basically, other than that it’s weird to see someone else as Freddy, it’s not a bad way to spend an evening. I’d say it’s better than the Friday the 13th remake, if that matters to any of you. Either way, it would make a shitty article since I have only trailers to get good screencaps and since I don’t want to ruin the movie quite yet.

Instead, I present a movie that makes the new Nightmare look… well, like the original Nightmare. Better than the original Nightmare actually – it makes the new Nightmare on Elm Street look like Citizen Kane. I present to you Terror Toons, which is another movie (like Monsturd, also reviewed here) that I rented entirely because of the packaging. It had a good number of signs that this movie would be amazingly bad. First off, the tagline is “Animated to KILL!”, which showed some promise. And the costumes shown on the front of the box were terrible. That meant that either these were the best costumes in the movie, or that the ones in the movie would be even worse. There was no other proof needed. I rented it, then went home to eat a whole pizza, watch this celluloid turd, and then cry myself to sleep..

So what exactly is Terror Toons about? Basically, it’s Itchy and Scratchy from the Simpsons (or early Tom and Jerry if you are even older than me) in the real world. A pair of cartoon characters, Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin, somehow come to life, and begin to kill people in cartoony goofy ways. I can see why they made this – it allows them to show off some interesting death scenes without having to worry too much about plot. However, since thousands of other movies do the same thing and do it better, this movie instead is a great example of how to waste $2,300. Yeah, that’s how much this turd cost to make, and since Blockbuster picked this movie up to rent, I’m sure the people at Brain Damage Films made loads on this… which is good for them, but probably bad for cinema as a whole.

"Welcome Gore-Hounds!"

This asshat is Scott Leff, I think. They don’t give his name, but since it’s produced and directed by Scott Leff, I’m going to say this is him. He gives us an introduction to Terror Toons, sort of like Alfred Hitchcock used to introduce his TV show, or Rod Serling introduced The Twilight Zone… except without any of the character or intelligence those people showed. Instead, Mr. Leff growls out his words and continuously reminds us we’re about to be thrilled. I think that Mr. Leff needs to watch his movie again… the only scary thing about this is that somehow Blockbuster is carrying it.

After the intro (and a completely unnecessary opening sequence), we get to start with what is unfortunately the best scene in the movie – a bathtub scene.

It all goes downhill from here...

This is Candy, and yes, we do get to see her tits. Ok… a few things I need to point out here. First off, starting your film with a pointless bathtub scene just to show me enough tits to keep me interested in your movie is a bad idea, unless you’re making porn or one of those late night Showtime “thrillers” that will undoubtedly have Beverly Lynne in the starring role. The second thing to point out is that for a change my screenshots somehow make this movie look better. Don’t be fooled – this movie actually looks like it was shot on a camcorder or maybe even those new cellphones that take pictures. The final thing to note is about Candy herself – she is definitely over 20 years old, maybe 19 at the youngest (and we get to see her tits so she has to be at least 18), yet her character is definitely supposed to be a young girl (we’re talking 13 or 14) or mentally challenged. Since I just touched myself while watching her bathe we’re going to say she’s retarded but most importantly 18. So I’m just going to hell, but not to jail.

Another thing to note is that even in a bath scene, this movie exudes a level of suck that should make any smart person stop watching this immediately. While she is bathing, Candy keeps singing “Rubber Ducky” – the song Ernie from Sesame Street used to sing… well sort of. If you’re going to have a person sing a version of something they’ll most likely know, you should at least make sure they know the words at all. Instead, we are treated to Candy singing “Rubber Ducky – you’re the one, Rubber Ducky – you’re mine all mine, Rubber Ducky, Rubber Ducky, Rubber Duckyyyyy…” eventually trailing off into just humming. This is perhaps the best cover of a song I’ve heard in months, except for that kid on American Idol who put “and the rockets red glare” into every line of the Star Spangled Banner.

So, after Candy dries off her well-endowed (yet retarded) self, she runs downstairs to see off her parents, who are going away for the evening, leaving Candy in the care of her sister, Cindy (who coincidentally is actually played by the aforementioned Beverly Lynne, who does not get naked in this movie but does in such fine films as “The Devil Wears Nada” and “Super Ninja Bikini Babes”) Wait… they named their kids Cindy and Candy? That’s fucking terrible, although not close to George Foreman naming all his kids George Foreman. The only rule the kids have is that they aren’t supposed to have any friends over at all, and the adults have left them to their own devices – which means Cindy calls over two guys at the advice of her semi-hot Asian friend (Amy), and Candy goes upstairs to watch a tape that mysteriously arrived in the mail– the titular Terror Toons.

