Dolls (dir. Stuart Gordon, 1987)
Stuart Gordon is best known for his adaptation so H. P. Lovecraft that reject cosmic horror for gore and comedy. This is probably for the best, because a straight, faithful adaptation of “Herbert West, Reanimator” is going to stop dead in its tracks as soon as you get to the racism, whereas Gordon’s version is a Grand Guignol delight.
Dolls was filmed between two Lovecraft projects, Re-Animator and From Beyond, but was released after both. It belongs to that decades old tradition that was at least codified by James Whale’s 1932 film The Old Dark House in which stranded travelers are forced to spend the night at a spooky house. Here, it is a mansion in the English countryside owned by an elderly toymaker and his wife. The travelers include an awful American man, his awful second wife, their long suffering child/step-child, a pair of Madonna cosplaying English women with a penchant for thievery, and a luckless American tourist. There are also living, talking, killing dolls–as the tagline on the poster helpfully informs us–and you know the rest of the story without watching it.
The elderly Gabriel and Hilary present their visitors with tests of character to determine whether they respect childhood wonderment as embodied by toys or whether they deserve to be transmuted into sentient doll whose only recourse from this hell of undeath is murdering the next batch of bad people. Gabriel and Hilary do this, because they are monsters. Yes, their victims are terrible, but we live in a society, damn it! And no, not producer Brian Yuzna’s Society. There will be no ‘shunting’ on my watch. There’s the implication that these dollmakers believe that the joy the toys bring to children counts as redemption, but the wanton death and killing seems to tarnish it just a bit maybe?
This is the least enjoyable of all the Stuart Gordon films I’ve seen. The Lovecraft adaptations are all better, Robot Jox is better, Space Truckers starring Dennis Hopper and Stephen “Blu E-Cigs Are Great for My Emphysema” Dorff is better. Go watch those instead.
October 7, 2018
oliveresque 