Dolls

Dolls (1987)

Dir. Stuart Gordon

Written by Ed Naha

Starring Carrie Lorraine, Guy Rolfe, Stephen Lee, Ian Patrick Williams, Carolyn Purdy

Normally I always choose a theatrical poster if I can, but I think the recent Shout! Factory Blu is the first media of any type to accurately capture the tone of the movie in an image.

This is a movie called DOLLS, and it’s about some people who get stuck in an old gothic manor with a bunch of killer dolls. My God, there’s something heartening about that kind of honesty. I mean, I guess it could be called KILLER DOLLS or something if they really wanted to just put it all out there. But come on bud, DOLLS ain’t in the business of foolin’ nobody. DOLLS is what it is. And it’s exactly what you think it is. Nobody rented this movie thinking it was a prequel to GUYS AND DOLLS, or an academic survey of aboriginal doll types from around the world. If you rented DOLLS, you did so because you wanted to see dolls kills a bunch of B-movie actors. DOLLS will provide that service. DOLLS is a generous lover.

What you might not expect -- particularly when I mention that this is a Charles Band production (DOLLMAN VS DEMONIC TOYS, GINGERDEAD MAN 2: PASSION OF THE CRUST, though at least it was from his years with Empire Pictures, when it was still possible to conceive of “A Charles Band Production” as something that could be nonlethally viewed by human eyes) -- is that DOLLS is actually not merely a vehicle to clumsily dump a few colorful deaths into our laps, like a cat cheerfully depositing a mangled squirrel carcass in your bed. It’s actually pretty good! I mean, it’s obvious a B-movie about killer dolls and it was produced by Charles Band, so there was always a ceiling on how good it was possible for it to be. But I’d say that by and large, it comfortably reaches that ceiling and maintains itself there pretty much the entire runtime. It comes perilously close to being a real movie in many ways. If that’s a backhanded compliment, it’s also a sincere one.

The backbone of DOLLS is that is gets the tone right. Director Stuart Gordon, who absolutely nailed the irresponsible, gleefully misanthropic comedy of RE-ANIMATOR and the slimy, twitchy mania of FROM BEYOND a few years earlier, here sets his sights on something sort of surprising: cultivating the feeling of a dark fairy tale, a kid’s movie set in a reality which is ever-so-slightly magical and timeless. Now, it’s also not a kid’s movie, because they talk about child molestation and punk rock and several people will have their eyeballs graphically removed. But there’s an unmistakable, prodding sense that this is a children’s story; it takes place mostly from a child’s perspective (a child who is inevitably right and consequently seldom believed by any adults) which celebrates the imagination and generosity of childhood and condemns the banality and selfishness of adulthood. And there’s also no mistaking the trappings of a classic fairy tale: a shadowy gothic manor house which seems to exist out of time, a magical old craftsman with a twinkle in his eye, a pair of openly wicked step-parents, a stern sense of brutal moralizing, and a marked reverence for classical images and tropes (particularly the iconic Punch puppet who serves as our primary dispenser of punishment, and the old-fashioned ornate porcelain dolls and hand-painted soldier toys who back him up). This is not by accident. Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that DOLLS doesn't know what it's doing. It knows exactly what it’s doing. DOLLS wants to be a kid’s movie for grownups, and preferably grownups who grew up a little twisted, probably from a high dose of exactly this sort of story in their youth. And that’s exactly what it succeeds in doing.

I would definitely fit that bill, so I pretty much loved it. Your mileage may vary. But suffice to say, the story concerns likeable tyke Judy (Carrie Lorraine, in the last of her four screen roles, the first being an extra in POLTERGEIST 2), who gets stuck in the rain on a country road with her indifferent father (Ian Patrick Williams, an actor who has had a busy 40-year career spanning from Archie Bunker’s Place to SUPERHERO MOVIE apparently without ever having a single good role) and miserable bitch of a stepmother (Carolyn Purdy, wife of director Gordon, who seems to delight in casting her as irredeemable bitches, but hey, ain’t marriage a funny thing?), forcing them to seek shelter at the always-nearby gothic manor of Gabriel Hardwicke (Guy Rolfe, a career which ranged from KING OF KINGS to PUPPETMASTER) and his wife Hilary (Hilary Mason, the blind psychic from DON’T LOOK NOW). (Side note: I swear, this trope is in so many movies that every time I get stuck in the rain I just instinctively walk in any direction, certain I’ll find a mysterious gothic manor willing to put me up for the night). The Hardwickes are dollmakers, and the kindly old patriarch offers a particularly grotesque Punch doll to the youth as compensation for her beloved bear, tossed into the rainy woods by the cruel stepmother on their way up to the house.

