“Now that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense,” says child-at-heart toy lover Ralph (Stephen Lee) at the end of Dolls. Ain’t that the truth. In Stuart Gordon’s (Re-Animator) flabbergasting film, an abusive father (Ian Patrick Williams), his manly second wife (Caroline Purdy-Gordon), and his precocious daughter Judy (Carrie Lorraine) find themselves stranded in the middle of nowheresville, England. Taking refuge in a giant castle along with Ralph and a duo of thieving punk rock chicks, the family becomes the target of demonically possessed china dolls sculpted by the spooky mansion’s elderly owners (Guy Rolfe and Hilary Moore). The dolls kill those who don’t have a childlike spirit, but there’s the nagging question of how grown-ups could be so easily felled by an army of tiny toys who move with stop-motion awkwardness and are vulnerable to being stepped on. More disturbing, though, is Purdy-Gordon, who seems to be channeling Joan Crawford-via-Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show as this fairy tale’s evil tranny stepmother. With its lesson about toys’ enduring loyalty to their owners, Dolls is like the separated-at-birth sibling of Toy Story 2. Though unlike that Pixar marvel, this pitiful horror film feels like it was made by a trio of monkeys with a $20 budget.
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