Doll in the Dark

Director: Alejandro Daniel
Writer: Alejandro Daniel
Producer: Alejandro Daniel, Linda Ayr Calvo
Cast: Amy Crowdis, Robin Lord Taylor, Josh Caras
Country: USA
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: https://www.facebook.com/dollinthedark

Doll in the Dark is an obscure US indie which was shot back in 2009 as The Melancholy Fantastic, played a few festivals in 2011 and surfaced on American VOD and cable in 2012. It generated some good reviews and a bit of fan appreciation then pretty much disappeared.

In November 2016, the film resurfaced under its new, more marketable title when Safecracker Pictures released it on UK DVD/VOD, exploiting the casting of a pre-Gotham Robin Lord Taylor. If you like Taylor’s portrayal of proto-Penguin Oswald Cobblepot, you will definitely also enjoy seeing him in this movie. It’s not one of those situations where a subsequently well-known name has a small role that renders a film inconsequential except for the most extreme fanboys/girls of that actor. Taylor here is 50% of what is essentially a two-hander and his character has the same sort of restrained craziness as Cobblepot. Just younger and less sociopathic.

[Update: Since posting this review, I have been told by the director that Doll in the Dark is a heavily re-edited version, not just a retitling. - MJS]

Amy Crowdis is Melanie Crow, a teenage girl living alone after both her parents died. She has a very creepy life-size doll which she treats as a real person. It’s a home-made, skeletal affair of stuffed limbs and torso surmounted with a cracked ceramic head. Sometimes it sits on the sofa, sometimes it’s in the kitchen, sometimes it rides shotgun in Melanie’s car. There is absolutely no suggestion that the doll is actually alive or possessed or has any independent life. This is not a supernatural tale.

The doll never moves, except for a couple of shots when an arm flops down. Noticeably, we also never see Melanie move the doll, except for one scene later on when she carries it upstairs. Removing that shot would have kept the creepy factor higher, but it’s already pretty high so no great loss.

Melanie meets Taylor’s skinny-jeaned emo character in a public library. It’s quite some time until we find out his name is Dukken, which I assumed was Dougan until the credits. Although it seems odd that we have no scene where he tells her his name, that lacuna is actually justified by a reveal near the end. Dukken and Melanie’s paths cross a couple of times and they start spending time together. Dukken is puzzled by Melanie’s doll but not freaked out by it because he thinks it’s just part of her ‘sick taste’, like decorating her Christmas tree with razor blades.

What we have here is an offbeat love story. Sort of. It’s what happens when someone whose freakish unconventionality is a deliberate choice meets someone whose idiosyncratic, individualistic behaviour and rejection of the norm stems from genuine mental health issues. Melanie is very, very cute but in a damaged goods sort of way. Somethin’ ain’t right.

There are other oddities of behaviour. Melanie seems to survive largely on pink ‘snowball’ marshmallows. When she does vary her diet to include a PBJ sandwich, she uses a large carving knife to spread the peanut butter. She watches 8mm public domain cartoons in a car in a barn, her own private drive-in. Although mostly she just talks to an ugly, weird doll. And occasionally the doll talks back.

This doll, we eventually realise, represents her mother.

Because we see everything through Melanie’s eyes, and because it’s obvious right from the start that she ain’t right in the head, she is effectively an unreliable narrator. As the film progresses, we will start to question exactly what is or isn’t real. All credit to Argentinian-born director Alejandro Daniel, this is well-handled and effective. What really sells this unnerving ambiguity is an absolutely bravura performance by Crowdis who has many solo scenes acting opposite just the doll prop. Taylor’s role is more reactive and his character necessarily shallower, since Dukkan’s persona is his own creation, but it’s a fine performance and I can well believe that this is what persuaded the producers of Gotham to cast him.

There are some areas where the film does unravel slightly, not least that it’s not made clear until well into the third act that this is actually happening around Christmas. Most scenes take place in Melanie’s home or open fields and roads so we don't get any confirmation that this is actually the holiday season and the decorations in her house are not a further represention of her detachment from reality.

This is only a short feature, running less than 70 minutes without credits, and thus doesn’t outstay its welcome, reaching its satisfying third act without resort to padding or unnecessary subplots. Though the final scenes offer some sort of resolution, even a happy ending, we know enough about Melanie (or little enough, if you like) to retain doubts about where this will go after the credits roll. What looks like resolution and catharsis could just be redirection and hiatus.

If that last sentence sounded a tad pretentious, then be aware that Doll in the Dark does on occasion steer dangerously close to the naively mannered angst of sixth form poetry. There are musings on death, there’s a (thankfully brief) discussion of Nietzsche, a copy of The Stranger by Albert Camus is a significant prop and there is a length quotation from Kierkegaard in the credits which seems random now but which originally explained and justified the title.

Fortunately, any time that it looks like Doll in the Dark might tip over into pretension some sort of narrative self-righting mechanism steers it back on course. This is an enjoyable, interesting film which is genuinely thought-provoking. You don’t have to be a loner goth to enjoy it.

Filmed in snowy Connecticut, the movie was offered for sale at the 2012 AFM under the title The Christmas Stranger but doesn’t seem to have been released as that. Director Daniel, who used the screen name ‘AD Calvo’ for the original release, previously made a supernatural romance variously known as The Other Side of the Tracks and The Haunting of Amelia. Since completing this picture he has made three more horror films – The Midnight Game, House of Dust and Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl – plus a comedy thriller, The Missing Girl.