About that bear: when he gets tossed away, the first thing we see is his immediate return as a gigantic, flesh-ripping stuffed monster who zestily bites into the unpleasant woman who has just rejected his presence. It turns out to be a fantasy, of course, but that lets you know right away that you’re A) in good hands and B) in the kind of movie which knows and approves of a child having a fantasy about her stuffed bear brutally butchering her stepmother as a means of violent revenge. That pretty much sets the tone for everything that follows.

Anyway, the stepparents are insufferable monsters, so you know they’ll get theirs. But that’s not enough victims to sustain a whole movie, so suddenly two trashy punk chicks (Bunty Bailey, the gal from Ah-Ha’s Take On Me video, and Cassie Stuart, who was in AMADEUS apparently) show up, with a dorky midwesterner named Ralph (Stephen Lee, ROBOCOP 2, “Registered Voter” in a 2004 episode of The West Wing) in tow. The punk rockers, as was customary in the 80’s, are violent thieves who are bound to be punished for their antisocial musical choices by way of killer dolls. But Ralph, Ralph is something special. Ralph is the biggest, dorkiest, most perfectly midwestern Midwesterner I have ever seen on the silver screen. This is the kind of Real America you seldom get from these smarmy Hollywood types, and as soon as I noticed his Cubs hat in the final scene of the film, I knew for a fact that the only way he could be this perfect is if director Gordon was born and raised in Chicago, which a quick IMDB check confirms, not that I needed any confirmation. His complete uncoolness is Ralph’s salvation, though; it’s his innocence and his inherent nice-guy can’t-catch-a-break schlubbiness that allows him to believe, against all real adult logic, that young Judy might just be onto something as she points out that people seem to be mysteriously disappearing around them. This is the point in the review where traditionally I’d say something like, “might it have something to do with dolls, possibly killer dolls of some variety?” But of course there’s no sense in being coy at this point; of course it’s killer dolls, you know that, the movie knows you know that, and it never pretends anything else, making Ralph’s grudging credulence a sign of his fundamental childlike goodness rather than a signal that he’s an irresponsible nincompoop (though his reluctance suggests he’s well aware that the latter is the more likely possibility, but can’t quite bring himself to ignore his gut on this one).

The cast is fairly perfect in their broad, semi-comic B-movie sort of way, and Lee in particular is a delight as the perpetually unlucky Cubs fan stuck, absurdly, in a dangerous fairy tale which he can’t believe but also can’t ignore. And the script, by Ed Neha (TROLL, and also what the fuck, he wrote HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS along with Gordon and co-producer Brian Yuzna) gamely sows plenty of knowing comedy beats --both good natured and malicious-- into the fabric of the story, ensuring that you know we’re all here to have a good time. But you didn’t come here to read about that. You want to know about these dolls, do they got the goods or what?

Well of course they do. Special effects guy John Carl Buechler (who we just encountered as the director of CELLAR DWELLER, though he’s known for his special effects work on FROM BEYOND and a generous sampling of FRIDAY THE 13th, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and HALLOWEEN sequels) manages the difficult feat of instilling dolls with a malevolent life on-screen, using what looks to be a mix of techniques, from stop-motion to green-screening to traditional puppetry. The dolls are splendidly designed to look threatening and eerie without ever looking like they were intended to frighten, and there are a bounty of great scenes with them as the movie goes on (though admittedly it takes a while to get there), most notably a brutal knock-down-drag-out fight between one of the punk chicks and a small army of assailants, and a wonderfully surreal and uncharacteristically restrained sequence where Ralph and Judy stumble into the wrong room and find themselves facing hundreds of the little bastards, all staring accusingly at them. And if there’s one thing I actually ought not to ruin, it’s the final plan the dolls have in store for their victims. But be assured it’s as perfectly ironic and merrily nightmarish as you could want from this concept.  

The Dolls are on point, but despite its generous helping of gorey setpieces, what makes DOLLS special aren’t really its genre goods so much as its general ambiance. There’s something which will be either immediately intoxicating or immediately alienating about its odd mix of kid’s movie, dark fable, classic horror, and schlocky 80’s gimmick killer movie. I think perhaps even more than he really intended to, Gordon managed to find a look and a tone which feel distinctly old-fashioned in their sensibilities, without really being meaningfully old-fashioned in execution. A key part of that is probably the score by multi-instrumentalist and occasional composer Fuzzbee Morse (I’ll pause for a minute while you savor how wonderful that name is; he also did GHOULIES II), which just drips with a sense of knowing magical mischief, and another part is the cinematography by Mac Ahlberg (RE-ANIMATOR, PRISON, STRIKING DISTANCE), which captures the gothic grandeur of the excellent manor set with a unassumingly vivid casualness that smacks of a child’s focus and point-of-view.

