Toy Terminator (2021)#review #shortfilm

Gruesome Hertzogg Podcast : Short Film Reviews

The doll’s house is the arena where (typically) little white girls play out, or occasionally resist, the model of life that they have inherited from their family and culture, in an idealised, plastic parody of patriarchy. The Toy Terminator opens with an image of a doll’s house – a cottage (that is clearly a model) on a wooded mountain (also a model) in the moonlit night. Inside this hilltop microcosm there is, breaching the divide between human and doll, a ‘real’ person playing with an assortment of toys. Yet far from being a Caucasian child, the ‘Toy Terminator’ (played by co-writer Fred Polone) is an unhinged, eye-patched African-American adult engaged in a horrifically gory race war with his grotesque puppets, whom he trusses and tortures, mutilates and murders in a fantasy scenario of black power.