Josh Caras, Geneva Carr and David Pirrie make up the solid, if sparse and sparingly used, supporting cast, with Shirley Knight as the voice of the doll.

Bizarrely, the film has ended up on the IMDB twice, listed as both 2011 and 2016. This may lead to some confusion, but it should be pretty obvious, just from the stills, that Robin Lord Taylor made this several years before the first season of Gotham in 2014.

Doll in the Dark is available to download from the Safecracker website.

MJS rating: B+

Wishbaby

Director: Stephen W Parsons
Writer: Stephen W Parsons
Producer: Simon Sprackling
Cast: Tiana Benjamin, Doc Brown, Fenella Fielding
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Wishbaby is a powerful, original, mesmerising film which may, I suspect, be seen in retrospect as one of the core titles of the British Horror Revival. An initial viewing suggests that it could be important in defining the subgenre in the same way that The Last Horror Movie, Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later are.

EastEnders’ Tiana Benjamin (also in Harry Potter IV) stars as Maxine, a 15-year-old black schoolgirl from a rough background. With no father and an absent mother, she lives with her older (half-?)brother Colin (rapper/comedian Doc Brown) in a squat in an empty office building. Men climbing the stairs to visit the Russian pimp on the floor above occasionally mistake her for a whore. Colin is a basically honest guy, holding down a job as a motorcycle courier and looking out for Max, although he’s hooked on meth.

Maxine inhabitants the world of today’s urban teens, the sort of environment where phones are routinely passed around to show happy-slapping videos. She doesn’t always attend school, sometimes bunking off to hang around the local ice rink, and she is resentful of the social workers who (as she sees it) interfere in things. But Max has a sense of moral values, so when she and her friend Jeanette (Leona Ekembe) see four boys attacking an old lady in a subway, she chases them away and the two girls help the old lady home.

Sometimes films stand or fall on the strength of one casting decision and in this case the film stands proud because casting Fenella Fielding in this role - Eve - was a stroke of genius. She is absolutely perfect. Now in her mid-seventies, she retains her slightly husky, breathy voice with its perfect diction and she emanates exactly the air of faded, genteel oddness that the part requires. Not eccentric as such, not batty, in fact slightly unnerving. She could have gone over-the-top, she could have been a descendent of Carry On Screaming’s Valeria Watt but rather she underplays the whole thing wonderfully and if this role can be related to any other in her career it’s actually (and bizarrely) Dougal and the Blue Cat that springs to mind.

In that once-seen-never-forgotten theatrical spin-off from The Magic Roundabout, an uncredited Fielding supplied the voice of an unseen being who goaded and coaxed the titular azure feline Buxton in his efforts to take over the garden by first flattery and then force. No-one who has ever seen Dougal and the Blue Cat can be left in any doubt that it’s an allegory for Naziism and Fielding’s cultured, coercing tones - serious, even sensual - are a major part of the adult subtext within that children’s film. When you realise or discover that she also provided the uncredited voice of the Village’s public address system in some episodes of The Prisoner, it adds even more layers to her role in Dougal and the Blue Cat. And hence, somewhat circuitously, to this one.

Her stand-out Carry On role may mark her in the cultural zeitgeist as a kooky vamp but in fact she can be creepy without being kooky (and mysterious without being ooky). She is simply magnificent in Wishbaby, a stand-out performance in a uniformly excellent cast.

The thing is this: the reason that the youths attacked Eve was because she was pushing an old-fashioned pram which they had spotted contained not a real baby but a doll. An ugly blue doll. Max at first sees this as a sure sign that Eve is batty but when the youths who attacked Eve are attacked in a mysterious way, the teenager starts to wonder whether the wishbaby may have some real power after all - and she lets Eve teach her how to make one of her own. (The youths are attacked, one by one, after breaking into a recording studio one night. Coincidentally, a late-night, empty recording studio - albeit a slightly classier one - was also the setting for Eitan Arrusi’s Reverb, released to theatres mere weeks before Wishbaby came to DVD. Even more coincidentally, both films had the same camera assistant, James Friend.)

The important point here is that the wishbaby itself does not do the killing. This is not really a killer doll movie. Although there are a few scenes of limited movement by the doll and a range of interchangeable heads with various expressions, this is not a ‘living toy’ film. No, the perpetrator of these acts is ‘The Governess’,a figure from Eve’s upper class childhood. (In flashbacks, young Eve is played by producer Simon Sprackling’s daughter Liberty.)

Played with beautiful understatement, perfect elegance and just a hint of sub-dom danger by Claire Cox (ex-RSC with a long list of TV credits), the Governess is the real threat here, a mysterious and deadly supernatural entity who can best be summed up as a very English version of Ring’s Sadako. It’s not clear what she does; that’s one of the reasons why she is so scary (and yet beguiling too). I mean, it’s not clear who she is but it’s even less clear what she does. People see her; she appears, just not to everyone. Her appearance in a stuck lift with the two social workers is especially frightening because of the claustrophobic containment in that scene and the impossibility of (non-supernatural) access. (The male social worker is played by Tony Marshall who was Nelson the barman in Life on Mars. His female colleague is Sakuntala Ramanee who was in a 1989 Doctor Who adventure and played a teacher in one season of Grange Hill.)

