#32: Dolls (Stuart Gordon, 1987)

Stuart Gordon's third film, following Re-Animator and From Beyond, could be marketed and shelved as a children's movie, if it weren't for the gore and swearing. A fairy tale and morality fable, Dolls begins with an imaginative little girl, her moronic jerk of a father, and her wicked stepmother getting lost and stuck in a storm on vacation. They take shelter inside a large, semi-Gothic mansion, owned by an elderly couple. The elderly man is a doll-maker, and a firm proponent of never letting the child inside of you die, of course. Soon, more stranded travelers appear, including a nice, toy-loving guy in his thirties and two nasty British hitchhiking kleptomaniac new wave rocker chicks he picked up on the side of the road. I'm hardly revealing surprise plot twists when I tell you that the rotten people get their comeuppance and learn valuable lessons about the power of a child's imagination. How they get their comeuppance turns this film from a kid's movie to a violent gorefest. The doll-maker's dolls like to get up and move around at night, and they're tightly wound little suckers. If they see something they don't like, they will dispense vigilante justice. Extreme vigilante justice.
As you can imagine, the killer dolls are very funny. Intentionally so. Several critics have complained that killer dolls just aren't that scary, but these critics seem to lack the child-like wonder and humor necessary to survive a killer doll attack. They wouldn't last one night at the old doll-maker's mansion. So, killer dolls aren't that scary, but most horror films aren't that scary. This film has great atmosphere, set decoration, detail. The performances are mostly very good. Someone yells, "Fuck you, clownie!" at a clown doll. The little girl is natural and real-life cute, not movie-cute. She doesn't look like she's had her face buffed for fifteen weeks by a stage mother. Dolls lacks some of the insane, gonzo energy of Re-Animator and From Beyond, but Gordon's filmmaking skills improved considerably by this third film. A kid's movie with "adult situations," as the MPAA calls them. I love the perversity of that.

One of the British kleptos looks a lot like Madonna:













One of the killer dolls looks a little like me:

#31: The Devil's Daughter (Michele Soavi, 1991)

In what's turning out to be a rotten month for both my wife's family and mine, it was nice to take a few hours off from the stress and watch a fairly nonsensical Italian horror film. The Devil's Daughter, aka La Setta, aka The Sect, aka Demons 4: The Devil's Daughter, aka Demons 4: The Sect is a collaboration between Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi and Suspiria director Dario Argento. Soavi directed, Argento produced, and both men wrote the screenplay with Gianni Romoli. While Italian horror is fairly incoherent in general, adding even more screenwriters to the mix just makes things more ridiculous. The film opens with a particularly eerie tracking shot that moves from a reddish-tinged lake to the desert, a transistor radio playing America's "Horse with No Name" rising in the mix as the camera moves toward a hippie camp. The song always sounds like a cheap, watered-down Neil Young ripoff whenever I hear it on the radio, but is creepy as hell in this scene. A title card informs us we are in "South California" (making me think of Kim Wilde's dumb-ass lyric from "Kids in America": "New York to East California/There's a new wave coming I warn you") in the late 1960s. The groovy hippies' isolated California idyll is soon shattered by the arrival of a Manson-esque creepy hippie who quotes "Sympathy for the Devil" and informs the groovy hippies that the Stones are a secret force that not many people know about. This is probably news to Mick Jagger. (A character later in the film calls the Stones "esoteric." ???) Needless to say, creepy things happen in the desert, especially when the creepy hippie's buddies show up. The film then moves to present-day Germany, and the plot takes a turn for the incomprehensible. If you watch a lot of Italian horror films, this should be no problem for you, but if you want a linear, three-act structure with character arcs, you're probably better off renting Big Momma's House.
In Germany, Kelly Curtis (Jamie Lee Curtis's sister) is a shy elementary teacher who almost runs down weird old Herbert Lom with her car. She takes the man back to her house to recuperate, and he mysteriously recognizes her home and knows her name and age even though she never tells him these things. He also finds a secret basement in her home she doesn't know about, and of course it's a portal to hell because all Italian horror films are required to have at least one portal to hell. Weird blue worm-like strings start appearing in the tap water. A death mask attaches to the face of a fellow schoolteacher. Stabbings occur. A human heart is carried around on the subway in the pocket of a trenchcoat. The world's stupidest, rudest doctor becomes a major character. A woman is sexually assaulted by a large bird. Shit blows up. Not a damn bit of it makes any sense, but at least the creepy hippies make a second appearance.
I didn't care one bit that the film was incoherent. Unlike Cemetery Man, most of the humor in this film is unintentional, but Soavi is a visually exciting director who manages to effectively stage one freaky setpiece after another. This is a hard film to track down, and it's only on VHS, but if you like this kind of thing, this is a particularly fine this kind of thing.