DOLLS
What you might call a mixed bag
Rarely has a movie so freely mixed together the good and the bad. What we've got here is some really splendid horror-fantasy, and some really lame horror-fantasy. Some hilarious comic relief, some dreadful comic relief. Some genuinely interesting, endearing characters, some painfully unwatchable characters. And somehow this managed to get weaved together into a mostly very pleasing film.
The plot's pretty much what you'd expect a killer-doll movie to be about. A little girl, her asshole father and his even more evil new wife get stranded right outside of some dollmaker's house. (soon, they're joined by two British punk/new-wave chicks, and what appears to be a mailman) The chicks are thieves and the girl's ersatz parents are continually stifling her imagination. The movie opens hilariously, with the stepmother (who looks like Cruella DeVille) throwing the girl's teddy bear into the woods. What the girl fantasizes about immediately following is worth the rental right there, especially thanks to that one shrug.
Anyway, soon enough, it becomes clear that the dolls in the house don't take well to not being taken seriously. Some of the humor falls flat on its face - the mailman guy is a lot like Kevin J. O'Connor's character in Deep Rising - comic relief so forced, that half the time he's really funny, and half the time he's just plain awful. And some of it works, like with an awesomely hissable line from the stepmother, who stops her husband from striking her child. "No!" she says. "Do you want to pay more child support? With my money?"
The horror-fantasy is mixed too. It's like a twisted Toy Story. None of the dolls are really developed as their own characters, like they were in the otherwise inferior Puppetmaster. Things are a little too predictable. But I liked the relationship between the dollmaker and his guests, and the inevitable confrontations between man and doll. As for the characters...the stepmom and dad are pure boo-hiss, the mailman is mainly loveable doofus...but the rest all really stood out, in their own little ways. The little girl, played by Carrie Lorraine, is an absolute delight. She's completely loveable. I don't think I've ever seen a movie which had such a loveable kid. That's not an easy thing to pull off. Kids are usually so nnoying in movies like this. The dollmaker was appropriately grandfatherly and mysterious.
But the two punk/new-wave chicks...the worst part of the movie. Oh my God - every time they were on screen, they'd stop the film DEAD. They were that bad - if they'd been the stars of this movie, it would be a candidate for the worst movie ever made, merely by the non-virtue ofstarring them. I just waited and waited and waited for them to die...and thankfully... Anyway, I recommend this one. Mostly. It's cute :)