Terror Toons (2002)

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Rudy Balli, Joe Castro, Steven J. Escobar and Mark Villalobos

Cast: Beverly Lynne as Cindy; Lizzy Borden as Candy; Brandon Ellison as Rick; Kaycee as Amy; Fernando Padilla as Eddie; Jack Roberts as The Devil; Gil Chase as The Father; Shimmy Maxx as The Mother; Fernando Gasca as Tommy; Alexi Bustamante as the Pizza Boy; Brendon John Kelly as The Cartoon Cop; Scott Barrows as Max Assassin; Matt Falletta as Dr. Carnage

Delving into more horror franchises, the ones which really fascinate me are those that are under the radar, straight to video titles that continued, or sequels to films like Xtro (1982) [Covered HERE] that you'd never expect to exist after the original and went off course. And then there are the micro- and no- budget films, where even outside of franchises it's surprising how directors can churn out so much outside of the glare of a giant studio, and make and make on insanely low budgets. A figure like Bill Zebub, a guy notorious for titling films like Antfarm Dickhole (2011)¹ and whose been making films since 2002, can have a fanbase and be prolific with limited resources not a disadvantage. These directors do cause you to consider whether watching all of their films would lead to them having auteur obsessions.

Then there's the franchises themselves which just continue on and on in this realm, like the slasher series Camp Blood from Brad Sykes, or today's subject from special effects creator and director Joe Castro, whose background is working on a lot of low budget films for micro-budget and small budget stewards like Todd Sheets, and Bruce LaBruce's controversial zombie porn film L.A. Zombie (2010) too, in that time also being a director himself. His most well known, and the topic for the opening introduction, is the Terror Toons trilogy which started in 2002, all about killer cartoon characters terrorising people. For the first film, Satan has decided to create the titular Terror Toons, animation on DVD when they were still a new trend, to be sent out to corrupt human beings or just having two figures stalking a group of young adults (acting as teenagers) in an era where micro-budget cinema transferred to digital camera and into the 2000s. The Toons are a mad doctor Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin, a purple gorilla created as a result of Carnage experimenting on a monkey, terrorising our leads in a small house set.

Already mentioned is the time the film was made in. Even if it's common for the previous decade to bleed over the next, as someone who was growing up as a teenager in the early 2000s that period for me had its own idiosyncrasies especially due to technology suddenly changing, and there is a huge change in mood to films like this as they switched from celluloid film and videotapes to digital. Notably as well, Terror Toons is made with a lot of green screen and low budget digital effects, all to depict cartoon physics including using fake tongues licking prop lollies and distorted eyes. The later in fact evokes the music video of Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun; for anyone who didn't see the video in the nineties originally, or saw it on Kerrang TV in the 2000s as I did, the video mainly surrounded idealised American suburbia with crudely (deliberately) distorted eyes and faces on the figures for creepy effect. The result in Terror Toons, especially the green screen, is an awkward result but it does give the film a weird edge above some films of a similar ilk. There is a lot to admire in trying to make a film at any budget, and I personally have always found the aesthetics of any decade, even if they have become obsolete, compelling and growing an aura as time passes.

Terror Toons also to its credit is better put together than most. There are practical effects, Castro really liking his disgusting and realistic guts, and they built around actual Terror Toon costumes and giant exaggerated props like axes and guns for the material. I also have to praise composer J.M. Logan, which is more surprising as he has barely worked as a composer but is actually more prolific as a production manager and part of the makeup department on productions. Working with what resources were available, the main theme alone is pitch perfect, good enough for any budget film and clearly indebted to Danny Elfman, a carnival music/Looney Tunes crossover for the ghoulish.