Clever editing and smart direction leave us in no doubt that something is happening without being as simplistic as showing us reality, any level of reality. There is some way in which people kill their friends because they perceive them to be doll-faced nightmares but it’s really not even as simplistic as that. Furthermore, the Governess is not just a vehicle for others’ wishes, she is a being with her own agenda, not just to serve but also to bewitch - specifically to bewitch Colin. That blue doll may give the film its title and its publicity image but it is the Governess that sticks in your imagination, raising questions of morality and reality with every slight turn of her perfectly sculpted head.

At its core, Wishbaby is a Faustian tale. At first Max uses the power of her own wishbaby to deal with the problems that make her life a misery: the social workers, the pimp upstairs. But while she may control the doll, she doesn’t control the Governess. And wishing for her mum to return may take things too far. Is that even her mum? Colin thinks not. First-time actress Ann Faulkner is particularly disturbing as Max and Colin’s mother: she looks scary even before she starts doing scary things.

It is the nature of Faustian tales that the Faust character loses control, and this story sees sympathetic characters die before climaxing in a savage and desperate battle between Colin and the being who may or may not be his own mother. This is a frightening tale yet also a beguiling, intriguing, fascinating one. And the whole thing is set against the background of inner-city, working class life, as defiantly British as Urban Ghost Story or Colin. This is the epitome of the British Horror Revival.

First-time director Stephen W Parsons does a fantastic job in creating both the realism of Max and Colin’s grim, urban world and the faded upper class shadows of Eve’s former life, while brilliantly mixing in the unnerving work of the wishbabies and the Governess. Previous to this he has worked as a composer for twenty-odd years, his notable credits including Food of the Gods II, Split Second, the Simon Sprackling-directed Funny Man, Luke Goss-starring gangster biopic Charlie, dodgy faux-sequel Another 9½ Weeks and the glorious Howling II: Stirba, Werewolf Bitch (aka Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf).

Sprackling has mostly been working on DVD-extra documentaries since he made Funny Man in 1994, some of them produced by Jonathan Sothcott, who takes executive producer credit here. Parsons’ wife Jacqueline was associate producer. Parsons shares credit for the score with Francis Haines, who composed the cemetery theme in Return of the Living Dead. Artists on the soundtrack include Essency, Dat Boy Aktiv, the Cabal, SLG, Undawurld, Klub Mundi and Doc Brown himself.

Neill Gorton is unfortunately misspelt ‘Neil’ on his credit as Special FX Co-ordinator. Sarah Lockwood, who has worked on Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, is credited with ‘SFX make-up’ while regular make-up and hair was handled by fashion stylist Jay Turnbull, whose work has graced the cover of Bizarre magazine. Cinematographer David G Griffiths also photographed Journal of a Contract Killer. Dennis Madden, who has lit videos for Dannii Minogue and Prince, gets an ‘additional cinematography’ credit as does Luke ‘not related to Jack’ Cardiff. Madden and Sprackling subsequently collaborated on The Reeds. The editor was video artist Anke Trojan.

While many independent British horror films have difficulty getting publicity, Wishbaby actually made it into the nationals twice in the month of its release, although not necessarily for the right reasons. Ann Faulkner was charged with the murder of her partner of 13 years, who was killed when she drove over him following an argument. But in April 2009 she was found not guilty and also acquitted of manslaughter. Then a couple of weeks later Parsons himself was in the papers, explaining how he had asked the BBFC to increase the certification of the film.

Originally passed as a 15, Parsons successfully argued that it should be an 18, saying, “I deliberately set out to make a horror film for an adult audience” and citing the happy-slapping camera-phone scene as something which could be copied by kids. Which was good publicity for Wishbaby but, in all honesty, the BBFC were doing the director a favour because there is no way that this is an 18. It’s creepy, scary, has some very brief drug use and a bit of violence but nothing that a 15-year-old kid shouldn’t see.

But don’t let that put you off. This is a powerful, impressive British horror movie and should be high on your list of movies-to-see if you have any interest at all in the current healthy state of British horror cinema.

The DVD from 4 Digital Media includes a trailer and two short films. Rough Magik is a 40-minute Lovecraft tale from 2000, written and produced by Parsons, directed by Jamie Payne and starring Paul ‘Avon’ Darrow. Karma Magnet is a 17-minute thriller from 2008, produced by Sothcott, directed by Martin Kemp and starring his brother Gary.

MJS rating: A-

Review originally posted 24th April 2009

Malice@Doll

Director: Keitaro Motonaga
Writer: Chiaki J Konaka
Year of release: 2001
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: DVD screener

In the future, in a long-abandoned entertainment complex, the robotic prostitutes (or ‘Dolls’) and various functional/administrative robots continue their now meaningless existence. Then one day, one of the Dolls - Malice - becomes human.

That’s the premise of this extraordinary and beautifully realised fable. In essence it’s a unique twist on the Pinocchio story, with robots becoming human against their wishes (initially). Malice Doll is sent by the head robot, Joe Admin, to be repaired when fluid starts leaking from her eye. But something bizarre happens and when Malice regains consciousness she is, well, conscious. She looks different (though still beautiful), her body is soft and pliant, she can feel pain - both physical and emotional. She has become human.

