The Underwhelming 1987 Stuart Gordon Shocker Dolls Is the First Stinker in the Revered Frightmaster's Filmography
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For Stuart Gordon, making a movie about sinister dolls that kill people was a regrettable but understandable one-off following the back-to-back triumphs of 1985’s The Re-Animator and its even bolder, even better 1986 follow-up From Beyond.
For Charles Band, the schlock merchant behind Empire Films and then Full Moon Features, as well as motion pictures such as Gingerdead Man Vs. Evil Bong and Bunker of Blood: Chapter 6: Zombie Lust: Night Flesh, movies about tiny toys with body counts represented much of his business model.
1989’s Puppet Master was followed by, and I hope you are sitting down and ready for this, 1990’s Puppet Master II, 1991’s Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge, 1993’s Puppet Master 4, 1994’s maddeningly titled Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter, 1998’s Curse of the Puppet Master, 1999’s Retro Puppet Master, 2003’s Puppet Master: The Legacy, 2004’s Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, 2010’s Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, 2012’s Puppet Master: Axis Rising, 2017’s Puppet Master: Axis Termination, 2018’s Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, 2020’s Blade: The Iron Cross and the upcoming Doktor Death.
As those subtitles convey, at a certain point, the Puppet Master series really went all in on the whole Nazi thing, not unlike the current Republican Party or musician Kanye West.
But that somehow wasn’t enough for Band. Full Moon also put out four movies in the Demonic Toys series: 1992’s Demonic Toys, 1994’s Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, 2010’s Demonic Toys: Personal Demons and finally 2021’s Baby Oopsie.
To give a sense of the craft and artistry involved, Dolls was directed by the revered cult auteur behind The Re-Animator and From Beyond while many of the Puppet Master sequels were directed by the man who helmed A Talking Cat!?! under and alias.
Band got into the killer doll business in a simultaneously big and small way with Dolls while Gordon was savvy enough to understand what worked and what didn’t, and moved on quickly whereas I’m sure Charles Band IV will be cranking out Dollman vs. Evil Bong vs. Gingerdead Man 43 in the twenty-second century.
To his credit, Gordon had ideas for Dolls beyond sentient chunks of plastic and porcelain terrorizing people who dwarf them in size and power. With Dolls, he set about making an atmospheric old school English Haunted House movie about travelers stranded in a horrific thunderstorm who seek shelter in a spooky old home with all manners of dark secrets.
Gordon similarly aspired to making a contemporary, hard-R horror movie version of a fairy tale, specifically Hansel & Gretel, with an irritatingly precocious little girl and a chubby comic relief goofball substituting for the titular candy-lovers and a house full of killer dolls owned by an eccentric doll-maker and his wife for the Gingerbread House of the original.
Stephen Lee plays Ralph Morris, the aforementioned affable doofus. He’s a businessman who picks up a pair of trashy British Madonna wannabe hitchhikers who are just waiting for the perfect moment to rob him.
Carrie Lorraine, meanwhile, plays juvenile female lead Judy Bower. She’s a precocious little girl cursed with a dad and stepmother who are horrible human beings even by fairy tale standards. Dad David (Ian Patrick Williams) does nothing to mask his hatred of his daughter or his desire to be rid of her as soon as possible. Judy’s evil stepmother is even worse.
Ralph, his hitchhikers and the Bowers all end up in the spooky domicile of the seemingly kind-hearted and warm Gabriel (Guy Rolfe) and Hilary Hartwicke (Hilary Mason), a doll-maker and his wife whose sprawling home is filled with his creations.
Rolfe and Mason make for an unforgettable couple. Within the weirdly moralistic world of the universe they are simultaneously larger than life monsters—practitioners of the dark arts with a coterie of killer dolls—and secret heroes who punish the wicked and reward the pure of heart.
Rolfe was so good playing a creator of killer dolls that that’s pretty much the only play he would ever go on to play. The eternally cannibalistic Band cast the elderly character actor as Andre Toulon, the titular puppet-master, in 1991’s Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge, 1993’s Puppet Master 4, 1994’s Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter and, in his final film, 1999’s Retro Puppet Master.
Gordon initially favors a Hitchcockian approach in that we see the murderous effects of the killer dolls well before we actually see the dolls themselves. Dolls is never better than in a first act full of gleeful misanthropy and sinister vibes.
Then the killer dolls start punishing the hitch-hikers and the family for their selfishness, cruelty and shameless dearth of child-like innocence and the spell breaks almost instantly. As Roger Ebert asserted in his two star review, the big problem with Dolls is that the dolls just aren’t scary. They’re too small and too cute and move too slowly to be a credible threat.
It also doesn’t help that of all the dolls, the only one that has any real personality or makes any kind of an impression is a Punch doll Judy is given as a replacement for her cruelly discarded teddy bear.
Chubby Sean Astin, sadly, did not become a horror icon.
Dolls’ other fatal flaw is its heroes. A horror movie that wants to scare people with delicate little dolls who must team up in massive groups in order to take down adults does not need a comic relief hero pushing things in an even sillier direction.
Gordon’s underwhelming third directorial effort only lasts seventy-seven minutes but it manages to wear out its welcome all the same.
As the many, many, many wildly similar films Band would go on to crank out illustrate, this kind of material could be handled much worse by much less talented people. But a singularly gifted fright-master was thoroughly defeated by the script’s innate flaws. Dolls is a small movie and a deeply unsatisfying one as well.
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