Cast wise, they act as hard as they can, in a film where there's not a lot to do barring a sequence of strip Ouija Board, trying to top the absurdity of Strip Monopoly from the original 1980 Friday the 13th film. Beverly Lynne interestingly, as the lead, would go on to a lot of softcore. Lizzy Borden as her younger sister deserves a paragraph. Alongside casting a drag queen Shimmy Maxx as their mother, she and the father the most rewarding figures for how funny they are, Borden adds an idiosyncratic touch as she looks like a stereotypical porn star, which she was, with what can only be politely described as very pronounced aspects likely to have been silicon enhanced, first introduced starting a song from Sesame Street in a bath before avoiding copyrighted material, bubbles stacked on top of a height they are on when she stands up. Borden, not to be confused with the obscurer glam metal band or the real life accused axe murderer, is clearly meant to be playing a young girl, at least up to the age of ten or eleven, which makes casting a well endowed porn star acting very childlike very weird.

Borden herself is also fascinating as, formerly married to porn filmmaker/radio host/wrestling promoter Rob Zicari, she is infamous for when she herself started directing porn films, pushing extremity and transgression, especially when it came to simulated non consensual sex, until she and Zixari were eventually put into jail for obscenity for a year and one day in 2009. She is a fascinating figure for how gender rarely is brought up in terms of transgression in artistic craft, though I'm never ever going to watch any of those films, and how a rare example like Borden complicates this even if she is a rarity. Back to the film itself, her role is admittedly slight, but this is the only film I could really bring this subject up in, so it was worth the paragraph.

As for Terror Toons itself in general? It isn't my thing, which is odd because it's clearly indebted to Herschell Gordon Lewis, the inventor of the "splatter" which was just an excuse for him to have scenes of gore with a minimal amount of plot, someone who'd eventually in one of his last involvements in cinema before his 2016 death have an onscreen role in Terror Toons 3 (2016) as a narrator. Lewis however, until his few seventies films like The Gore-Gore Girls (1972) got more sick humoured and scuzzier, had his tongue in his cheek, who never considered film an art form and just for profit, but enjoyed his work². Even without the sixties aesthetic of Middle America, Lewis had a good black sense of humour, whilst Terror Toons feels meaner and cruel.

Terror Toons feels considerably nastier - for one character getting his exposed brain tickled with a feather, others like a woman being sawn in half are prolonged with lingering shots of those aforementioned realistic guts being there. The result actually feels like a prototype for a "Torture Porn" film, which Joe Castro might be offended in the comparison of, but is felt as films like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) would come only a few years later with lurid scene fixated on torture and people screaming in agony, but on higher budgets. Aside from this, there's only intermitted some cartoon physics at play too, a lot of the violence closer to usually splatter and only referencing cartoons or with the killers dancing to the point someone laughs to death. (A cartoon cop, who follows the villains, is only briefly lingered upon and is only there for a dynamite in a box of doughnuts joke). The result is simply not to my taste as mentioned - the later films do start referencing fairytales, which is of interest, but Terror Toons 2 (2007) does pretty much follow this initial formula fully but with a larger body count.

I will admit to end this paragraph that, when I first saw the film over more than ten years ago (as it did get a UK DVD), I switched the film off halfway through, only to only finish it later on that day as part of a growing need to be a completionist and not be half-arsed with my activities. I have softened to Terror Toons since then, but my taste in these no-budget films gravitates more to the esoteric and idiosyncratic. Blood and splatter is a popular thing for people still, which they are more than happy to have, but I've lost the interest for it by itself considerably. Its neither to blame on a director like Joe Castro, still charging ahead with films into the 2010s as a director like a bold micro-director should, but something that you the reader should apply to horror cinema for myself altogether as it has lost its lustre in terms of something to hoot and holler for.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Wacky

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) That was one of the least offensive titles he's created, trust me. I think when your tweet on Twitter on 19th January 2020 that "I want to fill my intestines with helium so that when I fart, it will be in a high-pitched and cute manner,", you really couldn't give a frog's fat arse if you offend people, and that's still mild and even charming when you hear of what some of the films are titles, let alone that he's clearly someone who likes to make un-PC films on purpose.

2) In the same year as Terror Toons, Lewis himself made Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat (2002), a film he had talked of not really being his, but very different from this one. It has some nasty effects, actually worked on by Joe Castro himself and impressive to witness, but the result is a bizarre mass of jokes and surreal tangents, including filmmaker John Waters in a cameo as a Catholic priest, which is tonally more light hearted and absurd on purpose.