The other Dolls initially distrust her, but one by one succumb to the desire to change, as do the non-humanoid robots which attend them. The humanity is spread, virus-like, by kissing (“It is all I can do,” says Malice numerous times) but the other dolls and robots become deformed and monstrous. An additional, constant threat is a destroyer robot, Devo Leukocyte, which prowls the corridors - and once the Dolls are human they can feel pain and even die. Eventually Malice progresses beyond humanity and becomes a spirit, soaring away up through the complex.

I’m not 100 per cent certain what it all means, but Malice@Doll is a magical piece of computer animation with a mystical, PK Dick-ian theme, exploring the difference between ‘robot’ and ‘human’ in the way that Hollywood tosh like A.I. conspicuously failed to do. The emptiness of the entertainment complex and of the Dolls’ lives is wonderfully presented. There is no clue as to when or why the complex was abandoned or whether humanity still exists at all. The Dolls and robots have no real idea why they’re there - as they apparently never did - and with the patience of machines they are simply waiting for something or someone to arrive.

Why/how does Malice transform from Doll to human? I don’t know and I’m not sure it matters. It relates in some way to a ghost(?) of a little girl which she sees, but more than that I cannot say. There may be a (M)Alice in Wonderland connection here as screenwriter Chiaki J Konaka also worked on the TV series Alice 6 and the Playstation game and anime series Alice in Cyberland (as well as writing some Ultraman episodes and Evil Dead Trap 2). But other than the image of a rabbit at one point, it’s not immediately evident.

Rendered in 3D CGI, the animation is perfectly suited to the stilted body-movements and mask-like visages of the Dolls and the robots. Interestingly, the ‘camera’ is locked off on every shot, making the film more theatrical and staged. The final sequence, when Malice becomes a spirit, mixes computer animation with traditional cel animation to interesting effect. The character design is credited to Shinobu Nishioka while Yasu Moriki was responsible for ‘creature and conceptual design.’

I speak as someone with a pathological dislike of anime (don’t ask me to explain it: I love Japanese movies, I love cartoons, but Japanese cartoons leave me cold). But Malice@Doll doesn’t seem like anime to me, more like a puppet movie (Konaka has expressed a fondness for Czech animation - Jiri Trnka and the like). Perhaps the new wave of CGI animation emerging from Japan will find a whole new audience in the west, previously put off by western marketing of anime.

Malice@Doll is something new and different and should be watched, and enjoyed, with an open mind.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 23rd December 2009

The Horror of the Dolls

Director: Shane Davey
Writers: Shane Davey, Andrew Tomlinson
Producer: Shane Davey
Cast: Lucy Chalkley, Richard Brinkmann, Jessica Rudd
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener

Life’s like that, isn’t it? (As the great Vivian Stanshall once smoothly murmured into a microphone.) Exactly one year ago I added a review of a short film called Slight Complication which was made and sent to me (on VHS) in 1998 and had sat on my shelf ever since.

A few months later, I was contacted by that film’s director Shane Davey (he probably has a Google alert set up for his name - who doesn’t?) who is now a successful director of music videos. Turns out he was finishing up his debut feature film, which had the love-it title The Horror of the Dolls. To cap it all, the cast included my mate Jenny Evans from Evil Aliens.

So now I’ve had a chance to watch the film which premiered at the ICA in London after winning the ‘28 Days Later Feature Film Challenge.’ And it’s a very hard movie to review fairly. Not least because it was made as part of this challenge, in which film-makers were given an individual title and a month to make a film (of at least 70 minutes length) from scratch.

This shows in the improvised dialogue, which sometimes works well (mostly monologues or two-hander scenes with little actual dialogue) but sometimes seems stilted and artificial - which is kind of ironic. I’ve never been a fan of improv or even semi-improv (can’t stand Mike Leigh films, for instance) although it can sometimes work in a mockumentary format, as per This is Spinal Tap, Take Me to Your Leader or the interview segments of I, Zombie. But it’s clear that the best way to make improvised dialogue work is to shoot enormous amounts of footage and then spend weeks editing that down to something feature-length with a narrative structure. Clearly neither of those processes is viable with a four-week film limit.

There is also a tremendous amount of slow-motion in The Horror of the Dolls, which is I suppose an artistically viable way of filling a 70-minute slot (it actually runs about 85 minutes). What there isn’t is a truly coherent narrative or fully developed characters, but then that’s the territory of speed-film-making, I guess. It’s easy when you’re making a short film under a time restriction. A short film just needs a concept. There’s an old observation that most people who “have an idea for a film” don’t have an idea for a film, they just have an idea for a scene. You can turn an idea for a scene into a short film, even when you’re under the gun. But a feature, that’s a different matter.

So what is The Horror of the Dolls about? Well, it’s about a tower block and is set in a real location, called Balfront Tower. This is a hideous concrete monstrosity, a brutalist hymn to absolutely everything that was wrong with post-war architecture. It looks like it was designed using sticklebricks with the intention of housing as many of the city’s undesirables as possible. I bet it has vending machines that sell heroine. I imagine that when applying to live there the form has a section called ‘occupation’ which offers two choices: ‘crack whore’ and ‘other’. This is all totally unfair of course but architecture makes statements and the architecture of the Balfront Tower makes the following statement: “Give me your watch and your phone, man, or I’ll cut you.”

