THE TOY BOX

d. Ronald Victor Garcia (1971)

America, the 1970s. Thirty or so slightly grimy young people – a Manson-lite band of drop outs, dissolutes and runaways – gather at a seemingly abandoned mansion to play childish games, roll around in the nude and to take lots of drugs. Laughter and dancing are the key points – and strip poker, which they’re obviously all terrible at because the players are all naked all the time. Periodically, as they periodically do, a clock chimes, summoning knots of people to an upstairs bedroom where they are expected to perform carefully prepared dramatic vignettes on a sexual theme: a prostitute and her pimp; a sexy picnic; a butcher with a taste for necrophilia; a woman who has sex with her bed sheets. The mini plays are performed to an audience of one, Uncle, an elderly white bearded man with empty eyes who, to all intents and purposes, is as dead as a door nail.

Creepy, pervy, dead Uncle can talk without moving his lips and move things without touching them, materialising props for his young performers like drugs, money and, as things take a sinister turn, knives, pitchforks and axes. Uncle likes to be entertained, and the standard in/out just isn’t doing it for him anymore.  

  

The question of what is happening and what Uncle represents is eventually answered by briefly veering into another genre completely. It’s only slightly satisfactory, but it’s enough. A film like The Toy Box has no rational explanation, and nor does it require one. It’s just completely and utterly mad from start to finish, in the best possible way. 

In essence a softcore porn film with an actual story that gradually takes precedence over the smut, it most closely resembles one of Jess Franco’s flesh obsessed fever hallucinations, an illucid dream. All cinema has a dreamlike quality, of course, but a certain low cost, low quality type of film sometimes more closely resembles the memory of a dream – the fragmented recollection of something that was inchoate and incomplete in the first place. Those one's are my favourites.