Be it via some mystical hocus pocus or just a screwed up algorithm, killer dolls have been a fixure of horror films for absolutely ages. Chunky is, or course, the big dog of the world of pathological playthings, but even he has the topical likes of M3GAN snapping away at those Good Guy brand sneakers and trailing away behind them are the likes of Slappy from Goosebumps, Annabelle from the Conjuring Universe and 72% of every film that Charles Band has ever produced.
But what about those killer dolls that never made the grade? What about those terrible toys that never got sequels or merchandising deals? What about the movies lost to time, such as Dolly Dearest, that only had a single era of playtime? Well, I’m pretty certain that once you actually watch the movie in question, all will soon become clear – but that doesn’t mean one of the also-rans of one of horrors most eccentric sub-genres can’t bust out an original idea or two.
Oh man. If I had a dollar for every time I decided to cash in my family’s savings and uproot my wife and two children in order to buy a dilapidated doll factory in Mexico – I’d no extra cash, but I’d still have all my original money intact (what am I, an idiot?) but that doesn’t help Elliot Wade much after his hail Mary business play has caused much family misery. For a start, the Dolly Dearest factory that he’s acquired has seen better days and will require a ton of work to get it up to code and even though his wife, Marilyn puts on a brave face, you can tell that she’s itching to return back to LA. On the flip side, their young son Jimmy seems to be treating this all as some big adventure, but considering that he dresses like a stock broker from the late 80s and acts like a white Urkel, maybe we shouldn’t care too much about his opinion. But taking the move the hardest is youngest, Jessica, who misses all her friends, but finds solace in taking one of the preserved dolls still sitting in the factory and soon she and Dolly have become inseparable.
However, this proves to be an incredibly bad thing, because just down the road from the factory is a freshly breached Mayan tomb that’s released the evil spirit of a demon child known as Sanzia who promptly takes up residence in – you guessed it – Dolly. But while Marilyn bears the brunt of her daughter’s sudden personality change that includes everything from speaking in tongues to violent rages, the various Mexican staff members surely get the worst of it when they start meeting their ends in freakish “accidents”. However, thanks to the arrival of archeologist Professor Resnick who has turned up to pick around that old tomb, a precocious Jimmy starts putting some of the pieces together.
However, can the family manage to save Jessica’s soul and their own lives when they find out that Sanzia hasn’t just possessed one Dolly, but three?
Basically one of those forgotten films that popped up in the early 90s after the bottom dropped out of the 80s horror boon, Dolly Dearest suffers on a multitude of levels. Firstly, despite the location change to Mexico, there’s really no escaping the fact that this film is a shameless Child’s Play ripoff who seriously thinks that sticking it’s villain in a dress is going to fool everyone. As a result, anyone expecting the quality of animatronics we (and Chucky) benefited from in 1990’s Child Play 2, were horribly short changed by the type of budget you’d usually get for a direct to video enterprise. However, despite the fact that it’s pretty duff, I have to agree that their are some aspects of Dolly Dearest that prove to be surprisingly interesting despite the fact that it’s as tense and scary as a midsummer nap.
The first is that the movie is set in Mexico, which does regrettably mean that pretty much all the victims of the deadly doll are exclusively Mexican, but for a genre usually set in old rustic houses or intercity families, the location shift to south of the border. Of course it conveniently allows the script to pull some Mayan flavoured supernatural stuff to get the ball rolling, but you have to question the decision making skills of Elliot Wade to risk the well being of his family to buy a Mexican doll factory he never even drove down to view before buying it.
In fact, shitty parenting seems to be vital to films like this and considering that Denise Crosby had already witness one cinematic forces tear her family a new asshole in Pet Sematary, you’d think that maybe the former Star Trek actress would realise that cinematic homemaking possibly wasn’t for her. It doesn’t help that the obscenely precocious character of Jimmy is used as the sort of comic relief that would have played well in The Monster Squad, but seend incredibly misplaced here, even if I’ll freely admit that his shotgun blazing moment of glory (along with the kiss-off line “Play with this, bitch”), is B-movie heaven. I will say that little Jessica (who looks a lot like an E.T. era Drew Barrymore) does a fairly admirable job of portraying the child in peril and you can see that along with Child’s Play, Dolly Dearest was hoping to pinch a fair bit of material from The Omen too – jeez, there’s even a dog attack in a graveyard and a reveal of a misshapen baby skeleton just to really drive things home.
This brings us to the titular Dolly herself and while I’m willing to let the creaky puppet work that makes her about as agile as a three-legged cat on quaaludes slide, she’s ultimately far too goofy to terrify anyone other the very young. Once again, however, I will give props to the fact that there’s actually a trio of murderous muppets and watching them awkwardly work in tandem to take down their victims is not only pretty innovative, but it predates a similar trick seen in Cult Of Chucky by over twenty five years – so I guess we can chalk up one win for Dolly. However, combined with some Hallmark Channel style acting and some rather weak kills, the movie ends up being rather forgettable fare where the most disconcerting sight by far is the baffling presence of Rip Torn. Scrabbling around ruins and flinging dynamite with reckless abandon around during the messy climax he’s prone to saying disconcerting things to women like “I see your beauty in your son’s face” as if it’s the most normal thing in the world – but who knows, to Rip it probably was…
A few neat points can’t stop Dolly Dearest from tumbling to the bottom of the toy box as its flat direction and overfamiliar beats make it play second fiddle to most killer doll movies you could name. But don’t worry, kids! Women’s representation in the world of catastrophic kiddies things would soon catch up with the movie thanks to the rise of the likes of Annabelle and M3GAN who ensured that the future was rosy for fierce female dolls everywhere.
Dolly on the other hand was more Raggedy Ann than Polly Pocket if you get my meaning.
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