It was designed in 1963 by a fellow actually named Erno Goldfinger. Hello! There’s a clue there! No good can come from employing someone with the same name as a Bond villain. I mean look at the thing. It’s abundantly clear that if you key in the correct sequence on the lift buttons the roof opens up and it launches a nuclear missile straight at Paris.

When will you architects learn?!

Anyway, some sort of evil corporate entity wants to clear out the residents in some way and for some reason, although this is clearer from the synopsis than the actual movie, where all we get is a French woman in a red coat and an older woman with frizzy hair (Kari Frette and Anna Savva). They’re up to no good, that’s for certain.

On the top floor of the tower lives an old guy called Frank (Joerg Stadler: Mrs Meitlemeihr, Hannibal Rising) who is a bit weird but harmless. He collects dolls and his flat is basically full of them, mostly in states of damage and disrepair. The film opens with Frank’s murder by a creepy young bloke (Richard Brinkmann, who played various roles in a little-known CITV series called Captain Mack) something which is subsequently discovered by a council worker sweeping the walkways who has found a doll and takes it up the the old guy.

An off-duty policemen (I think) who lives in the building starts investigating the situation and contacts Frank’s daughter Jess (Jessica Rudd) who comes back to the tower and hitches up with and old flame. Or something. Meanwhile local resident Lucy (Lucy Chalkey, who plays the stepmom in CBBC fantasy kidcom Jinx) is trying to drum up support for her campaign to stop the evil corporate entity from doing whatever it plans to do, although her girlfriends seem largely disinterested or even keen to sell up and move out. Most of them seem to be artists for some reason, although one plays the cello. Jennifer Evans plays Lucy’s room-mate in an early scene that doesn’t really do anything except introduce us to the character, although she does get to reappear briefly, silently and dramatically later on.

One of her pals is Hannah, played by Hannah Farmer, who looks a bit like Sally Phillips from Smack the Pony, only with a permanent frown and lots of tattoos. After some further deaths, the film’s climax is a quite brutal fight between the never-named killer and Hannah who turns out to be not just really, really angry but also an adept kickboxer.

In among all this is a recurring motif of a creepy doll. In probably the cleverest (and certainly the most original) scene of the film, a police forensics officer (Mostyn James) carrying a crate of evidence from Frank’s flat accidentally drops it off a walkway and, on recovering the items from the ground below, finds that one large envelope has burst open and the contents are nowhere to be seen.

The contents was evidently a doll, subsequently found by Jess who recognises it from her childhood. This doll crops up, usually unnoticed by people, in further scenes and there is one absolutely superb, literally blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment which shows us that this is (probably) more than a doll. More than that, neither the film nor the filmmakers are telling.

The thing about The Horror of the Dolls is that it only works if you approach it in the right way. If you just want a horror movie, then you’ll think it’s a load of pretentious, half-arsed twaddle. But if you (a) consider its provenance and genesis and (b) are yourself pretentious enough to use words like ‘provenance’ and ‘genesis’ then it is possible to consider the film as considerably more avant-garde than it might at first appear.

This is not a movie which sets out to tell a story with clearly defined characters and a coherent, cohesive narrative so don’t look for those things. This is an impressionist film, as much about style as substance. For example, Shane Davey has a distinctive fondness for letting the soundtrack of a scene run in real time while jumping backwards and forwards in the visuals so that often people are speaking while not speaking (if you see...). There is also, at one point, and for absolutely no reason that I can see, an extraordinary sequence of three young woman, covered in blood, writhing in terror on the ground. Fabulous imagery: no obvious connection with anything.

Given the same premise but much more time to develop a script, I have no doubt that Davey and co-writer Andy Tomlinson (also credited as production designer and who may be the standby props guy from Tormented if the IMDB can be believed) could fashion a more satisfyingly structured plot and flesh out the characters. If they wanted to. Maybe they don’t.

Nevertheless, The Horror of the Dolls proves to be an intriguing - and, in a curious way, satisfying - entry into the British Horror Revival. It has that grimy, gritty, urban milieu that was managed so well in the criminally undervalued Wishbaby and which harks back to such 1990s horrors as Urban Ghost Story and Downtime.

Many of the characters are unnamed and the credits, though arty, are utterly unreadable. Working from the IMDB, cinematographer Sara Deane has DPed a bunch of other indies and was part of the camera crew on big pictures including Bend It Like Beckham, United 93 and that bizarre 2007 BBC modern-day version of Frankenstein. Visual effects are credited to Eren Ozkural who has various credits on Beyond the Rave, F and Forest of the Damned 2.

I always try to judge films on how well the filmmakers achieved what they set out to do bearing in mind what they had available. That’s somewhat tricky for The Horror of the Dolls because what the filmmakers had available directly affected what they set out to do. This film won the competition for the purposes of which it was made, so I believe it can be considered a success but I do also have to take into consideration the movie as a movie and what audiences can get from it who neither know nor care about the 28 Days Later Feature Film Challenge. Hence...

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 1st November 2010

Legacy of Dracula

Director: Michio Yamamoto
Writer: Ei Ogawa, Yo Nagano
Producer: Fumio Tanaka, Tomoyuki Tanaka
Cast: Kayo Matsuo, Akira Nakao, Yukiko Kobayashi
Year of release: 1970
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: R2 DVD (Artsmagic)

The third part of Toho’s unconnected ‘vampire trilogy’, usually known as The Vampire Doll, comes to DVD (courtesy of Artsmagic’s Shadow Warrior label) under the new title Legacy of Dracula: The Bloodthirsty Doll, in order to match the other two films, Lake of Dracula: The Bloodthirsty Eyes and Evil of Dracula: The Bloodthirsty Roses. Once again there’s no sign of Dracula in this film - in fact, there’s not even anyone like him - but then the two dolls that appear briefly have little relevance to the plot and certainly aren’t bloodthirsty!

