Dollman

Director: Albert Pyun
Writer: ‘Chris Roghair’
Producer: Cathy Gesualdo
Cast: Tim Thomerson, Kamala Lopez-Dawson, Jackie Earle Hayley
Country: USA
Year of release: 1991
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Dollman may not be the best film that Charles Band ever executive produced but it’s certainly one of his best - and from a personal point of view, this may very well be my favourite of all the Full Moon features I have watched.

Tim Thomerson (Trancers 1-5, Evil Bong, They Crawl) is absolutely superb as grizzled cop Brick Bardo, equipped with a bad attitude and the most powerful handgun in the universe. On a distant planet, he deals with a hostage situation in a laundromat where a criminal named Skyresh (Jamie Lee Curtis’ brother-in-law Nicholas Guest, who mostly does voice work but has appeared in screen in Puppet Master 5, Kickboxer 4 and even Star Trek II) is threatening to kill a group of fat people. The commissioner doesn’t like Bardo’s methods but his captain knows what a valuable maverick he is.

But this is all a prologue to Bardo, in a neato spaceship, chasing criminal mastermind Sprug in a flying saucer. Each time these two have met in the past, Bardo has blasted away another part of Sprug’s body and he now survives as only a greasy head, hovering on a couple of fanjets. (Sprug is played, under uncomfortable-looking make-up, by Frank Collison whose first credit was in a spoof documentary about 'Weird Al' Yankovic! He has since appeared in Amazon Women on the Moon, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, 12:01, the original movie of Alien Nation and the remake of The Blob.) When both spaceships pass through some sort of dimensional wormhole, Sprug and Bardo both find themselves on Earth, specifically in a rundown part of the Bronx in the early 1990s. Problem is: due to a slight difference in scale between their race and humans, Bardo is now only thirteen inches tall

Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Hayley: Nemesis, Maniac Cop 3) leads the most successful gang in the largely lawless area while Latino single mother Debi Alejandro (Kamala Lopez-Dawson, whose TV work includes Star Trek: Voyager, Lois and Clark and Medium) tries to organise the citizens into some sort of neighbourhood watch, despite the apathy of the cops. When Bardo saves Debi from Braxton’s thugs, she takes him home (lots of great shots of Thomerson being thrown around the cockpit of his craft) where her son Kevin (Humberto Ortiz: Arcade) is thrilled to have his own ‘dollman’.

Debi believes passionately in non-violence but Kevin and the neighbours are convinced that Bardo and his still-powerful handgun are the answer to their plight. Meanwhile, Sprug the tiny flying head is offering Braxton the use of a small-but-powerful bomb as well as some outer-space healing powers.

Dollman has a few things to say about violence, law and order, principles and society, but it doesn’t really say them terribly well. Debi’s abduction by Braxton raises the hope of things getting better in the neighbourhood as several of her neighbours rush out to try and stop the young hoodlums, but there is no chance for this idea to be followed up as we never return to the apartment block. Frankly the whole film falls apart somewhat towards the end - at least in terms of plot - where it becomes a stand-off between Bardo and the goons surrounding Braxton and the captive Debi. The final resolution is disappointing and looks like the production simply ran out of money.

But this is more than compensated for by good performances all round - especially from Thomerson - and defiantly bargain-bucket special effects. In an age before affordable CGI, most of the scenes in which Bardo interacts with full-size actors use simple editing, cutting back and forth between Thomerson looking up and the other actors looking down (or peering into the three-foot-long spaceship). There are a few green screen shots which are serviceable and allow just enough shared screen time to make the situation credible, if not believable. There’s even one glorious shot where Bardo, clinging onto the side of a speeding car, is stunt-doubled by a doll.

It’s the lead actor’s performance which really sells the film. Unlike other ‘tiny people’ movies and TV shows - The Incredible Shrinking Man, Land of the Giants, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - Bardo isn’t at all worried about how he will survive. He remains exactly the same misanthropic maverick cop that he was on his home planet and the enormous size difference between him and everyone else is just one more thing making a bad day even worse. He doesn’t really want to help Debi and is increasingly annoyed at Kevin proudly showing him off to the neighbours, but he’s a cop and he has a sense of justice.

Braxton Red and his gang of no-goods are kept just this side of parody, believably cocksure rather than over-the-top eccentric. This definitely isn’t a Troma film, although there’s a slightly Tromatic element to a scene at Debi’s workplace where she and her friend Maria (Merle Kennedy: Nemesis, Night of the Demons 2, Convict 762) sort ‘toxic waste’ by hand.

