Small Soldiers (1998)

After the last entry, Small Soldiers seemed a natural follow-up - the narrative themes are very similar, or at least they seem so at first glance. Oh, and I came to both of these films late because at the time of their release, they both seemed too incredibly creepy to contemplate.

I'd love to say I remember those days fondly, the days when I was sufficiently sheltered that merely reading the reviews for a film was enough to thrill me, but that wouldn't be strictly true - in the case of Small Soldiers, the combination of one strong espresso-based beverage plus Roger Ebert's review was enough to stop me sleeping for days and swear me off caffeinated coffee for the better part of fifteen years. Naturally, I swore off the damned film, too, until a couple of years ago over a bored Christmas break when I caught a little of it whilst channel-hopping and it occurred to me that maybe I might have, y'know, grown up a bit.

I'm not sure director Joe Dante has ever quite got past his own adolescent phase, though, and I don't think I'd necessarily want him to, either. He's a Roger Corman alumnus and a Spielberg protegé, and in my (limited) experience this continues to inform his work, allowing him to produce a string of adventure flicks in which small-town life is turned upside down by various knee-high nasties. This time, the focus is on a bunch of action figures that an ambitious toy development executive has decided to kit out with hi-tech military chips that allow them to interact with not just one another but their human owners, too. Thus we have the Commando Elite, a bunch of square-jawed, cigar chomping military heroes, and their sworn enemies the Gorgonites, freakish animal people whose core directive is to hide, then lose.

This being classic Dante, we need an appropriate setting, and so we have The Inner Child, an old-school toyshop populated with lovingly-crafted wooden playthings. It's owned by Stuart Abernathy (Kevin Dunn), who's recently set himself up in a new town after having had some problems with his delinquent son Alan (Gregory Smith). Alan seems to be settling down now, but the store doesn't seem to be making money, so in an effort to make a success of things Stuart goes off to a seminar on making small businesses work. Left in charge, Alan sees an opportunity to bring in some quick cash when he sees some of the new action figures on a delivery truck. He begs the driver to let a few, um, fall off the back and into the store, promising to pay him later.

While Stuart (who refuses to stock war toys) is away, the new toys are put in pride of place in the shop window, soon attracting the attention of the little brother of girl next door Christy (Kirsten Dunst). With that, all the puzzle pieces are in place, and it only takes the activation of the first toy for the fun and games to commence...

The good

There's no other word for it: this one's an absolute blast. Sweet and nasty and funny and surprisingly smart, it's briskly anarchic fun for all but the very small and/or sensitive. Look: this is a film that pits the voices of the Dirty Dozen against the voices of Spinal Tap, and if that doesn't convince you, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye. Add in then-teen queens Christina Ricci and Sarah Michelle Gellar to voice a troop of insectile mutant Barbie dolls, and you have some of the savviest casting in voice acting history.

The voices, however, are nothing without the visuals - in this case, a near-seamless mix of puppetry and CGI that even now, nearly twenty years on, remains almost entirely convincing. It's great work, and I think it's helped in no small part by the fact that the voice work and some sympathetic human backup are solid enough that I never particularly noticed I had any disbelief, much less had to work to suspend it. The good guys are unforcedly likeable and the bad guys are appealingly hissable, and in a movie like this, this is exactly the way things should be.

What about the horror elements, though? I won't deny it, this one's creepy. For a start, a movie that did to its human characters what Small Soldiers does to its toy ones would have trouble making it to the big screen these days - thinking about it, the closest analogue would probably be Starship Troopers, which is actually not thematically dissimilar, either. In any case, very bad things happen here to what are effectively sentient creatures, but it's generally within the context of established war movie tropes, which I for one think makes it all okay.

The bad

I seem to remember at the time that there was a lot of talk about parents mistaking this for another Toy Story. I can see how this would easily lead to tears at bedtime, and there's a motto here: film reviews are your friend (especially mine).

The verdict

Definitely the most fun you can have watching a bunch of creepy lifelike dolls making people scream. Unless you're a Directioner, obvs.