On a stormy night, Kazuhiko Sagawa (Atsuo Nakamura: Kwaidan, The Water Margin) goes to see his girlfriend Yuko Nonomura, having been away for six months. But the only inhabitants of the spooky old house are hulking, mute servant Genzo (Kaku Takashina: Lake of Dracula) and Yuko’s mother, Shido Nonomura (Yoko Minamikaze/Minazake - both names are given here), who informs Kazuhiko that Yuko was killed two weeks earlier when her car was hit by a landslide.

That night, Kazuhiko sees Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi: Destroy All Monsters, Yog - Monster from Space) and follows her to her grave, where she begs him to kill her...

A few days later, Kazuhiko’s sister Keiko (Kayo Matsuo: Gate of Flesh, Baby Cart at the River Styx), concerned at not having heard from him, sets off for the Nonomura house with her boyfriend Hiroshi Takagi (Akira Nakao: Commander Takaki Aso in three late 1990s Godzilla films, the Prime Minister in Godzilla X Mechagodzilla, and Lord Donjo in Ninja Wars). Mrs Nonomura says that Kazuhiko left the day after he arrived, but at Yuko’s grave Keiko finds her brother’s bloodstained cufflink. Hiroshi pretends that their car is broken in order to engineer an overnight stay in the house.

Mrs Nonomura and Genzo do their best to prevent Hiroshi from exploring, and Keiko finds a broken ceramic doll which Kazuhiko had bought as a present for Yuko, then is shocked to see Yuko in her room. The next day, the young couple go to the local town hall where the clerk who shows them Yuko’s death certificate relates the story of the family ‘curse’: twenty years ago the whole Nonomura family were shot by an intruder, except for Genzo the servant and Shido, who was traumatised, tried to commit suicide (hence the ugly scar on her neck) and then gave birth to Yuko nine months later.

After meeting with Dr Yamaguchi (Jun Usami), the local medic who signed the death certificate, Keiko returns to the house, while Hiroshi investigates Yuko’s grave. He has been told that she was buried without being cremated - and in her exhumed coffin he finds only a lifesize doll. Hiroshi believes that Yuko has become a vampire, but Mrs Nonomura is adamant that it is merely her spirit which walks abroad - it’s possible that there are subtler differences in their points of view which do not translate too well into English. What Mrs Nonomura does not tell Kazuhiko is that she and Dr Yamaguchi have sedated Keiko and locked her in the cellar with Yuko and the half-eaten body of her brother.

Chi o Suu Ningyo is probably the best of the trilogy. It was actually the first to be filmed and, as the original publicity on this DVD shows, was marketed internationally as a double bill with the second film, Lake of Dracula. Fortunately there is no sign of the tall but less than talented Mori Kishida and his terrifying white polo neck jumper in this movie, although it does use some of the same sets (described by Hiroshi as “a splendid, authentic foreign-style residence”!). It’s probably the most Japanese of the three, with Yuko’s condition - blue-ish skin, golden eyes, no fangs - owing as much to Japanese folklore as western horror films. There’s a super, and quite startling, shot near the end when she attacks somebody by scooting forward in a fast series of jump-cuts before plunging a knife into the victim’s neck.

This is another good-looking transfer although it seems darker than the other two. This benefits a flashback scene of a gravely ill Yuko, which sits her bed in a pool of light surrounded by stygian black, while Genzo and her mother hover nearby like figures in a chiaroscuro painting. On the other hand, some night-time scenes - especially a fight between Hiroshi and Genzo - are so dark that it’s difficult to work out what’s going on. Extras include scans of the aforementioned publicity booklet, a portrait gallery, five very nice, crisp, black and white publicity stills and an Artsmagic trailer for the Zatoichi films.

Watch out for Sachio Sakai as a taxi driver in the opening scene. He was to Toho what Michael Ripper was to Hammer, with bit parts in many of their movies including Gojira, Secret of the Telegian, King Kong Vs Godzilla and Gorath as well as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Dreams.

Entirely unconnected apart from sharing a director and a screenwriter, the ‘Bloodthirsty trilogy’ can be viewed in isolation or in any order. All are interesting, but if you only pick one, I would recommend this one.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 23rd November 2005

Eddie Loves You

Director: Karl Holt
Writer: Karl Holt
Producer: Karl Holt
Cast: Karl Holt
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: festival screening (FFF 2007)
Website: www.darklineonline.co.uk

For the past few years I have been a judge in the amateur film competition - the Delta Film Award - at the annual Festival of Fantastic Films. The quality of the entries gets better every year and most of them are professional in quality, if not in budget. In 2006, from a particularly strong field, the aggregate marks of the judges decreed that the award went to Karl Holt’s 25-minute horror comedy Eddie Loves You.

The premise is brilliantly simple: a man terrorised by a cuddly toy. Sorting out his old toys, our nameless hero finds that one of them, Eddie, has ripped and is losing stuffing. So he is consigned to the bin. But somebody brings the toy back in the middle of the night.

