Welcome back to my Dark Corner of this Sick World.
‘You’ve got hair like my rabbit’
Peopletoys, also known by the weirdly mathematical title Devil Times Five
is a 1970s slasher with a difference.
‘See, you’re not so smart, you don’t know everything’
Following a bus crash,
four children strike out into the snowy wilderness,
‘4 present and accounted for. Everyone else is flat dead’
not quite everyone else,
‘Hey wait a minute! I’m alive!’
in fact…
did anyone die in this crash?
This man sets out after the kids, who aren’t happy about it,
‘Don’t let him get us. I can’t go back there’
Meanwhile a mountain lodge is playing host to the third annual and general convention of horrible people,
‘I was 14 when I first slopped a mop down the Copperhaven’s cruddy halls’
Actually it’s some doctors and their wives meeting to decide
who gets the lucrative San Francisco practice but my explanation is just as good,
‘Of course I’ve slept with her, hasn’t everyone’
As they insult each other,
‘Listen you boozed up old broad’
seduce a caretaker with learning difficulties,
‘Come on, pull down your pants’
and do everything but hold up a sign saying ‘I’m getting killed later’
‘I’m never going to make it till morning’
At the house the kids’ pursuer catches up to them and…
they beat him to death over 5 minutes of sepia-toned slow motion,
before we learn where they come from.
'Do you really think he is dead?'
'He has to be by now.
'I don't feel good.'
This is half an hour in which means that;
a) that first half hour is nothing;
and b), now we know what the kids are capable of and why, the next hour is a foregone conclusion.
'Harvey!'
They enter the house,
‘Little people’
Children is the word you’re looking for.
‘We got a sick little girl over here’
Gee if only three of you were doctors.
They’re snowed in – although it doesn’t always look it,
so there’s no getting help and they don’t realise what they’ve invited to stay.
That seems an impossible way of killing someone.
There are technical issues like the least necessary slow motion ever.
And there were reshoots after a change of director but,
one of the kids had had a severe hair cut which they cover with a wig.
It is a wig in the context of the film because David likes to dress up,
but his actual hair, isn’t that similar.
Still, better than Samurai Cop.
‘Oh that’s very funny smart ass’
But the real problem is obvious
‘We think they’re kind of weird’
‘Very weird’
and what with the dead guy they’re entitled to be suspicious;
guns vanish…
‘Those guns damn sure didn’t walk off by themselves’
knives vanish,
‘How are you at buttering your bread with a spoon’
and....
‘I want the San Francisco job’
Oh yeah, let’s not let the missing weaponry and the dead guy in the woodshed distract from that.
Harvey here is suspicious of David,
‘There’s something strange about that child David’
and then...
There’s something strange about that child, here have axe.
There’s a lot of ways to die in this house,
piranhas in the bath probably being the weirdest.
‘It’s the kids!’
You cannot just be realising this.
‘Butt out’
Adults are always going to be, rightly, cautious about taking a hand to children,
and yes it was probably a mistake to give them unfettered access to gardening tools,
'I got me some big pappa bear!'
but after the first three or four deaths I feel like someone would say...
‘they’re pretty small. We can take ‘em’.
‘No!’
I guess the idea is that the adults are so caught up in business and adultery,
that the kids are free to pick them off, but
I don’t buy this having a message.
‘Get off my back’
Someone wanted to make a slasher with kids and decided the adults would have to deserve it,
‘You don’t care what you do or who you do it to or what place or what time do you?’
They’re jerks. It’s no more sophisticated than that.
‘We’re going to have some brand new toys soon’
Ah yes, people toys, I get it.
Quick sidebar, replacement director David Sheldon also directed Lovely and Deadly,
the only other movie I’ve seen with a character named...
‘Lovely’
Finally, a note for all directors and writers out there, we hate it when you end movies like this.
Thanks for watching. To see more Slasher reviews, click here.
What are the most creative deaths on film, ridiculous or otherwise? Tell us your favourites in the comments below.
'You all just sit here, but I'm going to take a bath.'