Toys Are Not For Children

You think that you have major Daddy issues? Your fixation on anything Daddy-related may wane after watching Arrow Video's newest Blu-ray release, "Toys Are Not for Children." File this 1972 potboiler into the "What the Hell Am I Watching" movie category.

While not exactly a horror movie, "Toys Are Not for Children" has some pretty horrific events that happen to its damaged characters. Jamie (Marcia Forbes) pines for her father, who abandoned her and her verbally abusive mother Edna (Fran Warren). Jamie, a 20-year-old na�vet�, misses her Dad so much that she's obsessed with the toys he gave her as a child.

The film starts off in an eye-popping sequence in which Jamie is fondling her toy soldier in the throws of nudity. "Toys Are Not for Children" gets even wackier as it progresses.

The emotionally stunted Jamie gets married, but she's afraid of sex, even though her husband Charlie (Harlan Cary Poe) is mostly sympathetic. It's after Jamie meets a hooker named Pearl (Evelyn Kingsley) that she eventually relaxes, and, well, becomes a prostitute herself. And this sends Jamie on a search for her ever-elusive father.

It all sounds like the plot to a fun John Waters film, but "Toys Are Not for Children" is presented in the most serious way possible. Marcia Forbes, in her only acting gig, goes from innocent girl to vampy vixen with ease... it's a shame that Forbes didn't take on any other film roles.

It's also a shame that Forbes doesn't appear in any of Arrow's extras, nor do any of the film's other actors (they've either passed away or left the film business). What you will get are examinations of the movie's director in "Fragments of Stanley Brasloff," a man who only made two films himself. And in "Dirty Dolls: Femininity, Perversion and Play," the correlation between dolls and female sexuality is discussed.

"Toys Are Not for Children"
Blu-ray
$29.99
www.arrowvideo.co.uk