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As Christmas draws near, a family pays a visit to a secluded mansion with your standard dark past. The building was once a children’s clinic until the death of a child set off a chain reaction of awfulness and supernatural revenge. The folks are planning on fixing it up and flipping it. Teenage daughter Alicia doesn’t want to be there and cops the attitude one would expect from a teenage girl being forced to leave her friends and thrown in a location where there is no working Wi-Fi. Doesn’t help that mom Hannah is her stepmother. Right when they arrive, Alicia sees a little boy’s reflection warning her to run and discovers a toy where there wasn’t one. Nanny Rose also hears whispers warning against staying in the home. As the parents focus on renovating, young Zoe and her brother Franklin combat boredom by playing with a bunch of toys they discover in a toy chest in a creepy playroom. Light spookiness is dismissed by the adults, Franklin wears a dinosaur helmet and whispers creepy shit and Alicia nearly chokes on a spider that makes its way into her bowl of popcorn. Work keeps calling Hannah away from her kids and Rose begins having vivid nightmares about the children in the clinic and the baby she miscarried. She also begins believing Alicia’s claims of a haunting after she’s the victim of a combination attack by a toy dragon and remote control car. She almost takes a fatal fall but when Hannah and David ask what happened, she decides to not sound like a complete lunatic and blames things on a bird getting in to the house. The toys hold a supernatural influence over the children and even talk to them. It’s an insane stop-motion fever dream as the toys, led by a stuffed animal by the name of Uncle Monkey, perform a song and dance for the children. I was not expecting this and it made me insanely happy. Hannah refuses to acknowledge the weird shit going down even when it almost claims her life… she knows a lot more about the house’s history than she is letting on. A bad snow storm keeps them in the house on Christmas Eve, also keeping their contractor stuck with the family. Guess who meets his untimely end first. David braves the bad roads to get his impaled handyman to the hospital but a bumblebee toy plays stowaway, smothers the contractor and causes the father to crash. Hannah confesses the locations tragic history to Rose and the kids destroy all of the Christmas presents under the playful instruction of the claymation playthings. Of course when they’re caught, the toys are just lying there and mom is pissed. She goes to throw Uncle Monkey and, like Chucky before him, he attacks. Deniability is thrown out the window and the stranded women have to put up a fight as the killer toys attack and also attempt to convince the little kids to kill themselves. Let’s hope this ordeal can bring the family closer together. The little kids are pretty annoying but the claymation fiends make up for that fault. Also impressive is how Verity Marks manages to pull off the role of an irritated teenager without irritating me… no easy feat. The opening may have you thinking you’re in for the standard terrible toy nightmare on the cheap but this bad boy loses its god damn mind when it finally shows its cards and I’m thankful for that. The cast is fine with no performance all that weak and outside of those little brats acting like braindead dopes, I was actually rooting for the family. I’m still pleasantly shocked they didn’t go the cgi route and went with green-screen and stop-motion.
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