FrightFest Halloween Review – Dolly
In a decaying mansion in the woods lives Dolly (Max the Impaler), a hefty, superstrong woman who wears a chinadoll mask with only one glass eye – does she see out of the hole where the other eye was gouged? She has a prisoner called Tobe (Ethan Suplee) chained up in a cupboard and an enormous collection of broken dolls, which she has used to decorate the forests – a question never asked in these films is where do all these antique creepy toys come from and how do they fetch up in the collection of a non-verbal maniac who seems hardly the type to order limited edition weirdness from Etsy even if parcel delivery could be arranged without too many mailmen getting mangled.
Into the region come Macy (Fabienne Therese) and Chase (Seann William Scott) on a hiking date – he’s going to propose to her, and though she has a nice rapport with his daughter she isn’t sure she’s ready to be a stepmother … a situation which has been overused in horror films since the Texas Chain Saw remake sprung the discovery-of-the-engagement-ring-after-carnage-has-rendered-it-valueless moment of poignance … though doubts about the roleplay aspect of motherhood feed into what happens to Macy after Dolly has taken a shovel to Chase (no, Scott, the most familiar face in the film, isn’t out of the picture after that, though his face is less easy to recognise) as she winds up in a dolly dress being treated as a plaything in the monster’s lair. Director Rod Blackhurst, who also co-wrote with Brandon Weavil, builds the film around sickly comic bad taste scenes of Dolly playing with Macy – which includes pampering, nappy changing, feeding and when the living doll refuses to go along punishment with a whacking implement.
There are a couple of actual twists and realignments of who’s menacing who and Blackhurst goes all out for the grotty 1970s feel – down to speckling the image as if the film had been dragged through too many drive-in projectors – with imaginative art direction and a few wild elements (like an end credits theme tune in the spirit of HG Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs!) … but it still boils down to a hulking thug abusing a woman for long stretches of the film and a sense that the audience is screwed any way you take it – if we think it’s funny, we’re indefensible sickos … if we’re offended, we’re censorious buzzkills … and if we hate watching this sort of scene, we’re in for an unpleasant eighty two minutes. It’s another essay in retro grindhouse, with acknowledged debts to TCM but also nods to lesser-known stuff like Tourist Trap, Just Before Dawn or Criminally Insane.
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