I was never one for playing "traditionally" with toys and dolls when I was a child. I had a My Little Pony, but I used it as a war flail. I had Barbie dolls, but I used them for playing triage, complete with my own homemade recipe for plaster of paris for broken bones (water and talcum powder mixed together into a paste; then dip thin strips of tissue paper into the paste and wrap around doll limb to be put in a cast). My preferred toys were my Transformers and My Pet Monster, complete with the breakable day-glo orange cuffs. So it's probably safe to say that whatever love for dolls I had went to someone else instead - and it was probably Charles Band, along with several other peoples' love for dolls as well, because Charles Band is the name behind the vast majority of "evil doll" horror films - if he didn't direct them, he at the very least produced or executive produced them, including in this case the Stuart Gordon movie Dolls.
An American family become stranded on a road in the English countryside as a storm rolls in. Their situation is exacerbated by the fact that father David and stepmother Rosemary clearly aren't fond of David's daughter Judy, going so far as to throw her toy bear away as punishment for moving too slow (Judy imagines the bear coming to life and mauling them in revenge). They seek shelter in an isolated house whose residents are elderly dollmakers called Gabriel and Hillary Hartwicke, and are soon joined by others escaping the storm - two punk rock girls called Isabel and Enid, and a salesman named Ralph. The Hartwickes are a kind if slightly eccentric-seeming couple who agree to put up all the travellers for the night, and even give Judy a Mr. Punch doll to replace her lost bear. But there are strange things going on in the Hartwickes' home - there are whispers and the sound of tiny footfalls heard about the place, and the many dolls around the house seem very lifelike, especially around the eyes...
Dolls is a dark fairy tale as much as it is a horror film, and it wears its genre combo proudly. Some of the references are obvious - Judy reading Hansel and Gretel in bed and remembering how Hilary grabbed her finger to see if she needed "fattening up" - and some are more subtle, such as the lost travellers having to break into the isolated house for shelter and the idea that only children or those who are a child at heart are protected from the horrors inside the house. And of course there's the magical killer dolls, which is not a spoiler because the movie's called Dolls and it's on the poster and the tagline so if you were expecting something different I don't know what to say.
So it's safe to say that if you suffer from pediophobia this film is not for you. There are a lot of dolls in this movie, and they move about, giggle and attack people with great enthusiasm (not to mention what happens to their victims afterwards...). And it's all done with physical effects too - puppeteers, motion capture and makeup effects are king in this movie, as is usually the case with the films of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yunza (who worked as producer on the film). Interestingly, most of the horror in the film comes from either the dolls doing murderous acts and the moments of the film that go into Uncanny Valley territory, which is strikingly different from the film Gordon and Yunza worked on immediately after Dolls (but was released first because of post-production work), From Beyond.
What I found most interesting about Dolls is that, if you took out the gore (of which there if a fair amount, all well done) the story would most likely make a good episode of Goosebumps or one of the other kids' TV scary shows out there. It ticks all the boxes of a scary kids' story - child with cruel parents finds themselves in a magical place; toys come to life; no-one believes the child but one adult who's really just a big kid... When you consider some of the other stuff that Gordon and Yunza have done, both together and on their own, it stands out not only for not being part of the Cthulhu mythos (did H. P. Lovecraft ever write about killer dolls?), but also for being something that could be - almost - family-friendly...
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