Eddie is a toy that our hero cannot dispose of, however hard he tries. And Eddie is not only annoyed at this treatment, he is also jealous of the comparative care bestowed on all the other toys. He will have his revenge.

And all the while, his voicebox keeps squealing: “Eddie loves yooo! Cuddle Eddie!”

Karl Holt’s film really does have everything. It is a cracking script which builds gradually, mining each level of action for both horror and humour before upping the ante. There are plenty of moments spoofing iconic horror movies, including Halloween, The Fog and a lengthy lampoon of The Exorcist (which introduces the film’s only other human character). But these are comedy spikes in an already fabulous gagfest, not the be-all and end-all of the film.

The central performance - by one-man band Holt - is perfectly observed and played completely straight. The special effects, though cheap, are surprisingly effective. The music (which adds to some of the spoofs) is great and the DV photography is very impressive.

If one wants to be picky, it’s maybe a tad too long, especially in the Exorcist sequence, but that’s about the only fault that I could spot. Having said that, there is probably scope to remake this as a feature because there are surely other gags to be mined if a slightly more complex story was built around the central conceit.

What distinguishes Eddie Loves You from most ‘killer doll’ films is simply that Eddie is cute. Most deadly puppets look scary: think of Chucky, the casts of Puppet Master and Demonic Toys, the ventriloquist dolls in Magic and Dead of Night. Creepy, creep, creepy, even before they start to move by themselves. Eddie, on the other hand, is played by ... a Tickle Me Elmo. It takes only a very few moments to accept that the toy is Eddie and not Elmo, although this would of course need to be changed in any more professional remake. You would want an original puppet, not only to avoid the litigious wrath of the Henson Corporation (they might send round Big Bird!) but also so that you could merchandise the little fellow yourself.

Eddie Loves You had its premiere at the Portobello Film Festival in August 2006 where it won Best Cinematography. Two weeks later, it took home the Delta Award at the Festival of Fantastic Films. In October it is lined up for Shockerfest and for the Chicago Horror Film Festival (where it is nominated for three awards). Holt’s massively entertaining film is a surefire crowd-pleaser which I expect to crop up at many more festivals, and win plenty of other awards.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted 6th September 2006

Doll Graveyard

Director: Charles Band
Writer: 'August White'
Producer: Charles Band
Cast: Jared Kusnitz, Gabrielle Lynn, Hannah Marks
Country: USA
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: R1 DVD

‘A film by Charles Band’ it says on the front of the sleeve. Were ever five less necessary words included in a piece of DVD packaging? Anyone who can’t work out that something called Doll Graveyard is a Charlie Band movie just isn’t paying attention.

I’m delighted to report that this second release from the latest incarnation of Band’s empire, Wizard Entertainment, is a step up from the rather disappointing and formulaic Decadent Evil. A seven-minute prologue is set in 1911 and already we can see that more time and money has gone into this film. Whereas Decadent Evil simply used footage from a previous movie, 12-year-old Hannah Marks (currently shooting Danika with Marisa Tomei) as Sophia and Ken Lyle (The Missing) as her abusive father have been dressed in suitably Edwardian clothes and there is even a shot of a vintage car parked outside their house.

The DVD sleeve blurb says this prologue takes place in 1905 and that would make sense as the main story is set in the present day, exactly one hundred years later. But the caption identifies the prologue as 1911, presumably because the car is a 1911 model and it was decided that having the dolls resurrected after 94 years was better than having pedantic letters from vintage car enthusiasts. (I’m not an expert on these things myself, but the car is specifically identified and dated in the end credits in the acknowledgement to the company who supplied it.)

Sophia is a lonely girl whose only friends are four large dolls: a baby doll dressed in blue, a German soldier doll with an enormous spike on his pickelhaub, a fierce-looking samurai doll and an African warrior doll wearing nothing except a loincloth and a bone through his nose. When she breaks a vase, her dad loses his rag and, as punishment, forces her to dig a grave in the back yard and throw the dolls into it. When Sophia slips and falls into the grave, breaking her neck, it doesn’t take her father long to work out a way to hide the body.


100 94 years later...

Lyle also plays Mr Fillbrook, single father of high school senior DeeDee (Gabrielle Lynn: Montgomery West and the Wings of Death, To Kill a Mockumentary - who has the most incredibly wide mouth) and freshman Guy (Jared Kusnitz: The Toast), who now live in the house although there is no suggestion that they are related to the earlier owners. When Dad goes out on a date, DeeDee invites over two friends, sensible, cardigan-wearing (but cute) Terri (Anna Alicia Brock: November Grey, Invisible Truth) and blonde slut Olivia (Kristyn Green: the receptionist in David E Kelley’s TV series The Law Firm) who in turn invites a couple of jocks: Tom (Scott Seymour) who is a bit of an arsehole and Rich (Brian Lloyd) who is a complete arsehole. Tom has the mutual hots for DeeDee while Rich hopes to score with Terri because Olivia is “no challenge”. Before joining the girls, they visit Guy in his room at the top of the house and lock him inside with his hands tied.