Perhaps the worst costumes ever... and I'm including the Tellarites from Star Wars... and if you know what I'm talking about, welcome to Loser's Club.

This scene in itself explains perfectly what is wrong with this movie. First off, the costumes for Dr. Carnage (the green head), and Max Assassin (the purple monkey head) actually look less disgraceful than they really do. All I can figure is that my video capture box sucks so bad, that the suck of the costumes and the suck of my equipment cancel each other out. I guess to explain how bad these costumes are, they are just big plastic heads with googly-eyes. They have zero points of articulation, and so any sort of change they need is basically photoshopped in, probably frame by frame. See that girl’s head in the above pic? Notice that her eyes and mouth are drawn on over her actual face? All the effects are done like that, unless it involves blood, you can assume it’s criminally bad makeup. I can live with bad effects, but there are times when you shouldn’t do closeups– like anytime in this movie but that bathtub scene.

After the Terror Toon ends, Candy is left watching a black and white spinning spiral, and it makes her fall asleep. Meanwhile, downstairs Cindy’s friends Rick and Eddie show up to keep her and Amy company, and they’ve brought the staple of every bad party I’ve ever gone to: wine coolers. Here’s a tip– unless you are a girl or 14 (and if you’re both… wanna go out?), you don’t drink wine coolers. And as a rule, unless your party also includes free blowjobs and pizza, I’m not staying at a party with nothing but wine coolers. However, since there are two guys and two girls at this party, I’m sure it will degrade into a big blowjob festival, and so I’ll accept that this will be a party.

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, the group has a girls vs. boys argument about what they should do. The guys understandably want to play strip poker, but the girls want to play with the Ouija board. In case you’ve never seen one of these, they are supposedly able to channel spirits or something, but basically it’s a board with the alphabet (and sometimes words like “Yes”, “No”, or “Eat Cock, Fucko”) that also has some sort of triangle with a hole in the middle, and everyone puts their hand on it. Then, the “spirits” guide the triangle around the board, stopping occasionally at letters, and eventually it will answer a question you ask it. I’ve tried it before, and it’s lame. However, I can see how the girls would rather play that than strip poker. They argue for a few minutes until one of the guys comes up with a brilliant idea… Strip Ouija. It really is just as stupid as it sounds, and as an added disappointment– the only skin you see belongs to Rick or Eddie.

Meanwhile, back in Candy’s room, Candy blissfully sleeps while the spiraling image on the TV continue. Suddenly, two little specks appear in the screen, and get bigger until the images of Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin grow out into the room and out of the TV. There is no explanation to why this occurs, but that’s okay– we’ll find out why this occurs later… well, sort of. Candy hears a sound and wakes up, but before she can make a sound she is grabbed by Max Assassin and the Doctor begins a little bit of special surgery for Candy.

We'll always have that bath I watched you take...

He cuts her back open, and makes little slits on the side of her mouth, and turns her into a flesh puppet. Just about this time, one of Candy’s friends (some nameless guy) comes by to hang out alone in her room. Well, I can’t really blame him – after all, if a semi-retarded girl with huge tits wanted me to hang out in her room, I think I might be able to score too. When he gets upstairs, he finds Candy watching TV – but something is wrong… before he has a chance to figure it out, he is grabbed from behind by Max Assassin and his head is ripped off.

I didn’t include a picture of this death because frankly it sucked. Instead of an interesting bloody rip, his neck appears to be made of styrofoam, and so it snaps of relatively cleanly and completely uninterestingly. Oh well, it’s just supposed to be the warm up I suppose, so I suppose they were right in not blowing all their effects budget by this point.

