I'm not a great admirer of Charles Band's productions, be they under the Empire or Full Moon label or whatever. Still, there are a few Full Moon pictures like a lot (i.e. Castle Freak, Subspecies II: Bloodstone) and he certainly deserves credit for continuing to crank out horror films direct-to-video when the genre was considered all but verboten in Hollywood. I'll sit through about anything that's vaguely horror-oriented if it's on cable in the wee hours of morning and I've got some beer and brain-cells in dire need of killing, but how many movies about monstrous toys (i.e. Demonic Toys, the never-ending and gradually deteriorating Puppet Master series) can Chuck crank out!?
Blood Dolls, however, manages to be a quite a bit of fun despite the fact that the teat of this particularly peculiar sub-genre ran dry nameless aeons ago. I mean, consider this plot: Racist masked billionaire Virgril Travis shrinks ethnic minorities down into murderous dolls and uses them too off his business competitors. As if that weren't weird enough, Virgil turns out to be a freakish genius with a head the size of a softball (the product of a weird genetic experiment performed by his scientist "mother") who keeps an all-girl rock band in a cage to perform for him upon demand (encouraged by periodic electric shocks from his dwarf man-servant) and has his private assassin/butler to wear clown make-up around the clock.
The performances are right on the money for this sort of a thing, the actors playing their roles perfectly straight while never losing the sight of the fact that this is all utterly preposterous. It's all entertainingly done, focusing more on the cartoonish villains than the wee folk (which look like a Klu Klux Klansman's version of Puppet Master Adres Toulon's creations, including a thick-lipped, gold-toothed, switchblade packing pimp doll) and is refreshingly devoid of any sympathetic "victim" characters. It even wraps up with a William Castle-style "choose your own ending"!
Maybe I was just in a particularly undemanding mood, but I found this a great deal of fun and think it's well worth checking out if you're in a particularly undemanding mood…. and have plenty of your favorite alcoholic refreshment on hand.