But DOLLS isn’t really a movie which is defined by its technical qualities; like any good fairy tale, if it reaches you, it’s because of some essential essence that flickers through the conscious mind and takes up somewhere deep beneath the surface. Or, it doesn’t; Ebert, at the time, praised the film’s setting and execution, but bemoaned that “dolls… look too inconsequential to scare us,” and that compared to RE-ANIMATOR and the weekend’s other major horror release, EVIL DEAD 2, DOLLS is” more elegant, civilized, artistic and clever than the first two movies, but less fun.” I think he might have missed that the intent here is to be fun, but by playing with a different set of rules than the anarchic, button-pushing RE-ANIMATOR or EVIL DEAD. But maybe he got it and it just didn’t work for him. I suspect you must have, as the movie does, some fundamental and stubborn love of old things, of dusty old children’s books and corny old puppets from the distant past which seem stodgy until you dig in and realize how depraved they really are. If that’s not your bag, DOLLS still gamely offers plenty of superficial genre delights, and makes each kill a memorable and imaginative meal -- but for me, anyway, that’s just the icing on the cake. There are a million movies which offer that. What makes DOLLS special is its unique desire to compliment its 80’s horror trappings with something darker, older, and --in an odd way-- more innocent. It’s a funny, silly film in a lot of ways, but it’s quite serious about that impulse, and it makes the experience a singularly satisfying one with no real obvious peer among films of its era.   

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	They Walk. They Talk. They Kill.
TITLE ACCURACY	Yup, Dolls confirmed.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None; apparently there was some appetite for it from Gordon, but it never happened.
REMAKE?	None, although there is a 2002 Japanese film of the same name by Takashi Kitano, which improbably stars CREEPY’s Hidetoshi Nishijima.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Killer Toys / Gimmick Killers
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna… Charles Band?
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No, unless you want to count the stuffed bear incident.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Something along these lines, sort of.
CREEPY DOLLS?	Oh. Hell yeah. Enough to justify this category all by itself, even though it hasn’t seen a lot of play these last two years.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	You neglect the magical innocence of childhood at your fuckin’ peril, bub.

The Arrival (1991) aka The Unwelcomed

The Arrival (1991) aka The Unwelcomed

Dir. David Schmoeller

Written by Daniel Ljoka

Starring Robert Sampson, Joseph Culp, John Saxon, Robin Frates

The years following David Schmoeller’s undisputed masterpiece TOURIST TRAP were littered with near-misses. He had a studio thriller with Morgan Fairchild which just didn’t catch on. A harrowing experience directing Klaus Kinski in the sleazy CRAWLSPACE, which didn’t add up to much commercial success. A castlebound religious horror effort which sat on the shelf for years before it was re-titled and released as the fourth movie in the unrelated CURSE series. Only the fun, kiddie-horror PUPPETMASTER from 1989 --a full ten years after TOURIST TRAP-- managed to come together into something that worked. And that was direct-to-video, and Full Moon video, no less, so not exactly a victory to shout from the rooftops. His follow up, THE ARRIVAL (retitled for video THE UNWELCOMED, and in West Germany, ALIANATOR 2) was a step up in the sense of actually getting at least some theatrical release. I can’t find any specific box office figures, although I know it was at least less successful than the $356,000 Hal Hartley’s TRUST made as the 32nd most lucrative film of 1991. Also I know it did less than the $519,000,000 that TERMINATOR 2 made the same year.

But great art is not always appreciated in its own time, so let’s not hold that against it. Considering it must have been made for almost nothing, this is in some ways technically better than you might imagine, in some ways, I guess. It is, I think, a somewhat more solid effort than his subsequent ambitious-but-disappointing NETHERWORLD, but unfortunately it has the same essential problem that one does: A semi-interesting premise and decent atmosphere are undermined by a poorly structured plot and a lack of sufficient genre goods.

Basically, this is a sci-fi horror tale of some kind of alien entity (seen only for a few scattered frames) who crash-lands on Earth and takes up residence in the body of bespectacled septuagenarian grandpa Max Page (Robert Sampson, Dean Halsey in RE-ANIMATOR). This seems to kill Max, but in the morgue he suddenly regains life, and his health improves in record time. It’s not long before he’s inappropriately but endearingly flirting with his nurse (Robin Frates, PUPPET MASTER and Talia Shire’s ONE NIGHT STAND, exuding an easy sense of endearing girl-next-door warmth). And then… he keeps getting better, starts to feel youthful. And then starts to look more youthful. And then also starts blacking out and drinking blood. OK, so one notable downside, then. Pretty soon, Max realizes he’s a danger to his family, and heads out on a cross-country road trip/killing spree with continually incredulous detective John Saxon in pursuit. All the while, he’s killing more women and getting younger, until finally he looks like hunky, leather-jacket-wearing motorcycle-riding Kenneth Anger alien fantasy Joseph Culp (Dr. Doom from the original 1994 FANTASTIC FOUR and son of Robert Culp).

