Terror Toons 3 (2015)

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Joe Castro and Steven J. Escobar

Cast: Herschell Gordon Lewis as Himself; Beverly Lynne as Cindy; Lizzy Borden as Candy; Lizet Garcia as Sheriff Hate; Jonah Nemetz as Red; Brashaad Mayweather as Bad Wolf

In 2002 director and practical effects designer Joe Castro made Terror Toons, an incredibly low budget slasher film about killer cartoon characters. Come 2007, Terror Toons 2 was pretty much a remake of the original, in which Satan (or Satan's son in that film) has decided to release deadly cartoon DVD compilations into the world. Terror Toons 2 was this premise with a larger cast, a significantly larger body count¹, but still a micro budget production which relied on computer effects and superimposition, ones obviously artificial. The only real change was that the sequel introduced a desire to take fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel in that film, and pervert them. It's a film that, even though I confess that the original Terror Toons wasn't my cup of tea, does feel like under the shadow of the prequel which was at least the first and distinct. Literally it's a remake in many ways but trying to boost off an idiosyncratic work in itself I had a strange nostalgia for.

Terror Toons 3 is something completely different.

I had some inkling of this - I was intrigued by the trailer in its hyper artificial computer effects drowned form - but I wasn't expecting something this unpredictable, grotesque and utterly bonkers. The detail to bear in mind, which isn't promoted in the trailer, is that under seventy minutes the film has an unconventional structure, that it beings with the recapping of footage from the original Terror Toons, before attempting to set the film the same day of the events from a film made thirteen years previously. It was a challenge when Halloween II (1981) followed Halloween (1978) just in Jamie Lee Curtis' hair, but this was a considerable risk here. Castro went as far as cast all the actors, who were already clearly adults playing teens back then, even if it means bringing them back to life. Since we were last with them, Beverly Lynne has been in a lot of softcore, whilst porn actress/director Lizzy Borden had ended up in jail between the films, due the an obscenity trial against the transgressive porn films she was directing into the 2000s, to which she was released in 2010 and back to projects including this film.

Ironically, it's not even worth bringing up whether they have noticeably aged or not, as Terror Toons 3 is barely about those characters baring a cameo. Instead the film is divided into two. The first piece are the reincarnated antagonists of the original film, Dr. Carnage and his killer monkey assistant, going on a bloodbath rampage in a hospital. The second piece has splatter film innovator and exploitation legend Herschell Gordon Lewis, in one of his last onscreen apperances before his 2016 passing, narrate a twist on fairy tales where Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf are two male friends being targeted by the Three Little Pigs, i.e. a corrupt trio of cops.

The fairy tale is the actual film as it takes up most of the length and, amusingly, Terror Toons 3 leaves on a "To Be Continued" with the Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin story, which is just a string of gore and perversion. The fairy tale itself has Red Riding and his homestead, a group of red hooded gang members and a grandmother played by an old man, eventually getting into a brawl with the evil cops. I will get to the aesthetic of the film later on, but suffice to say it's a fascinating and perverse experience, absolutely not for anyone but one I found actually unique even if I felt dirty afterwards. Castro has an eccentricity which clearly grew over a decade, playing to both a desire for misanthropic humour and grotesque splatter, less torture porn now like the first Terror Toons but overt lunacy here, in which eventually not even cannibalising bodies to hide the evidence will work as they all collect together into an Eldritch blood blob monstrosity of CGI. Even the world of this fairy tale looks like a horrifying video game downloaded off the deep web, clearly aware that it doesn't look realistic in the slightest, and making the viewer want to feel queasy with distorting actors or a world of giant creepy teddy bears on the side of streets.

Terror Toons 3 as a result is significantly weirder than any before, here a film that is frankly grimy as Castro fully embraced superimposed sets and deliberately fake inserts and distortions over time after dabbling with them for the first two films. I originally referenced the Black Hole Sun music video for Soundgarden for the original Terror Toons, but now I can legitimately make a comparison to *Corpus Callosum (2002) and make it stick, a sadly difficult to see film by Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow. *Corpus Callosum was a series of vignettes, set around mostly an office, where Snow deliberately used fake and cheaper looking computer effects to mutate and distort the human body, open to crude jokes such as an ever growing giant cock.

This exactly applies to Terror Toons 3 but even more rancid and nasty on purpose, not as despairingly nihilistic as The Summer of the Massacre (2012) thankfully, but the tone finally out of the trilogy fitting the darker streak Castro has with his splatter. Also aptly there's giant cock here too, giant werewolf cock as among the many things that will boogle the mind as it manages to come up with ideas even I had to have a double take on and admire in its sick originality. The Red Riding Hood story is proud of this, alongside also a clear camp edge belied that Lewis, who even here is a charismatic man who could wax lyrically about good business practice, was hired like a macabre horror show host holding a homemade evil looking text, or the cops (including a strict female leader) not just eat doughnuts when we first meet them, but have them cut in half and filled with chilli and cheese. There's another drag actor following on from a reoccurring trend in Castro's work, here playing a female Robocop, and probably the most overt homoeroticism I have encountered so far as, whilst there is some female nudity and a woman inflated into a giant skyscraper sized breast, here's a lot of topless manflesh and werewolf cock, the fake exaggerated kind or real. This even includes an actor superimposed humping a giant actress's leg in a moment so kinds of fucked up it has to be applauded even if it feels wrong to.

The story does get illogical - a random witch cameo near the end even gets a baffled reaction from the leads of the fairy tale segment - but it is a strangely compelling experience, the extremity of the aesthetic interspaced with practical effects. This applies as much to the other half, the massacre at the hospital which is really a series of CGI exaggerated set pieces with no conclusion, in which Dr. Carnage returns as a constantly reforming giant monstrosity, and the effects in the midst of the CGI tampering are spectacular, one in mind the creature inside Dr. Carnage's body making everything work whilst looking like a horrifying plus toy. That example is among the many that show Castro's work has jumped beyond what he was doing with the first two films, not dismissing the work he has probably done outside this trilogy since before the franchise, but that he's worked on it further in this context and world. Even the CGI, if you accept it, has an immensely surreal effect now, such as setting up a shot of a toy vehicle for a baby, only to have it later as a giant object ploughing through victims in a hospital corridor.

That it doesn't have an ending, baring carnage having taken place, does pose an issue as there never was a Terror Toons 4 in the 2010s. The fairy tale does end, with Herschell Gordon Lewis befittingly regretting trying to cook a pig's head, a final scene he'd have probably found great, but it's curious that Joe Castro clearly had plans to continue this series, like to pepper in more perverse fairy tales, only for that not to happen¹.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Perverse/Psychtronic/Weird

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

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1) Joe Castro really likes to up his ante in body count numbers, as Terror Toons 3 shows and that The Summer of the Massacre would break a Guinness World Record for the largest body count.

2) At the time of this review, in February 2020, it does list on IMDB that Terror Toons 4 & 5 are in post production, with Lizzy Borden's twitter account informing readers that number four is actually about to be released in a moment of synchronicity at the time this review will be up. I will leave this review with curiosity of if they are released and what to expect....