Let’s face it: dolls are creepy. I think this feeling is aptly summarized in one of the most beloved episodes of The X-Files, “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”, where a psychic played by Peter Boyle gets weirded out by a murdered woman’s collection of dolls. “Why did this woman collect dolls? What was it about her life? Was it one specific moment where she suddenly said, I know… dolls. Or was it a whole series of things?”
There are shelves upon shelves of the things in the dark, old mansion at the center of 1986’s Dolls. This is a weird movie. Actually, it feels like two different cuts of the same movie were spliced together almost at random.
One of those movies would be a slightly dark kid’s adventure, ala The Goonies. Carrie Lorraine plays a little girl who has two deeply awful parents, played by Ian Patrick Williams and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon. The movie is well-served by Lorraine’s naturalist acting, and her lines seem to be tailored for such a performer: “What do you want from me? I’m seven years old.” As for Purdy-Gordon, she was the wife of the director at the time, and that is Stuart Gordon, of Re-Animator fame.
That credit alone should clue viewers into the other path this film will take, and that is a fairly gory and violent one. I have seen films of this vintage which are far more explicit in that regard, but this is still a very solid R. So then: not a kid’s adventure film.
The family will seek shelter in the creepy-ass mansion after their car breaks down in a storm with the most fickle rain machine I have seen. Turn the camera one way and there’s a deluge. Cut to the opposite angle and there’s nary a drop in sight.
The owners of the mansion are eccentric old doll creators played by Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason. I do not recall having seen Rolfe in anything before, but his performance brings dignity to the film. But I do remember Mason as the blind psychic in Don’t Look Now, and it was great to see her in something again.
Other shelter-seekers over the course of the night include Stephen Lee as a benign man-child. This overweight man looks more than a bit like Sean Astin gone to seed. He arrives with two hitchhikers he picked up, and these are played by Bunty Bailey and Cassie Stuart. Neither is very believable as a punk rocker, even if this is the 1980s low-budget film idea of a “punk”.
Bailey was briefly a thing in the film world after being the girl in a-Ha’s “Take On Me” video, a song that was recently used for no apparent reason in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Here, she has a deeply risible British accent I assume is meant to be Cockney. Maybe that is her real accent, but the fact it wavers in strength from line to line indicates otherwise.
The kid’s thread through the movie, as I have come to think of it, largely has Lorraine and Lee investigating weird going-on’s around the house, exploring it by candlelight. Their encounters with the evil, living dolls are largely benign. Admittedly, these things do try to kill Lee at one point, but Lorraine intervenes and they all play nice from that point on.
The other guests in the house do not have Lorraine to intervene for them, so they are killed off in various ways. Once again, the gore and violence could have been worse, but it is strong enough here to be excessively jarring in comparison to the other material. One moment that crossed a line for me is when one character rolls over somebody they think is only sleeping, only for that corpse to have an eye plucked of the socket and dangling around on the thread of its optic nerve.
The characters are pretty slow on the uptake, making them easy for the dolls to capture or kill. One character says, when they finally catch on to the situation, “Oh my God. They’re right…it’s the little people.” Alas, not an adaptation of the novel The Little People, which is about Nazi leprechauns. Believe it or not, I own a copy of that deeply strange paperback.
One area where the film excels are the special effects. I’m sure they would have used CGI if it had been cheap and readily available when this was made. Thank God it wasn’t, as a combination of marionettes, stop-motion and mechanical-controlled figures were employed. I love practical effects, and the stop-motion is especially effective. One effect I never quite figured out is how the unarticulated dolls’ heads change expressions in some scenes. Those isolated moments deeply unnerved me.
The movie was produced by Charles Band, who would go on to a kind of fame with the cult hit series Puppet Master. Given the physical effects work here, one can see a straight line from this film to a succession of movies centered around tiny toy killing machines.
Dolls isn’t the first film I have seen which scans as a kids’ movie but which has enough hard-R content in it to disqualify it as such. That element didn’t completely turn me off, but it kept me from completely losing myself in it. Even with that, there is still enough here to warrant a viewing by the curious, and the whole endeavor has a certain goofy charm.
Dir: Stuart Gordon
Starring Carrie Lorraine, Stephen Lee, Guy Rolfe
Watched as part of Arrow Video’s Enter the Video Store: Empire of Screams blu-ray box set