Sick For Toys

 

Sick For Toys is a holiday/Christmas themed horror flick which consists of the characters Roy, Jason, Kate, Emelia and Edward. There are others that fill in some persona gaps too, but these five are the main hams in the oven. I really didn't know what I was going to receive as a gift from Sick For Toys when I decided that that was what I was going to watch this morning for a review-and to be honest, I was hoping it was going to be some kind of horror comedy type of flick because that's really what I was in the mood for this morning. I'll look harder next time. This film is basically the opposite of that and has no joy for the holiday spirit at all. This truly was being sick for toys, and it's a slow burn. The pace here was actually done really well as far as I was concerned and never felt like I was rushing to get to the endgame from it being a slog. I thought that the delivery of everything that took place in this flick felt right and the way it was supposed to happen, and as demented as a pair of siblings Emelia and Edward are, what they were involved in and their psychosis never swayed or made me feel like I was being drug (heh) through the mud. Our baseline for Sick For Toys is this-we have our main jock/jackass/narcissist in Jason who already has a girlfriend, but thinks like every other one of these kinds of assholes and tries to eat his pussy and have some on the side too. We only get to imagine this happening through our imaginations because of some later exposition, but he ends up being Emelia's newest "toy" because he ran into her at the local pharmacy and they started talking. One thing led another, and boom-his ass is drugged, tied up and starved in the siblings' basement for Emelia to play with. Which basically just means that she lays with him on the floor with his arms around her for a period of time and she rapes him while he lays there and isn't able to do anything to stop her. I guess karma's name for Jason is Emelia. While that business is happening, we get to focus on Roy who is Jason's best friend (and has a thing for his girlfriend Kate) and after a couple of crappy dates, meets up with her to talk to her about Jason being missing for a few days. She sort of just dismisses it because he said he was going to go on some "off the grid" trip or some nonsense. Roy ends up meeting Emelia because he found her number on a napkin and calls her a few times. They end up having a coffee date and she eventually ropes him into coming over to her and Edward's house. Even after she tells him everything about their parents dying and how they have been living in their house for decades now, Roy likes Emelia a lot and goes over there anyway. Things start getting really fucking weird while they are having Christmas dinner, and of course-I'm sure you guessed it by now-Edward put some shit into Roy's soup. I don't know if he roofied it or put acid in there or LSD or what, but you can slowly start experiencing with Roy that their voices keep going higher and lower, he keeps looking at the ham while Edward cuts it and it gets bigger and smaller. Everything is distorted to a degree, and then Emelia sort of guides Roy into the garage where Jason is to start doing the same shit to him that she's been doing to Jason the last few days. But even in the state that he's in, Roy starts figuring out who's in the room with him and finds his phone and everything and then Edward stabs his ass. This is when things start getting really gory and really messy. I won't go any further in case after all of that you'd want to watch Sick For Toys, but I will say this-ultimately, it's not a great film. There are a lot of great elements that make it a whole package, but this flick is the very definition of a purgatory film. I already know that I will never revisit this one ever again, and if you do ever track down Sick For Toys to give it a shot, you'll probably feel the same. I'm just going to say zits and zombies that if you're that sick for a toy, you could do a lot better-but you could also do much worse. I hope that you get a lot of cool toys and that you never become sick. Have a great Christmas. 

The Chill Factor

 

To finish off this frozen duology, I decided to dive into another snow themed slasher from yesteryear titled The Chill Factor. When I was starting to reach the edge of not wanting to collect physical copies of horror films anymore, this was one of the last ones I was interested in purchasing considering that Arrow Video had put this into print on blu-ray, it looked like a cool addition (pun intended) to hang out amongst the rest of what I had already accumulated at that point. In the same vain as being a fan of more obscure sub-genres of horror such as SOV and spa/workout horror and heavy metal horror, I also really like this less traversed hallway in the corridors of terror-snow or winter centered fright films. I don't what it is-maybe it's the whole aesthetic of everything being isolated because of the massive amounts of snow everywhere, or just the bitter cold you can feel coming off the screen as our main characters fumble around while getting annihilated, but there's something special hidden in the DNA here for me whenever I sit down to watch an entry in this arm that not a lot of horror fans seem to gravitate towards. When it comes to The Chill Factor in particular, there isn't anything that special about it as an individual film-but once it's sitting amongst it's peers like Iced, Shredder, Dead Snow and anything else in this ilk-it's a pretty solid and fun entry to jab your icicle into. If you want a basic breakdown, it's pretty much a mix of The Evil Dead, The Exorcist and, well-Iced. Yeah. So pretty much what takes place in The Chill Factor is that a group of friends are really into motorized sledding to the point where that's their only mode of transportation to get anywhere. They end up at some local bar in the middle of iced-over nowhere, and right when the film starts we are presented with some racist redneck bullshit that hates one of our main guys' fiancée's because she's black and he's white. Really, who even gives a shit about that. But I guess back in 1993 it was still a thing to hate people with different colored skin. I'm pretty much on the same level with remembering all the characters names as I was when I was watching Iced, so all I'm going to do is be as generic as possible to get the story across. Or come up with my own names. After the black girl fiancée gets made fun of for a second just because she has a darker skin pigment, her male fiancée comes around, says some shit to this dumbass about how he was just drafted to the Minnesota Vikings, and proceeds to dispose of the loser quickly. They all sit down to have some beers because it's another one of the guys' birthday in the group, and the main woman that runs the place starts telling them about Black Friar Lake. It's sad when I remember the name of the lake more than the names of the main characters. The birthday boy and Tom (I only remember his name because of certain events that I'll get to soon) decide after a lot of drinking that it's a good idea to race across this frozen over Black Friar Lake to see who's sled is faster. Of course, the race ends up being a disaster because Tom goes flying head first into a tree and the birthday boy just falls off his at some point. Minnesota Viking and one of the ladies in the group find some abandoned religious camp ground that's all boarded up, and break into it for warmth and to try and get some medical help for Tommy Boy. One by one they become unalived in various ways-especially after they find this ridiculous, oversized, hand-made Ouija board with what looks like a human eyeball in the middle of it where the spinner is anchored. They do a shitty séance, a dark spirit that was trapped there takes over Tommy's body, he miraculously heals, has sex with all but one or two of the girls in the group (the black girl is dead by this point) and it turns from a fun, half anxiety filled urgency for Tommy's health into a possession based Exorcist type deal with a finale that I honestly wasn't fully expecting. I'm going to ramp it up zits and zombies and say that I think that if you even remotely have any interest in frost layered terror, give The Chill Factor a shot. It doesn't matter if you bought a new designer winter jacket or a motorized sled or any of that crap-it only matters if you know how to have fun and are in the mood for winterized devil worship and seeing a black woman's head being brutalized by a ceiling fan. That happens here. Factor in some chills-before winter is over.  

