On 12 April 2021, I watched the Robin Williams movie Toys on the Sony Movies TV channel. This is a movie from which I'd often seen clips, but I'd never previously viewed it in its entirety.
Directed and co-written by Barry Levinson, and released by 20th Century Fox in 1992, Toys is a seriously strange, Willy Wonka-ish film set predominantly inside a technicolor toy factory whose rightful heir, Leslie Zevo (played by Williams), has been usurped by his uncle, Leland (a manic Michael Gambon), albeit with the blessing of Leslie's dying father, Kenneth (a delightful cameo from veteran Hollywood star Donald O'Connor, no less). This is because Kenneth reluctantly concedes that Leslie is too childlike and unworldly to be able to assume responsibility for running the factory (despite living and working there his entire life). He got that right.
Leslie is a total man-child addicted to silly pranks and jokes that this movie's audience is presumably expected to find humorous and whimsical (the latter word actually being voiced on several occasions by various of its characters), but which at least for me wore very thin very quickly. Uncle Leland isn't any better either, a failed military man but still an unabashed warmonger who sees the toy factory as an ideal base where he can create miniature weapons of war and recruit unsuspecting children to operate them. He secretly achieves this by using a newly-opened school inside the factory as a front for training children by encouraging them to play arcade video games that are actually genuine war games using genuine artillery.
Add to this Leslie's sweet but decidedly odd sister Alsatia (Joan Cusack), whom it doesn't take a genius to figure out very quickly is actually an android, plus Leslie's ditzy girlfriend Gwen Tyler (Robin Wright), and also rapper/actor LL Cool J as Leland's son Patrick, a covert intelligence man with the military who is hired by Leland to beef up the toy factory's security, and the result is a multicoloured mishmash of a movie that is visually stunning but veers unpredictably from oddball comedy skits to some quite nasty attempts by Leland to slaughter not only Leslie, Alsatia, Gwen, and longstanding factory supervisor Owen but even his own son Patrick.
These latter scenes are played out in an often non-slapstick manner that I wouldn't have expected from what is ostensibly a juvenile, live-action cartoon elsewhere. Ditto for certain suggestive, sensual innuendos that Williams's character uncharacteristically utters, shattering for me the simple, innocent persona that Toys seeks to create for him. Indeed, when released in 1993 on VHS video in the UK, a sexual reference had to be deleted in order for the video to receive a PG rating.
In my opinion, Toys tries very hard to match or even outdo Roald Dahl in the creation of a candy-coated confection for children that has been dipped into a chilling cream with a biting after-taste. However, no-one does chilling children's fayre more effectively than Dahl, as this movie starkly confirms. Perhaps it would have been better instead for Toys to have dispensed with the darker, more adult aspects altogether (which caused it to receive a PG-13 rating in cinemas), and gone down the same route as more traditionally-wholesome entries in this particular movie sub-genre, such as Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, for instance. That is, by focusing its efforts exclusively upon generating the vibrant colours, imaginative inventiveness, scintillating magic, and overall child-friendly ambience that modern-day audiences have come to expect from innovative toy-dominated fantasy movies intended for family viewing.
Apparently Toys bombed at the box office, and for once I agree with the critics who almost as one derided and dismissed it. For me, the best things about this mad movie other than its sumptuous sets were two specially-written songs featured in it. One of these is the lovely Christmas ballad 'At The Closing of the Year', by Trevor Horn and Hans Zimmer, which is performed by Prince protegés Wendy & Lisa (click here to view on YouTube the gorgeous opening credits scene from Toys in which it appears). The other is the haunting, ever so slightly sinister song 'The Happy Worker', by Horn and Bruce Woolley, which is performed by Tori Amos (click here to view when signed into Facebook the scene from Toys in which it appears).
Adding further to this movie's nothing if not diverse content are songs performed by Thomas Dolby, Grace Jones, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and Enya, plus music by Tchaikovsky, and a number of visual references to the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte.
Also needing mention are the rare but exceedingly unusual outdoor scenes, featuring a verdant vista of grassy hills in every direction, intersected by immaculately cut roads wending through its manicured greenery. So otherworldy do these scenes appear that I naturally assumed that they were CGI - but later, to my great surprise, I discovered that they are real! In fact, these are the Palouse hills of southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho. The things that you learn from watching a movie!
If you'd like to view an official trailer for Toys to give you some idea of what to expect, please click here to view one on YouTube.
And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
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