PLOT SUMMARY: A family rents an RV not knowing about its dangerous history.
Have you wondered what happens to their lairs when killers are caught?
Do people want to move in there? Do realtors still sell those places? Are they demolished because let's face it, who actually wants to own a place or an object that belonged to someone who kills people?
Perhaps sellers are so concerned about the losses they may incur that they still put these items and homes on sale.
After all, that is where Horror movie ideas take birth.
The Toybox has nothing to do with toys obviously. It's a weird reference to an RV a killer used to kidnap and torture victims. He was eventually caught and killed but his spirit lives on.
What happened to the RV? It wasn't destroyed or anything.
It is rented out to an unsuspecting family who wants to have a nice vacation.
They must have planned this at the last minute because none of them checks to see whether the RV is working properly or not.
Do the windows open? Nope.
Does the AC work? Nope.
Is there clean water? Nope.
And the radio only plays one song.
The family, consisting of five members (grandfather, father, mother, daughter, and uncle) find out much much later that the RV has the habit of stalling in the middle of nowhere as well.
THE TOYBOX Movie Plot
The movie begins with a boy on a bicycle who stops by the parked RV and goes in to investigate for no reason except it is parked in someone else's driveway.
He is pulled in. The RV shakes and that is that for the boy. The next morning his mother drives around the neighborhood looking for him but no one has seen him.
What happened to the body? Nobody knows. Yes, we are not shown what actually happens to the corpses. Does the RV use them as fuel?
The family sets about on their vacation and we are introduced to some unnecessary tension between uncle and his father. He is moody with everyone except for his niece.
Weird things begin happening as the windows won't open and start sliding back on their own.
No deaths yet.
Along the way, they find a pair of siblings whose car has broken down.
They immediately take them in and the sister starts experiencing strange hallucinations inside the RV.
Eventually, the vehicle malfunctions and an accident happens before we can even make note of the new characters' names.
The brother is killed and the sister is mortified and in grief for five minutes before she gets back to her normal self. The grandfather injures his arm and almost bleeds to death.
The sister tries to fix the RV but of course, nothing is really wrong with it.
While all this is going on, the daughter is making creepy drawings and playing skip rope right behind the RV.
There is another malfunction and the RV goes in reverse.
Another death. This made me cringe and I wished the makers had spared the child.
There is a blink and miss scene of a knife hitting the walls of the RV and blood oozing out. Doesn't seem important but guess what? It is.
The mother is heartbroken and keeps seeing weird visions on the broken TV. She is taken back minutes before her daughter's death and screams for help.
Outside, her husband is discussing with his father how he can't leave his wife alone when she is grieving.
Not once does he turn around to see his wife screaming and banging on the window.
The killer's ghost makes an appearance and strangles the wife with the skipping rope. She is holding onto her daughter's bloodied dress but we can see it is not the same one.
She is killed too.
The husband is shocked, spends two minutes crying, then is back to normal.
By this time, the characters finally believe something evil and supernatural is afoot. They learn about the previous owner and that he used the RV as a toybox. They realise they have to disembark immediately.
But of course, the killer traps them all inside. They find pieces of hair and knives and the brooding uncle decides to carry them the wrong way.
One jerk of the RV and the knives stab into his neck. He's dead.
There is no time wasted mourning over him. Fortunately, he learned that his father walked out on them because their mother was having an affair.
This adds nothing to the story or makes the characters appealing.
You can't bring yourself to like people who get over the deaths of their family members so quickly.
The Toybox Ending Explained with movie spoilers!
The only three left try to escape and shoot windows, but nothing happens. The father is luckily outside and promises to get help even though he is still bleeding.
The son's hand is caught by the evil ghost and he is made to shoot his father in the head.
This time the son loses it and turns the gun on himself.
The only one left is the woman who wasn't even part of the family.
With the window now cracked because of the gunshot, you would think she would try to jump out.
She doesn't and instead cries herself to sleep.
When she wakes up, the window is fixed and she is attacked by the psycho ghost.
It is during the struggle that she discovers that when the walls of the RV are destroyed, it affects the ghost. She stabs the walls with the knife but the ghost doesn't weaken and throws her back into the only bed.
We don't know what happened to her body.
The next scene shows a couple of guys on a motorcycle who find the RV and investigate. They're more interested in finding free beers than what this Toybox is doing in the middle of nowhere.
The fridge had stopped working and the food had turned bad, but there were a few cans for the bikers to find.
Naturally, they are both pulled in and the door slams.
Despite its obvious flaws, the story did have a lot going. It did have some creepy scenes and you do feel for the child when she is run over. Had the makers tied up loose ends, the horror factor would have been more effective.
Scare scale:
While I found your take on The Toybox interesting, it's filled with at least a dozen facts you got wrong. 1) The grandfather bought the RV; he didn't rent it. 2) The boy on the bicycle was lured in by Gunthry; he didn't just check out the RV for no reason. 3) Although most all the windows wouldn't open, they were able to get one open; that's the one that slid back & closed. 4,5,6) The RV didn't malfunction; what happened was intentional, not an accident. Gunthry controlled what the RV did & didn't do. Gunthry controlled the fuel pedal, causing it to speed up, which caused the 1st incident. Gunthry controlled the engine fan, attacking the grandfather, causing injury to the grandfather's arm; the grandfather didn't injure himself. Gunthry took the RV out of park, putting it in reverse, killing the daughter. 7) The wife/mother wasn't holding her daughter's bloodied dress. The bloodied white dress had belonged to the girl Gunthry had tortured & killed when he was alive; the daughter's dress wasn't white & was assumed to still be on her body. The mother knew that wasn't her daughter's dress. 8,9) The window wasn't cracked as the result of the gunshot because Gunthry opened the window before making the shot. The wimdow, therefore, wasn't "fixed" because it hadn't ever been damaged. 10) The bed in the bedroom isn't "the only bed"; in most RVs/campers, the table & bench seats transform into a bed, as well as the sofa, so at least six people can sleep in the RV. 11, 12) We can presume that we do know what happened to Samantha's body. Based on what we know, Gunthry/the RV cleans up its own messes. That's the point of the opening scene with the boy on the bicycle, as it shows the audience the horrific, bloody mess (& dead body not found) from killing the boy. The very next morning, the family enter a clean RV, to begin their road trip/vacation. Along that same logic, that Gunthry/the RV cleans itself, it would've also cleaned & restored the fridge, as part of a lure for its next victims. | The idea of a spirit attaching itself to an object isn't a new one; that's the case in this movie. Gunthry attached himself to the RV, what appears to be close to 100%, as he controls everything in the RV, the RV itself & the RV bleeds. That, for sure, is a weird twist, that the RV bled! My take on the uncle's mindset & attitude, as well as the backstory between him & his father, are a bit relevant to the story. It provides reason for his interactions with his father & brother, their upset towards him & he, towards them, his smoking pot... all of which provides reason for his father & brother to think he messed up, was irresponsible, that he killed his niece. Also, you're not alone in thinking they didn't grieve long or hard enough, but my take on that is different as well. I feel they were hit with shock, immediate grief & heartbreak, but snapped back into survival mode. They had hardly no food, only a few canned goods, no water, no a/c, an RV that only worked when Gunthry wanted it to ... stuck in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, without cell phone service. In a real life scenario like that, I believe that's what would happen, that people would react, then snap back into survival mode. That they'd deal more with their grief once they were safe & out of that horrific situation.
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