Downstairs, the heated game of Strip Ouija is raging, and Eddie (one of the guys) is basically completely naked, except for his socks and a pair of boxers. However, as most people who have a “one wine cooler” party do, they get hungry, order a pizza, and put the game on hold – not seeing anyone’s boobs except for Eddie. This leads to death #3 in the movie – the pizza guy – which is almost as unimpressive as Candy’s boyfriend’s head-ripping was. The pizza guy is greeted to the door by Dr. Carnage – a huge man in a giant green mask. The pizza man is unfazed by this bizarre man, and hands over the pizza, and demands payment. Dr. Carnage then opens the pizza, eats the whole thing in one bite (by jamming this pizza into his face like Cookie Monster), and the pizza man again is unaware he’s not just dealing with a very hungry foreigner and again demands payment. This is obviously the stupidest pizzaman ever, so he is fully deserving of his lame death – being sliced to death by a giant pizza cutter – off-camera. That’s just pathetic.

Cindy and the others, however, are getting a little annoyed because their pizza is late. Amy (the Asian girl) tries to call the pizza place to complain, but she realizes the phones are dead. The group begins to panic, but then…

Dance Dance Murderlation?

That’s right, the cartoon killers begin dancing for them – for about 2 minutes. That doesn’t seem too long, but when you’re trying not to turn off a movie out of disgust two minutes is a lifetime. However, apparently their dance works – because the group is no longer scared or even worried about their past-due pizza. Instead the whole group just starts laughing (and badly faked I may add). Forget how stupid this whole idea is. Forget how stupid Cindy and her friends are for not being more concerned that two giant costumed things are now dancing in the living room. Forget that the acting we’ve seen makes most elementary school Christmas pageants look like Broadway material.  Forget all that because it’s about to get even worse.

Eddie (formerly the guy who we all got to see nearly naked) thinks this dance is funny. Really funny. So funny, that the others stop laughing to stare at him first in disgust, and then in horror as inexplicably he laughs so hard, he coughs up huge chunks of blood.

I'd rather have another off-camera death, because then I could pretend this made sense.

I’m going to move on and pretend that last scene made sense at all, because now Cindy, Amy, and Rick are now effectively scared of these two intruders, and this movie can get down to its business – killing people in horrible cartoon fashion. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen too often. The three remaining teens manage to run around in a panic and get separated, which would normally lead to dying alone in different corners of the house. Instead, Amy and Rick manage to get knocked out and captured by the Doc and Max Carnage, leaving Amy all alone in the house with a cartoon gun she got earlier.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that… well, I know why I didn’t, and you’ll see why too in a second. Earlier in the movie, when Candy was watching the mailed DVD that started this whole mess, there was a police officer character who tries to stop the Doc and Max from killing some random cartoon girl. However, the cop is on screen for 3 seconds until Max Assassin cleverly swaps the policeman’s nightstick for a stick of lit dynamite and blows the cop to bits. It was unremarkable then, so I didn’t bother writing about it. Later on, after Eddie laughs himself to death, the policeman comes out of the swirly television and finds Cindy and gives her a giant cartoon gun, telling her to shoot the two bad cartoon characters. That’s how she got the gun.

This is why I didn’t mention the cop before. After he gives Cindy the gun, we see the cop wandering through the kitchen and he finds a box of donuts. Since cops like donuts, he grabs a big jelly-filled donut and proceeds to scarf it down. However, the donut is inexplicably not filled with creme, but with a lit fucking stick of dynamite! Cop dies, and I turn off the movie for a few minutes to use the bathroom since this movie has made me so mad I could shit. After a half an hour or so, I began watching again, just in time to see Cindy herself get captured by Max Assassin. That cartoon gun, forget it too… she didn’t use it anyway.

I feel like the guy on the right.

We next see Cindy tied to a chair next to Rick who is still alive, at least clinically. See, Dr. Carnage took Rick to his dentists chair, and sawed through his head and removed his brain, making him a vegetable, but somehow still alive. This makes Rick now my idol, because if my brain was removed I wouldn’t know how shitty this movie is. So, what exactly does the Doc have planned for our heroine and her brainless friend?

Why, they put on a magic show!

Yes, a magic show.  How unimaginative. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I’ve watched a lot of cartoons. A lot. I think if the makers of this movie watched just one Road Runner / Wile E. Coyote cartoon, they’d have a minimum of 10 different and interesting ideas for killing people. Instead we’re treated to a tired half-assed trick like this next one. As seen in every other movie ever that involved an evil magic show (and trust me, there are a lot more of these than you’d expect), I present “Sawing a close friend in half.”

