70's American Horror Part Sixty-Nine

TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN

(1972)

Dir - Stanley H. Brassloff

Overall: WOOF

 

Pure exploitation in every conceivable sense, Toys Are Not for Children is an icky and D-grade affair.  The second of only two movies from no-budget filmmaker Stanley H. Brassloff, it plays out traumatic daddy issues in an unwholesome and humorless manner, taking such subject matter seriously while the embarrassing production values undermine any sincere attempts to disturb.  Most of the actors are amateurs and Brassloff's wooden direction hardly helps matters, though he indulges in relevant flashbacks to a jarring extent that at least break up a series of unlikable characters who endlessly repeat themselves.  It is a miserable experience to watch Marcia Forbes' native and poor young protagonist getting taken advantage of by everyone that she encounters due to her parents being all levels of dysfunctional awful.  Daddy is a womanizing scumbag and mommy never stops reminder her daughter of this fact while simultaneously chastising her for wanting a relationship with him, which Forbes spends the entire movie chasing in endlessly unhealthy ways.  This leads to an inevitable finale that will both ruin anyone's ideas of daddy/daughter roleplaying and make the viewer wish that they turned the whole thing off much earlier.

 

DARK AUGUST

(1976)

Dir - Martin Goldman

Overall: MEH

 

A low-key regional offering from Vermont-based filmmaker Martin Goldman, Dark August is heavy on mood yet void of plot, meandering for roughly ninety-minutes without any compelling pay-off.  Fusing some mild, occult mysticism that was often found in genre works from the period, it concerns a troubled yet likeable New York photographer who moves out to the boonies while suffering a midlife crisis at age thirty-eight, (even though actor/co-writer J.J. Barry looks closer to fifty-eight), at which point his hardships are compounded by a vehicular accident and some sort of curse that has befallen him.  Kim Hunter of all people shows up to deliver some unintentionally hilarious ooga booga New Age chanting, but the performances as a whole are better than what such off-the-grid independent B-movies usually allow.  Some tripped-out synth noises and a melancholic piano motif are used sparingly to help give it an intimate atmosphere, but the drama sadly never picks up.  Whatever supernatural elements are at play come off as both arbitrary and inconsequential and the ending is half-baked, as if the production simply ran out of money and had to turn in the finished product without first shooting everything that they needed.

 

TERROR OUT OF THE SKY 

(1978)
Dir - Lee H. Katzin
Overall: WOOF

Another killer insect TV movie from screenwriter Guerdon Trueblood, Terror Out of the Sky is a direct sequel to 1976's The Savage Bees which even opens with said film's closing set piece, only with a recast Tovah Feldshuh in place of Gretchen Corbett.  Debuting on CBS instead of the NBC like its predecessor, it is just as detrimentally chatty and sluggish, relying on dopey melodrama to pad out the running time.  There is a love triangle here between Feldshuh, a fabulously-bearded Dan Haggerty, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. that drives the snore-inducing plot line where people talk about bees, then talk about them some more, and then make sure that the audience knows that bees are being talked about yet again.  One or two familiar "Hey, that guy" character actors collect a paycheck and the production affords plenty of live buzzing bugs to crawl on people, as well as a school buss at one point that several heat-stricken kids are trapped inside of.  It is still lackluster stuff and the finale feels like it is seven hours long, which is never a good sign for anything that is trying, (and in this case failing), to slam home the suspense.  At least we get a shot of a guy in nasty bite makeup and someone says "Oh my god, his mouth! Its full of bees!".