Dolls

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Ian Patrick Williams, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, Carrie Lorraine, Guy Rolfe, Hiliary Mason, Stephen Lee

Genre: Fantasy/Horror 1987

Running time: 77 mins.

Rating:★★

A wealthy and nasty couple, David and Rosemary Bower (Ian Patrick Williams and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon), along with the man's daughter, Judy (Carrie Lorraine), get their car stuck in the middle of nowhere during a storm. The Bowers seek refuge in an old mansion, where they are welcomed in by an elderly couple, who make toys. What David and Rosemary want more then anything is to send Judy, who has a very "active" imagination, back with her mother. The surprise they receive, along with the other stranded guests, will make them wish that they were still a child at heart!

A Vincent Price-esque-Seventies horror movie flare with some pretty awesome Eighties special effects. However, some of the problems of this film is that it leaves too much assumption that the audience knows what's going on with the personal tensions between David, Rosemary, and Judy, the horridness of David and Rosemary, and the imaginative, innocence of Judy, and the mysteriousness-eerieness of the elderly couple that the film becomes a bit campy. AND, so you don't question their existence/need in the film, the two Mandonna-wannabes almost get run over by the Brewers near the beginning. A LOT! Of the performances were over acted, minus perhaps Guy Rolfe's, Carrie Lorraine's, Hiliary Mason's characters as the elderly toy makers and Judy, that you kind of that someone would swat them with a flyswatter, so that they would either tone it down or actually act! 

The subtle build up to revealing that the Dolls are not only alive, but malicious too is pretty fantastic, as well as, what ends up happening to the not-so-nice people. Yet, the film leaves you with a lot of questions that the director must have thought he made clear. Were all the toys once people? What happens once the people do turn into dolls? Do they continue "the punishment" of any visitors who have lost the child within? Why do they have to die or near to death to become dolls? The dolls are evil, but somehow never harm children because of the "obvious"? Do the toymakers actually make any of the toys non-magically? Nonetheless, the film gives you enough of a scare to want to be nice and appreciate dolls. Bells sot of covered on my end.