“Cuddly Toys” is Sharp Around the Edges
Hidden in the credits of Kansas Bowling’s bizarrely bleak Cuddly Toys is a stark sentiment: “There are 100 actresses in this film. Statistically, two will die before they turn thirty. Who will they be?” This is the sort of extreme, yet somewhat absurd stance Cuddly Toys adopts throughout its entire runtime. It’s both a mockumentary and a harrowingly honest look at the lives of young and teenage girls.
Cuddly Toys is not a narrative-based film, but a mockumentary mixed with a white-coater style film of the sexploitation genre. A white-coater film from the late 1960s and 1970s was a means of skirting obscenity laws. If a film was educational in nature, it wasn’t obscene, according to a 1969 Supreme Court decision. The term white-coater comes from a doctor, usually wearing a white lab coat, who would introduce the graphic film as a means of teaching. Cuddly Toys follows suit by having the entire movie framed by Professor Kansas Bowling (Bowling). She stands in a mostly empty room and directly addresses the camera. She’s an expert in the lives of teen girls, and this is her exposé. What follows are vignettes and interviews that attempt to get to the bottom of the troubles of teenage girls.
Cuddly Toys is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. The film seesaws between a genuinely funny look at the ridiculous standards society puts on young girls and moments of great darkness. Isn’t that the reality of being a teen girl, though? They’re placed in impossible situations, seen as objects more than people, and only respected when they’re young and beautiful. In one of the sequences, a priest offers his condolences to a grieving mother. He tells her that at least her daughter will forever be young and beautiful, she’ll never have to be old and ugly. At first you chuckle, because what an absurd thing that is to say to someone who is grieving. Then the character repeats it, and it dawns on you that it isn’t outside the realm of possibility to have been said in a real situation.
That’s the world Cuddly Toys lives in so confidently. Bowling understands that a teenage girl’s existence is absurd, but that it’s only through confronting it head on that a conversation can come of it. Professor Kansas Bowling looks into the camera and says, “Parents, beware. Lock up your daughters.” Again, both a tongue-in-cheek statement that harkens back to the cautionary, fear-mongering parenting of the ’70s and a frustrated solution to the horrors that exist in the world. Cuddly Toys is an angry work of modern mondo cinema. There are violent rape sequences meant to shock, but not in a way that feels cheap. It feels irate, a direct critique of films that use violence against women as a plot point for male characters or as a hollow attempt to interrogate the realities of womanhood.
“Christian science kills” says a text card in the middle of the credits. Cuddly Toys will not be for everyone. It’s purposefully rough, like sandpaper on the skin, but it’s also impressively in control. The film balances its satirical point of view with its no-holds-barred look at what teen girls and young women experience on a day-to-day basis. An impossible balancing act that somehow comes together, Cuddly Toys is blisteringly unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
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