There are definitely some decent things in here. The movie looks pretty good, for one thing, even if it negates a lot of its visual atmosphere with a chintzy keyboard score from noted Charles Band accomplice/brother Richard Band. There are some surreal, symbolic dream sequences at the beginning which look quite handsome, and a strange, dreamy ambiance to the editing and acting throughout. The acting is significantly better than you’d expect, with both Sampson and Culp giving performances which are subtly textured but intriguingly opaque. All that works in the movie’s favor, because what it kinda turns out to be is a sort of early blueprint for UNDER THE SKIN, with an alien predator who isn’t exactly evil, but has very little interest or aptitude for pretending to be the humans it preys on (it even figures out to turn into a hot guy to lure women). THE ARRIVAL even adds a little wrinkle to the UNDER THE SKIN formula, in that there’s obviously still a little of Max in there, or at least his memories. But how much, and what motivates this strange amalgam of human and alien intelligence?

This is what the alien looks like, which is actually pretty cool. Shame it's probably on-screen for less than a second in the whole film, and I had to meticulously screen-capture it by going frame by frame.

All that stuff is pretty good, and there is ample evidence that someone put at least a little thought and craft into the story. There’s a recurring motif of white roses for some reason, and hey, somebody knew enough to know it was both necessary and morally right to get Michael Pollard in there as a wacky witness that John Saxon talks to one time. It’s a pointless, worthless exposition role which just fills Saxon in on a few details we already knew, but Schmoeller (who has a brief cameo as a doctor himself) almost certainly lets Pollard ad-lib his way into by far the most entertaining scene of the movie. Still, there’s no getting around it: this whole enterprise could definitely use a little more whammy. Its dreamy, quiet middle is almost completely free of narrative tension, it’s just the alien wandering from place to place and occasionally eating a woman off-camera. Nothing in it is assertively bad, but it treads water for an inexcusably long time while waiting for the finale to finally introduce some conflict again. The film doesn’t even seem to settle on a main character til the final act, when it finally decides against all logic and reason that for some reason the alien ain’t that bad, and we should be worried mean ol’ John Saxon is going to stop his murder spree. How this makes any sense at all, I cannot say, but at least once it firmly comes down on the alien’s side, the filmmaking is strong enough to manage a little tension that most of the film lacks.

Even so, there’s just not a lot of meat on the bone, here (although the version I saw inexplicably had the “fucks” beeped out [though the “shits” are left in?], so maybe there’s another cut out there that delivers a few more exploitation goods.)* It has a few ideas and some little unique touches, but as with NETHERWORLD, the filmmaking isn’t quite strong enough for the dreamy, slow burn thing to resonate much. But also like NETHERWORLD, a thin through-line of dark humor is key to it squeaking over the finish line without turning into a total snooze. Pollard is a hoot, Stuart Gordon has a cameo as an unfortunate biker, and his wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon also steals a scene as a belligerent alcoholic trying to scam a free drink at a liquor store. Little asides like that add some much needed color. And it can be pretty funny to watch this weird alien guy make people uncomfortable by barely making an effort to fit in. Sometimes it’s also not-so-intentionally funny, like when the Cops spot this multiple-murderer leaving a house, and Saxon admonishes them not to follow him, but to just wait around where they are in the hopes that he’ll come back. Pretty crafty police work there. He does come back, although I bet the people he kills in the interim would appreciate a slightly more proactive approach. I’d ask the same of the film.

*Huh, the trailer actually has a scene of our alien in a bathtub full of blood with a naked women, which also isn’t in the version I saw, or if it was I don’t remember it. So maybe this review isn’t giving it a fair shot. They also tease a freaky naked three-way that they don’t deliver on but later make reference to. I gotta check the runtime on my 99 cent Dollar store DVD copy.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Fear is never an invited guest.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None. Wait, does Michael Pollard count? He was in BONNIE AND CLYDE.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: John Saxon!
• BOOBIES: No Well, not in the version I watched, but this trailer has some at the end, so I think there were some originally.
• MULLETS: Didn’t notice any.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: He usually kills his victims while making out with them, but the making out was consensual.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No.
• MONSTER: We see a very, very few fleeting glimpses of some sort of weird, I dunno, rock alien?
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: Definitely, although by aliens instead of ghosts, for once.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: Doesn’t really follow a standard slasher plotline, although he does kill using a scalpel.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yes, old man to Joseph Culp.
• VOYEURISM: Cops watch alien while they laboriously plan what should be an easy arrest.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Extremely high
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Hey old, man, wanna get your lovelife workin’ again? It’s as easy as letting an alien take over your body and turn you back into a retro-50’s motorcycling hunk! With one slight catch...
• TITLE ACCURACY: “THE ARRIVAL” makes some basic sense, the title I saw it under, “THE UNWELCOMED” doesn’t really.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.