Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator (1985) and for that he will have my eternal gratitude. That film, along with Evil Dead II (1987) opened my eyes to gonzo horror that mixed crazy violence with comedy and gore, and my life was forever changed.
But while I absolutely adore Re-Animator I’ve never really taken to any of the other Stuart Gordon films I’ve seen. Dolls, his third feature film as a director, did not change that.
Dolls is part of an unrelated series of films about childhood toys that come to life that for some reason were very popular in the late 1980s. The special effects work with the puppets here is a lot of fun, but it comes in very late in the film, and unfortunately the build-up is a bit of a slog.
An obnoxious married couple with a precocious young daughter get stuck in a thunderstorm. A couple of punk girls are hitch-hiking nearby and are picked up by a doofus salesman. They too are trapped by the storm. All of these disparate people make their way into a strange old mansion where they are greeted by a kindly old couple.
Most of the characters are highly unlikable. The punks are petty thieves, and well, punks. The married couple constantly complain and are ridiculously mean to the little girl. The old couple are pleasant enough but of course they are in control of the killers dolls. What’s left is the salesman who is dumb and goofy and the precocious girl.
Naturally, the killer dolls kill the annoying characters first leaving the salesman and the girl to survive the night. Presumably creating and working the puppets was expensive so most of the film they are completely off screen. They don’t really appear until nearly 45 minutes into this 77 minute film. Once they do appear things become a lot of fun, but that’s a long 45 minutes where nothing much interesting happens before then.
I’ll argue that it is worth watching for those dolls. My wife is a doll collector and while she leans heavily into the Barbie world and these are more of the porcelain variety I still got a kick out of watching how they brought them to life (and then found creative ways to destroy them). I’m a huge fan of practical effects and they are well done here.
I just wish their was a better script that moved around the effects.
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