Hugely enjoyable for those in the right frame of mind, Dollman was one of only two collaborations between Band and the prolific Albert Pyun, the other being 1993’s Arcade. Busy guys both, this was one of three films directed by Pyun in 1991 and one of seven produced by Band. The screenplay is credited on-screen to ‘Chris Roghair’ but there seems to be universal agreement that this was a pseudonym for David Pabian whose other Full Moon pics were Crash and Burn, Puppet Master II and Subspecies.

Thomerson worked with Pyun on eight other pictures throughout the 1990s including the first and third Nemesis movies, Blast, Heatseeker, Spitfire, Knights, Hong Kong 97 and Brain Smasher: A Love Story. Also in the cast, most of whom have worked with Pyun on other films, are Judd Omen (Dune, The Howling II, CHUD II), Michael Halsey (who moved to LA in the early 1980s after spending the previous decade acting in things like Blake’s 7 and Are You Being Served?!), Frank Doubleday (Space Rage, Escape from New York), New Zealand-born Vincent Klyn (Cyborg, Nemesis, Final Equinox, Urban Menace), John Durbin (Demonwarp, Mutant on the Bounty, Cyborg 2), Luis Contreras (Suburban Commando, Alien Avengers II), Eugene Robert Glazer (Scanner Cop II and a regular on La Femme Nikita), Samantha Phillips (Phantasm II and III, Weekend at Bernie’s II) and overweight actress Laurianne Jameson who plays one of the fat ladies held hostage in the prologue and was also in that unforgettable sex scene in The Dark Backward.

The cinematographer on Dollman was George Mooradian who worked with Pyun on at least twenty other features including two Kickboxers and all four Nemesis films. His other credits include Retroactive, The Hitcher II and Pterodactyl. Producer Cathy Gesualdo, who served similar duties on Arcade, was Second AD on Friday the 13th Part VI and A Nightmare on Elm Street IV.

Special effects are credited to ‘Frazee’, actually Logan Frazee who also worked on Nemesis, Blade Runner, The Towering Inferno, at least four Star Trek movies and Satan’s School for Girls. Bardo’s spaceship was built by Gene Warren (Nightflyers, True Lies) and Leslie Huntley (Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Fright Night Part 2, Magic in the Water). Special effects make-up is credited to Mike Smithson who worked on things like House II, Scanners II and The Exorcist III and now works on stuff like the Spider-Man movies.

Production designer Don Day can boast Frankenstein General Hospital, Martians Go Home, Shadowzone and 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up on his CV. Editor Margaret-Anne Smith was a Full Moon regular throughout the 1990s, working on Trancers III, Prehysteria, Puppet Master 4 and 5, Robot Wars and Magic Island, while composer Anthony Riparetti was (and indeed still is) a frequent Pyun collaborator. His music can be heard in Alien from LA, Heatseeker, the Nemesis films, Omega Doom, and Tammy and the T Rex.

With such an array of top talent (hey, in my opinion at least!) on both sides of the camera, it’s no wonder that Dollman is such an eminently watchable movie. Charlie Band would have loved to spin it out into a franchise but in fact there was only one proper sequel, Dollman vs Demonic Toys (which I haven’t seen) although Thomerson appears briefly in character in an epilogue to the appallingly poor Bad Channels.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 2nd July 2007

Demonic Beauty

Director: Bin Banluerit
Cast: Lakana Wattanawongsiri, Nak-rob Traipoe, Ekapun Bunluerit
Year of release: 2002
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

Blimey - you wait years for a ‘flying vampire head with guts hanging underneath’ movie and then two come along at once. After watching Mystics in Bali, I popped this thing into the old DVD player and was delighted to find that it has the same sort of monster. (Well, near enough. This is a krasue - hence the original Thai title Krasue - which is the Thai equivalent of the Malaysian pelagganan seen in Mystics. In Japan the same thing is rather amusingly called a krappa.)

The prologue is a big battle scene - dozens of extras, plenty of horses, very impressive. It’s the year 1763 BE and Knight Harnsuk from Whiang Chiang-in City in Thailand is attacking the Khmer Capital City. King Suranetaravoraman is killed and his haughty, vain, 19-year-old niece, Princess Tarawatee, is taken prisoner. (I was taking notes!)

A mere three minutes in, just as I’m getting used to the fact that this is a big budget production and the disc is subtitled to boot, there is one of the most realistic beheading shots I have ever seen. I actually watched this through in slo-mo several times and still wasn’t sure how it was done.

Harnsuk wants Tarawatee for his wife but finds that she is in love with Fajang, a Thai spy who worked as a servant in the Khmer palace. Fajang is executed (I think that was him we saw getting his head chopped off) and Tarawatee is condemned to be burnt at the stake. But in the next prison cell is a village woman, Keaw, who observes that Tarawatee is the spitting image of a girl from her village, name of Daow.

