You'll think twice about reliving your childhood with the Harry Novak pickup TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Young Jamie Goddard (Marcia Forbes) works in a toy store because she loves toys, especially the dolls that here long absent father (Peter Lightstone) sends her as if she were still a child. She has developed a sexual attachment to them that disturbs her domineering mother Edna (Fran Warren) who resents her daughter's affection for her philandering husband. When Jamie makes the acquaintance of more worldly yet seeming more warmly maternal Pearl (Evelyn Kingsley) and visits her and her pimp husband Eddie (Luis Arroyo, THE YOUNG SAVAGES), she is actually overjoyed to discover Pearl is a whore ("it's not like being president of the PTA") since she might know how to get in contact with her father. When Edna discovers that Jamie has been socializing with Pearl – a woman who fanatical Edna was responsible for running out of town – Edna throws her daughter out of the house; whereupon, Jamie agrees to marry co-worker Charlie (Harlan Cary Poe, STIGMA) whose overtures she once rebuffed. Charlie thinks he is getting a "living doll" in Jamie and he is shocked to discover that she really is as childlike at home as in the store, keeping her childhood toys and the new ones her father sends to her, and reacting badly when he tries to initiate lovemaking with her. While Jamie is content to "play house" at home, Charlie tries to keep up the illusion of a healthy marriage and love life but eventually starts drinking and running around with single girls at the local nightclub, and his paternal boss Max (N.J. Osrag) refuses to believe that anything is wrong with Jamie, much less that there can be an unhealthy relationship with toys. With Charlie coming home less and less, Jamie goes to stay with Pearl who is shocked when Eddie one day reveals that he is turning her onto the streets as a working girl specializing in men who like to play daddy. Although Pearl claims that she can work enough to take care of both of them, Jamie discovers that she can only find sexual pleasure with such men, and is hoping one day to meet her real father but the circumstances of that meeting turn out to be tragic on a mythical level.

Although released theatrically by Harry Novak's Box Office International in a double feature with BEHIND LOCKED DOORS – a roughie written by director Stanley Brassloff who had also directed the more conventional roughie TWO GIRLS FOR A MADMAN – boasting a sublimely sick premise and rich in unnerving situations, TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN seems to be trying to be anything but traditional sexploitation. Most of the nudity is incidental and the film is more focused on performance and character with some surprising insight into the things a child might see or hear that might create such a character as well as the actions both well-intended and selfish on the part of the parents that might enable such behavior. The budget is as low as many of Novak's other productions, but Brassloff and his cast try to otherwise transcend the limitations of the production, and the film's theme song "Lonely am I" scored a single release. The film started shooting in 1971 but was not released until 1973, and one wonders how much of the film's structure might have been altered by "film doctor" Fima Noveck who created the BLOOD COUPLE cut of GANJA & HESS and prepared the sometimes very different English-language versions of foreign films like THE INHERITANCE and BLOOD FEUD. It is not surprising that the Blu-ray release of the film was intended as part of Arrow's AMERICAN HORROR PROJECT sets but ruled as not horrific enough. Arrow might have been better off taking THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA from the first set and DREAM NO EVIL from the second and formed a daddy's little girl box set with TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN.

TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN was hard to see until Something Weird Video put it out on VHS and later an Image Entertainment double bill DVD with the more conventionally exploitative THE TOY BOX from director-turned-TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME cinematographer Ron Garcia. While the non-anamorphic letterboxed (possibly a hard-matted shoot) Image DVD transfer looked fair-to-poor with plenty of scratches and greenish tones, Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen presentation from a 2K scan of "original film elements" makes up for the fair HD presentation of the Novak title THE CHILD with a startlingly colorful and clean-looking transfer with bold red and blues (only the blue credits lettering looks like it might be out of register). The LPCM 1.0 mono track is very clean, with the theme song and dialogue coming across without distortion or any distracting age-related issues. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historians Kat Ellinger and Heather Drain who tie the film in with other films of the era that dealt with sometimes dangerously arrested development like CARRIE and THE BABY – and the more artsy THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA and SOME CALL IT LOVING – note that the excellent Forbes may have been discouraged from pursuing other acting roles when she married Cannon Films' Christopher Dewey, as well as delving into the little-known past of Brasloff who is also the subject of Stephen Thrower's video appreciation "Fragments of Stanley Brasloff" (25:03) which traces the film to a "true story" Brasloff heard twenty years before the film, his early career as actor an stand-up comedian, his earlier two roughie film ventures, and his heavy promotion of TOYS and his statement that he would continue with movies if the film was a success or mine it for stand-up material if it failed.