Wordiezett So much average

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Michael Neumann The romantic longings of adolescence confront the sexual urges of adulthood after an orphaned English girl and her two younger siblings move into the toyshop of their malevolent, misogynist uncle, a tyrant who stages debased one-act plays in his basement theater using life-size puppets. Fans of Angela Carter's hothouse Freudian writing will know what to expect, but her screenplay here was directed with a bum eye for mock-poetic effect: the magic realism slips into portentous fantasy with little transition and even less subtlety. The uncle's amusing stage production of Leda's encounter with the swan (the girl is real; the bird is a puppet) is more or less typical of the film's transparent symbolism, which reaches its zenith in an early scene meant (presumably) to represent the young heroine's impending womanhood. Locked out of the house one night while wearing her mother's (white) wedding dress, she climbs an apple tree (get it?) to arrive, conspicuously bloody, at an upstairs window

sporaceous Like "blackriverfalls" in Leeds, England, I, too, have been in search of a copy of The Magic Toyshop for the past 15 years. The movie, back in 1987, had a run in a tiny, now-defunct art-house cinema just off the University of California campus in Berkeley. I remember the movie receiving glowing reviews in the local free alternative presses.The Magic Toyshop has left an indelible impression in my brain. Yes, the story is bizarre, disturbing, perverse, and sexually discomfiting; but that is the nature of Angela Carter's artistry. Her's is a world in which mythology, fairy tale, and childhood innocence meld and clash with the sometimes magical, sometimes perversely ugly reality of adult consciousness. The Magic Toyshop encapsulates the violence inherent in the confrontation of the adults' and children's worlds into a succinct cinematic package. Scene upon surrealistic scene vividly and lushly convey the romantic dreaminess of childhood and the tight rigidity of contrived adulthood.A few years after its brief visit to the Bay Area, The Magic Toyshop was in rotation on the Bravo arts cable channel. I managed to make a VHS recording of The Magic Toyshop. The quality is poor, but luckily this was recorded before Bravo had to fall to running commercials, so my copy of the movie has no breaks. I hope I still have my VHS copy, because it seems that, despite the death of Angela Carter and the continued interest in her literary work, the movie The Magic Toyshop may exist as ephemerally as the memory of a persons's first cherished toy.

soyarra I saw this film on the A&E Channel in 1991 and have bitterly regretted not taping it then. The late Angela Carter herself wrote the screenplay and included elements of magical realism not present in her novel, which made it even more intriguing and absorbing. The cast includes the great Tom Bell as Uncle Philip and the terrific Irish actors Kilian McKenna and Lorcan Cranitch (of "Cracker" fame) as Finn and Francie. It is a fantastic adaptation of a difficult, strange and wonderful book, and I wish SOMEONE at Granada or the BBC or wherever would release it on all regions DVD already!

blackriverfalls The Magic Toyshop is a rich and by turns sensual and disturbing adaptation of the Angela Carter book, to which the film stays particularly true.At the heart of the story is the young Melanie, who after her parents die tragically is sent to stay with her Uncle Philip, Aunt Margaret and her cousins Francie and Finn. Aunt Margaret is mute, and Uncle Philip is a control freak who stages plays with life size puppets and when not doing so treats his family as little more than an extension of his marrionette collection. Through a series of strange and often surreal events the perverse dynamics of this family begin to reveal themselves to Melanie.SO WHY CAN'T WE WATCH THIS FILM?Since it was screened on BBC1 back in 1988 it has never been repeated, or released on video or any other format, anywhere. I know this because I've been trying to hunt down a copy for over a decade, it is not only unavailable but seemingly unheard of to the point where I've sometimes wondered if the film was never really made and I dreamed the whole thing. I can understand some of its themes being considered contraversial, such as Uncle Philip's symbolic molestation of Melanie with the swan puppet, or his need to assert his dominance over Aunt Margaret by making her wear a silver collar, but suppressing films that bring these themes out into the open is only reinforcing the old taboos.I guess we can only hope that it gets some kind of release, somewhere, sometime in the future...