Dolls (1987)

What's It About?

On a dark and stormy night little Judy Bower, her shithead father, and evil stepmother find themselves stranded on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere.  They seek shelter from the storm in a nearby mansion where they meat a kindly old couple, Gabriel Hartwicke and his wife Hillary.  Gabriel is a toymaker and his home is filled with hundreds upon thousands of dolls.  The old man takes a shine to Judy and gives her a Punch (of Punch and Judy) doll to keep her company in lieu of her stuffed bear which her stepmother threw into the woods.  A trio of people, also seeking shelter from the storm, arrive soon after Judy and her family.  It's two punk-rock girls and a chubby lovable oaf of an American named Ralph. 

The guest are all seen to bedrooms for the night but soon the various dolls and other toys about the house start coming to life and attacking people.  Is Gabriel actually the kindly toymaker he seems to be or something far more sinister?

Is It Any Good?

The first year I did this column I reviewed 31 films made, produced, or at least distributed by Full Moon Features.  As such I feel like I can spot the greasy hand of Charles Band in anything.  This is an Empire Pictures film so Band's involvement is already confirmed but even if I walked into this movie halfway through I'd know it was him.

Throughout the years of Full Moon it's easy to spot a trend of sorts involving various tiny villains.  From puppets, to toys, to worry dolls, gingerbread cookies, futuristic cops, '80s babes, deformed fetuses, and even dwarf versions of the universal monsters. The benefits of this are obviously budgetary but I've had a working theory that Charles Band also has a very specific fetish for small things.  The reason I bring this up is because Dolls was either the first manifestation of this fetish or the project that awakened it within him.

Dolls is directed by underrated legend Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator and Robot Jox fame and written by Ed Naha, who wrote Troll and C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D.  There's a lot of elements here that would be the basis of nearly every Full Moon film.  We've got our palatial setting, cast of awful shithead characters to die, innocent protagonist, and a lovable goof to maybe die or not depending on the movie.  We've got our basic morality tale, our tiny stab-happy monstrosities, and a plot that serves to only set up set-pieces.

The lead actress is not great but she's almost impossibly young, the rest of the cast are suitably hateable aside from Stephen Lee as Ralph who is supremely likeable but also entirely needling in his awkwardness.

The movie kind of works as a dry run for the Puppet Master movies, though what this film lacks in the uniqueness of Puppet Master it more than makes up for it in actual quality which the Puppet Master films sorely lack.  It certainly falls into the R-rated movie for twelve-year-olds model that Band succeeded on for as long as he did but it's almost a childrens' movie in its own right if it wasn't so bloody and persistantly terrifying.

There's a lot of stuff to love in this movie but two gags really stuck out.  In one, Judy daydreams that her stuffed bear comes out of the forest as an actual bear sized teddy bear which then rips its skin away to reveal a very fake-looking monster bear that kills her step-parents only for her to go "Teddy!" and it to shrug sheepishly.  The second is a bit where a character comes to bed with a partner we know to be dead covered in a sheet, unseen to this character who talks to their dead companion as though they were alive is a blood stain that blossoms on the sheet covering their face.

Dolls isn't the best Stuart Gordon film by far but it may scratch the itch for a lot of people who have found the Puppet Master series well below their expectations of it based on the premise. 

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Buy it.