The Toybox

This is my first review. I felt it necessary to warn people of just how f***ing god awful this piece of trash is! I watched it cuz of the positive reviews, guess we were watching different flicks... I love horror movies and enjoy British entertainment but this was sooo far from the realm of achieving any entertainment value whatsoever!!! This felt like a horrible film student flick with no sense of keeping a story together at all. The camera work was good as others have mentioned, but i don't care how clean it looks if the story makes less than no sense. Save yourself 80 mins and keep looking...

TRUST ME

I didn't want to see this at first - my friend described it as a British low budget horror, which was a right turn-off.

But I was pleasantly surprised - whereas most horror/slasher movies don't care about subtleties and characterisation, this was at the heart of what the Toybox set out to do. This film isn't your bog standard slasher, you need to pay attention and concentrate.

There was a fair amount of laughter in the theatre at the start of the film. But before anyone got too cosy, things starting turning nasty and weird and the audience weren't sure whether they should be laughing. This is was when the film got really interesting.

The acting was exceptional - but special mention should go to Suzanne Bertish and Heather Chisen who turned in marvellous performances. Also the photography was impressive, it certainly was a lavish production and didn't look low budget.

There have been a lot of British horror movies coming on the scene lately. Do we have a movement in British horror going on? I hope so. And certainly The Toybox is among the best of the present bunch.

This film played at the Rex in Berhampstead a marvellous recently renovated art deco cinema and it turned out to be a fab Sunday night out. Although I think the Q&A session afterwards was a bit of an own goal. These things are always rubbish, just a load of half-jokes and sycophantic laughter.

Wow. So my boyfriend and I went to the movie store to rent a film. I like dumb horror movies, so I browsed the variety of terrible films they had to offer while he went off in search of Michael Moore's 'Sicko'. So then I found the worst of all of them (as I would soon find out). It looked good on the cover and the description on the back seemed decent enough. The fact that there was an IMDb quote on it as a review was proof that it would be bad in a good way. So the next night, we put it in the DVD player and from the first five minutes, we were so incredibly confused.

The movie is utterly incoherent, with badly placed time-jumps from past to future that leave you asking a major 'WTF?' The plot has no sort of coherent story -- other than the vague allusion to a local myth about a murder, but this only actually comes into play in the movie in the last twenty minutes of it. So pretty much for the first hour you have this: random, confusing time jumps; incoherent plot; parents who don't age; bad acting; bad dialogue; a boy who magically changes hair colour; and a host of obnoxious characters for you to get bored with!

The movie moves so slow that it's a chore to actually sit there and watch. I'd rather be scrubbing the toilets, honestly. Don't bother with it.

I really wanted to like this movie, because it is refreshingly different from the hordes of everyday horror movie clones, and I appreciate that the filmmakers are trying for something original. Unfortunately, the plot just didn't hold together and none of the characters were likable enough for me to really care about them or their fates.

Visually, The Toybox was pretty interesting. The director took a lot of somewhat risky moves, like adding in little bits of (Flash-looking) animation in parts and really cheesing up some of the special effects (such as the light from a certain amulet). Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't, but he deserves kudos for the attempt, and the cinematography was generally of high quality.

Unfortunately, when this same approach of throwing lots of things at the wall to see what sticks was applied to the plot, the results were not very good. The film never really finds a tone that it likes, moving schizophrenically from black comedy to family soap opera to 80's witchcraft flick to childhood nostalgia to embattled-family slasher. Taken on their own, bits and pieces of each of these elements work fairly well, but nothing ever coheres into a satisfying whole. Besides that, large bits of the plot are never really explained. I'm not one who likes to have everything spoon-fed to me, and I like movies that leave things up to the audience to decide, but the parts that are left out from The Toybox just seem like they either ran out of money before they could explain them or they didn't really think things through to begin with.

I look forward to the director's next project, since I think there is a lot of talent lurking under the surface here, but I can't really recommend The Toybox on its own merits.

The Toybox was a really good watch. It bought together visual tastiness with a juicy narrative and, at the risk of this sounding like a junior cookbook recipe, created a creamy dose of well needed British horror.

I especially like the inclusion of animations withing the film. It helped to create a certain tone that was held throughout.

There are some random moments like unexpected clowns appearing from nowhere but this helps to control the films unique identity by leaving some questions unanswered.

The movie includes some quality acting from the likes of Suzanne Bertish and although not all of the other actors could keep up this pace none created a noticeable let down for me.

I can definitely recommend this for a decent watch