SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 5: THE TOY MAKER – You’ll have to forgive me for going off-season, but it’s been on my list for a while. SNDN has to be one of the strangest horror ‘franchises’. I’ve said this before, but there’s such an irresistible seam of weirdness that runs all the way from the sheer gall of ‘part2’ through to this, our final dollop of dark Santa zaniness. It was a relief to finally catch up with part five and find that it nailed and, in some ways, surpassed the quirkiness of its forebears. And yes, there are plenty of typical elements, the whole ‘lonely kid who no-one believes at the mercy of supernatural toys’ thing, flat characterisations, basically whatever you would expect from an early nineties genre knock-off that went straight to video, but there’s so much else besides. Its central conceit is based on Pinocchio, and the way it’s handled is baffling in its throwaway surrealism, something that only becomes apparent at the end when we see how Collodi’s much loved creation might be bent to fit the purposes of a shite B-movie that wants to reference ‘The Terminator’. Its ‘evil toy’ attacks are sometimes contrived in odd ways, including one where a sexed-up couple are ambushed by plastic soldiers before being mauled by a weird little cyclopsy-type thing on wheels, all of it inherently very silly, but somehow only grimness comes through; the scene lingers on the couple’s agony and desperation, whereas it might’ve been played for no more than giggles by that other bad toy monger, Charles Band. A level of herky-jerky narrative badness at least entertains in its dumbshow way (I’m always down for throwing in rampant coincidence for the sake of moving things forward when it’s done barefaced, and it definitely is here). As for lingering questions… so odd to see Mickey Rooney in it, but then again, he did file for bankruptcy around the time. Sometimes you can’t sum up why you like a film. I really like ‘The Toy Maker’, though. It’s possibly my fave of the lot, barring the original, which is difficult to top – I’ll be saving my re-visit for the happy season.
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