Even with my low expectations for this movie, I was disappointed here. Bonus points for using a magic box with "Magic Box" printed on it.

… and there is no catch, she just gets cut in half. Then, as an added bonus, Dr. Carnage opens the box and pulls out her intestines and begins playing with them and poorly drawn cartoon buzzards fly around the screen. Think I’m lying? Then you haven’t been paying attention to this review.

However, as horrible as this movie has been up to this point, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. After the less-than-stellar magic show ends, Cindy passes out and wakes up in Hell. You can tell she is in hell, because she is surrounded by poorly animated flames, and an old man with giant plastic horns in what appears to be a lawnchair. The lawnchair – OF SATAN! The devil explains his evil plan to Cindy, and it’s a plan so evil, so well thought out, that I’m sure Cobra Commander is kicking himself in the ass for not thinking of this himself. However, the Devil probably isn’t foolish enough to think he can trick the forces of good with a funhouse full of gas-balloons.

See the master of evil! See his lawnchair!

The Devil explains that he created Terror Toons to control the world by infiltrating the minds of the children through Saturday morning cartoons to make them an evil army that killed without remorse, earning the Devil more souls and more respect – which is what the Devil says he’s really after. Now, I can almost see that idea as not incredibly stupid, and if this movie was about an army of insane children killing adults with giant mallets I’d be fine with this explanation. However, the Devil’s explanation does not account for his cartoons coming out of the TV and killing everything in sight. The slaughtering of his fans is no way to gain an audience, just ask Great White (Haha, I told an unfunny slightly dated joke… as opposed to my usual Carter-administration jokes).

So why cartoons instead of porn or badly dubbed live-action import shows? Well, Cindy thought that was a good question too, and asked the Devil. His answer – because in the animated world you can be whatever you want to be! He then proves his point by making Dr. Carnage shrink and Max Assassin grow in a display of image stretching that is on par with my incredible MSPaint skills. However, this gives Cindy an idea… a wonderfully stupid idea. If in the Terror Toon world you can be anything you want, and she is in their world, she can become something that can definitely stop the Devil!

If I was the Devil, and this was what was sent to stop me, I'd be offended.

That’s right, Cindy decides to become a superhero to stop the Devil. Apparently, Cindy hasn’t read many comics, because her costume consists of pink tights with matching elbow-length gloves and tanktop, a black skirt and boots, a bad pink wig, and sparkly glasses… wait, is Cindy trying to defeat the Devil as Elton John? Even this lame old-man-in-a-five-dollar-chair doesn’t find this worth dealing with, and he laughs and vanishes. This makes the devil luckier than me, because I was still here watching this movie.

Now, as a superhero, Cindy has gained the ability to fly back to the real world through her TV, and then inexplicably is also able to find the DVD production plant where they make all the Terror Toons. While she is fiddling with the collection of wires, a toaster, and a few switches that they have somehow combined to create the DVD machine, Cindy is attacked from behind by Max Assassin and Dr. Carnage. Then, she kills them both in incredibly uninteresting ways! Dr. Carnage himself gets hit in the head with an axe (and trust me, it’s not even worth showing you a picture of). Max Assassin is taken care of when Cindy snaps his neck and then steps on his head, spilling his brains all over the ground. Sadly, this time I didn’t just get tired of writing… this movie ends so quickly at this point that it took longer to read that paragraph than the entire time used by the final battle.

A stupid ending to a stupid movie.

Now that Cindy has disposed of the cartoon killers, she smashes the DVD machine and we fade to white and the next day when Cindy and Candy’s parents come home to find all the kids dead, and Cindy is holding her sister’s lifeless body laughing. Well, maybe a few people died or went insane, but at least the Devil’s plans have been stopped. Then we see the kid next door go to the mailbox to find he’s received a free gift in the mail…

To be fair, if I received this piece of crap as a gift, I'd probably turn evil too.

Wow. I’d almost feel bad hating such a small production, since it’s obviously somebody’s dream to run their own horror movie company, but I went to their website. Besides a bunch more bad looking horror films, know what else Brain Damage Films sells? Faces of Death. Videos of people (supposedly) getting killed mixed in with horrible scenes of animals getting tortured and mutilated. So, I have no pity at all for this company, and so I can end this review conscience clear.