Dolls (1987)
The very first word yelled in this film is, “Wankers!” by a pair of ropey, hitchhiking, cockney punk rocker girls. Need more? The mythology of Dolls—Stuart Gordon’s Hansel and Gretel-homaging, killer-Toy Story, haunted house horror show—is simple. Random strangers get conveniently stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere, and must seek solace in a toy maker’s mysterious mansion, where they are typically murdered horribly, and promptly transformed into bad dollies. Here, a storm forces a bickering, fractured family to join the elderly, kindly, marionette-mad Gabriel, and his witchy wife, who lend a seemingly caring hand. Buggering around the mansion quickly becomes a slasher spectacular, with our gang getting cut up left, right, and centre by knife-wielding, bitey, stop-motion puppets that hit you with hammers, saw off your arms, gladly stab you in the back, and will merrily hacksaw your feet right off. Viewed from the perspective of Judy—a periodically daydreaming child, Dolls excels at establishing a schlocky, comedic tone, with some seriously eerie effects, and then cleverly juxtaposes it with savagely violent, blood-spattered death scenes—clashing ’em together with childlike wonder, and a playfully mischievous singsong spirit. Stephen Lee is an actor who resembles a chubbier Sean Astin, who I knew solely as Duffy—the bent copper from RoboCop 2, who gets his mush smashed repeatedly into some arcade game screens. Here, he plays the childlike, good Samaritan, Ralph.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of Dolls is that its nasty offings are so ferocious, wicked, and ingeniously well-designed and executed—almost too well for a film that features a fantasy werebear mauling. There’s a mean, rich stepmother, skeletal, melting, pixie-goblins, a chatty, bite-happy, power tool wielding Mr. Punch—who suffers his own American Werewolf in London meets Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches metamorphosis, executioner elves, sinister playthings with spiky, Barbarella teeth’d mouths that curl up and across menacingly, and somebody blown to bits by a merciless firing squad of toy soldiers. The most haunting image is perhaps Isabel, who, after being turned into a porcelain-headed doll-woman, must collect her own eyeballs from a pool of blood.
Prepare for the longest night in the world—and also one of the shortest features. The most appealing quality of Dolls, initially anyway, and aside from already digging the director and synopsis, was its snappy, 77-minute running time. It’s a beautifully brief film, that proves a straightforward, grotesque fairy tale can be told on film in under 80 minutes, in an extremely satisfyingly manner. In fact, why aren’t all movies this length? Except Terminator 2—that’s exactly right.
Scarious Artists 