Iced

 

In the spirit of living in the Midwest and being buried in snow and subzero temperatures for almost a week now, I decided that I should embrace the fact that my two favorite things can coincide with one another-cheesy, 80's slasher flicks and Old Man Winter. My favorite season of the year actually is winter because I like the solitude that freezing in your living room or basement can bring as well as the fact that indulging in being an introvert coupled with the ideal that it's just more difficult during this time of year for other folks to want to go out in lieu of chilling their asses off brings me a simpler joy that no one will bother me to want to hang out. It's less anyway. I'm way more comfortable not spending my time with others and would much rather ensconce myself in the silent beauty known as isolation. There are many benefits to having a personality and mentality like this, and I'm really grateful the universe has blessed me with such a humble existence. However, for a film like Iced from 1989, none of the characters here have a chance at participating in such a foray. This film has been on my "T.W.E." list (To Watch Eventually) ever since Cecil from GoodBadFlicks did a review of it multiple years ago as well as Ben from 80's Horror Central. They both said solid things about it and it just seemed like it had that specific, shitty 80's charm that I'm always looking for when the mood strikes me to sit through an entry like this. If you're already a fan of the Friday The 13th franchise or any deeper cuts in the slasher sea, then you're going to outright enjoy Iced purely for the energy it brings and the similarly styled kills it formulates. The plot here and the way it unfolds really does have a layer of snooze to it unfortunately-and I know this outright because I'm normally pretty good at remembering all the characters names and their purposes in whatever is going on is-but here in Iced for some reason, I had a really tough time recalling who was who and what the hell they were doing there. Mainly what gravity pulls together here in Iced is that we start with a group of friends who are really into skiing are on a trip together, there's a main character named Jeff that has some kind of mental issues that lead him in becoming jealous of his friend Cory getting naked with his other friend Trina. I guess he wanted to get with her, so they slalom/race down a mountain against one another to win her heart, he loses to Cory, gets pissed, and plans to stroll down the hallway at the hotel they were staying at to murder Cory and presumably Trina with one of his ski poles. He's interrupted by Eddie (who kind of looks like if Robert Goulet, Geraldo Rivera and Dabney Coleman had a threesome) which pisses him off even more. So he goes to ski on the slopes by himself after all the trails are shut down for the night and ends up killing himself by careening off of a snow bank and landing chest first onto a huge pile of rocks. Four years later, everyone who is leftover from this initial trip has been invited to check out some new condo establishment where they all cost $250,000 (in 80's money that's insanity) and a lot of pointless drama and bad acting build up to the point where maybe all of these characters should bite it. There are a couple of twists towards the end that I won't spoil just in case if you do want to sit through Iced, but basically who you think is Jeff making a comeback and killing everyone in this snow covered establishment really isn't. Maybe you'll be shocked by that reveal, and maybe you won't. Oh, there's something else I need to point out here-Lisa Loring who played the original Wednesday in The Adams Family is here as Jeanette, and she couldn't be more hot. She also played a raging psycho/lesbian bitch in another crappy 80's horror flick titled Blood Frenzy. I did a Youtube video about that movie-maybe I should revisit it and write a new review on here for it. Anyways, so there's that as well. I'm going to notarize this here for you zits and zombies and just state that if you're already into these kinds of funny, overacted slasher pieces from the 80's, you really can't go wrong with some fresh powder from the likes of Iced. If you're not and you're just trolling around looking for a horror movie to watch, you had better be prepared. There's someone hiding inside that snowman over there.