Earlier, clearing up the yard, Guy discovered a samurai doll which he cleaned up and put on his shelf. Well, of course this thing comes to life (rod puppet animation courtesy of Band regular Chris Bergschneider) and somehow resurrects its three cohorts. The samurai, the German doll and ‘Ooga-booga’ the African doll are already scary enough while the baby doll has cracked its porcelain head across its jaw line, giving it ersatz razor sharp teeth. The reason they want to protect Guy is that he is intermittently possessed by Sophia’s restless spirit.

And so the dolls attack (exactly halfway through the film). There is blood everywhere and there are two fatalities though I won’t spoil this for you by naming names. Terri, who actually thinks Guy is kind of cool and cute, rescues him from his room and works out what is going on (kudos to Kusnitz for repeatedly proclaiming “My name is Sophia” without embarrassment). When Guy and DeeDee’s father returns home, having received an anguished phone call from his daughter, he finds Guy/Sophia in the hallway and the opening scene from the prologue is played out again, Mr Fillbrook somehow channelling Sophia’s father by virtue of having his fob watch.

Guy’s eventual overpowerment of the possessing spirit is too simple and could have done with a bit more externalised internal conflict, but the epilogue as the dolls are laid to rest - and the final scare shot - sort of make up for it.

As might be expected, the actual feature runs only about an hour with the rest of the 71-minute running time (the minimum that Blockbuster will accept, I believe) being a three-minute opening credit sequence and seven minutes of end credits. After clips of each actor, the actual end credit roll is so glacially slow that it is still painful to watch at ‘x4’ speed - and there are no clips in or following the credits so there’s no point actually sitting through them unless (a) you’re in them or (b) you’re a very thorough movie reviewer.

Doll Graveyard is great stuff: the violence is suitably bloody and the puppets are suitably creepy, although occasional wordless murmurings from them (sounding vaguely German, Japanese, African and baby-ish) slightly lessen their fear factor. Silent killers are always scarier (and besides, they don’t have respiratory systems so where does the noise come from?). The puppets are stiff with blinking eyes as their only facial movements; Bergschneider’s animation is okay but one doesn’t get the impression of the dolls having different personalities, as one did in movies like Puppet Master.

The script by a pseudonymous Domonic Muir (Critters, Decadent Evil), from a story by Band, clearly defines the believable characters without falling into stereotypes (which makes me feel a little guilty that I characterised Olivia as a ‘blonde slut’ earlier, but what the heck). There is some nice dialogue here too: “It bit me. What if it has rabies?” “It can’t have rabies, it’s not alive.” “But the little fucker moved!”

Though the story is set in one house, it doesn’t feel constrained and there is a lovely touch straight after the opening credits when we get a shot of the house with a modern car on the drive, exactly matching the earlier shot of the 1911 vehicle.

The actual production credits of the film are slightly confusing. Back in July, when this movie was in post-production, Charles Band said on his blog: “Speaking of Full Moon – you will probably notice the Full Moon Features logo is back up on our sites and starting with Doll Graveyard it will be on our DVD sleeves too; the reason for this is although Wizard is the new distribution company it seemed wrong not to have our cool Full Moon logo present the movies!”

The credit block for the movie reads ‘Wizard Entertainment in association with Shoot Productions presents...’; the Full Moon and Wizard logos are both printed quite small on the sleeve which has ‘copyright 2005 Wizard Entertainment’ at the bottom. But the on-screen credits are ‘Astonishing Features in association with Shoot Productions presents...’ (with a Full Moon logo right at the start). It’s confusing but, to be honest, quite what the difference is between Full Moon, Wizard and Astonishing isn’t clear and probably doesn’t matter to anyone except obsessive credits-watchers and Charles Band’s accountant. (Shoot Productions is co-producer/casting director Jeremy Gordon’s company.)

Jethro Rothe-Kushel is the other co-producer and, as on Decadent Evil, directed an enjoyable 17-minute Making Of featurette, combining cast and crew interviews with behind-the-scenes footage. Curiously, Gabrielle Lynn is credited in this under her more usual name of Gabrielle Docktor. The DVD also includes 7’50” of bloopers (some of which are mildly funny) and a 3’20” message from Band himself in which he plugs his Full Moon Roadshow tour, due to kick off as this film is released, and his other upcoming titles. There is a plug for Full Moon toys and the Full Moon website, which also plays automatically when the disc loads although one can jump straight to the main menu, and there are seven trailers: this film and Decadent Evil, the forthcoming Gingerdead Man and Petrified, clips compilations When Puppets and Dolls Attack! and Monsters Gone Wild! and a four-minute promo for Band’s six-disc how-to package Cinemaker.

Danny Draven (Hell Asylum etc) once again takes on editing and sound design duties and the cinematographer is the great Tom Calloway whose amazing CV includes Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Creepozoids, Slumber Party Massacre II, Critters 3 and 4, Steel and Lace, Project: Metalbeast, Hellraiser IV, Amityville Dollhouse, The Dead Hate the Living, To Kill a Mockumentary and Deep Freeze plus assorted second unit or camera operator work etc on Friday the 13th Part VII, Demonic Toys and others. I love it when people’s CVs look so much like my DVD collection! The (pretty good) music is credited to a band named District 78, apart from the end credits song which is by Charles Band’s son Alex, lead singer with The Calling.

Doll Graveyard is very much a return to form for Charlie Band; it may not be his best film but it’s his best for a while and bodes very well for the hotly awaited Gingerdead Man.

MJS rating: B
review originally posted 2nd October 2005