An old witch called Tala, who claims to have great great great great grandchildren, visits Tarawatee in prison and transfers her life essence to her, so when the princess is set afire her head lifts off in a green glow and goes flying away towards Keaw’s village - where bad guy Teur’s father is using voodoo magic to kill Daow because she rejected Teur in favour of her fiancee Roong.

And that’s all just the prologue!

At Daow’s funeral, she suddenly sits up - it’s a miracle. But has she really come back from the dead, or is her body possessed by an evil spirit? What do you think, viewers?

The other girls (who all look and dress exactly alike so it’s really difficult to tell which one is Oy and which one is Uey) are suspicious that Daow seems to have little memory or knowledge of the village. More to the point, a ghost is at large, slaughtering local livestock. Everyone calls it a ‘will-o-the-wisp’ (interesting use of an old English expression in the subtitles) but all that anyone has seen is a flying, glowing, green thing so it is generally assumed to be the old woman, Chan, who lives alone on the edge of the village.

In actual fact it is of course Daow’s head, which detaches itself, dragging her heart, lungs and intestines out through her neck as it flies away. Except it’s really Tarawatee’s head, complete with big vampire teeth and a squiggly symbol on her forehead. As suspicion points towards Old Chan, so Daow/Tarawatee arranges more circumstantial evidence in the direction of the old woman’s hut. Meanwhile, when her head is attached, she is still fending off the attentions of both Roong and Teur.

Eventually the traditional ‘mob with flaming torches’ attacks Chan’s hut but the old woman is taken into care by local monk Kru Baa Khan, so when the attacks continue it’s clearly not her. There’s one particularly icky scene where a village girl is giving birth in one of the houses on stilts. The demonic head flies under the house, snakes its tongue up through a crack in the floor and whips the afterbirth out of a pot, leading to the classic line “Help! The ghost has stolen my baby’s placenta!”

It all finishes with the villagers confronting the head who confirms to Roong and her father that she is actually Tarawatee and that Daow really is dead. She then turns into Tala (remember her - the ancient witch?) and pitches her black magic against the white magic of Kru Baa Khan who defeats her by drawing energy from a ten-armed statue. Daow’s own head magically reattaches to her body which can then be cremated. ...But a young girl walking past the ashes notices that a necklace has survived. She puts it on and her eyes begin to glow...

What an amazing film! The flying head is rendered in surprisingly good CGI, whizzing around the forest with the guts flapping underneath it. There’s one truly incredible scene where it actually fights a cobra(!) and another grisly close-up of her torso breaking open so that the inner organs can be pulled up out of it (ooh, the sound effects!). The picture looks gorgeous - those Thai cinematographers certainly know how to light a film - although the VCD takes away a lot of depth in the shadows and there’s a fair bit of artefacting. The widescreen transfer is otherwise terrific, though the poorly translated subtitles are hard work.

In a surprisingly generous package, the first disc includes six trailers: Tigress of King River (a woman soldier reincarnated as a big stripy cat), Mekong Full Moon Party (an X-Files-like drama based around the legend of the naga - a sort of giant aquatic snake - and the fireballs which emerge from the Mekong River), blockbusting historical epic Suriyothai, bonkers action flick Killer Tattoo (all guns’n’cars'n’explosions), brutal women-in-prison drama Butterfly Grey and Hollywood action stinker Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (directed by Thai-born Wych ‘Kaos’ Kaosayananda). The Thai trailers aren’t subtitled in English but that’s okay because the Ballistic trailer isn’t subtitled in Thai. The second disc has the trailer for Demonic Beauty and forty production stills, including some behind-the-scenes shots that reveal how the beheading effect was achieved.

Director Banluerit is also an actor who won a Best Actor award in 2000 for his performance in historical action epic Bang Rajan. His most recent film as director is Chang Puen Kaew, a family movie about a boy who befriends an elephant. Among a cast which I can’t pin down to specific roles are Ekapun Bunluerit (aka Ekkapun Bunlerrith, presumably related to the director), who was also in the ghost comedy Porb Phee Hien, Lakana (aka Lukkana) Wattanawongsiri who was in The Devil’s Bride, Natthorn Somkanae, Chartinan Kannasut and Jitranun Thammawongsa.

Demonic Beauty is a corker of a film, though I would have liked to have seen more of the epic battle at the start and maybe a little less of the village soap opera. Nevertheless you can’t fault this movie for serving up top floating vampire head action.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted before November 2004