Tag Archives: Dolls

Puppet Master Review

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This review is of the TV-14 edited version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative

It’s time for one of those disgraceful movies. This one never even got to start on a high note and so you knew immediately that it wouldn’t be any good. Puppets can make for interesting villains at times but this one is definitely just going for shock value the whole time with no real substance at play. Throw in a bunch of annoying characters and you have an absolute recipe for disaster.

The film starts off with the Puppet Master bumping himself off instead of fighting off the evil villains. We then cut to the present where a group of psychic power users are summoned by their old “friend” Neil. These people are the best at what they do. Whether it is seeing the future, seeing the past, or being able to use wards, they are ready for anything. You might call them something like the Psychic Avengers! When they all walk into a room you will be shocked at what little aura any of them possesses. It’s almost as if they drain it from the room. Here’s the strange thing though, Neil is dead and has clearly been that way for a long while. How come none of these psychics sensed that? How did Neil summon them while dead? Well surely it wouldn’t hurt to stay in his mansion for one night?…….can they survive the puppets?

I mean maybe you could feel a little bad for them if they were upstanding citizens but they all look terrible from the jump. Frank and Carissa are way too self absorbed as they mess around when this should be serious business, Dana seems rather desperate and Alex completely wastes his future ability by not actually doing anything about it. It’s clear that they are all out of their depths and completely unprepared for what is about to happen. These psychics are all about to get exposed.

Neil’s wife Megan is rather suspicious the whole time. She is easy to offend but also seems to know more than she is letting on with Neil. The film shrouds her in mystery the whole time but she still never manages to be all that interesting. She gets to spend a decent amount of time with Alex but of course she was just married so you hope there is no romance brewing. Alex just seems oblivious to all the danger throughout the movie though. Even in the dream where we see the future, he just mindlessly walks into a trap. Yes, it was a dream but it is treated as something he would have done if that was the situation. Cmon now.

Frank and Carissa are some of the worst because they know they are in imminent danger and decide now is the time for bondage play. Really? Reallllly? That’s one of the most contrived kills I’ve seen in a long time, especially as Carissa has several minutes to free Frank but panics instead. The whole scene is just soooo bad and drawn out. They were going for max edge on both of the kills here and it was all so overdone.

Then for Dana, she seemed like the weakest anyway. Aside from her only noticeable trait being that she was crazy, she just didn’t handle this very well. I’ll get into this more later on but the puppets are really weak. At least for Frank and Carissa you can make a few excuses even if they are weak ones. Well, Frank has a legit excuse, the rest are dicey. For Dana she is just flat out defeated which is crazy.

These puppets are nothing like Chucky or Talking Tina. They don’t seem to have infinite regen or teleportation. We see characters tossing them around and plucking them apart like actual toys. They look so weak (Thanks in part to the low budget) that they should have lost immediately. For example one of the puppets is like the Thing. He does the “It’s Clobbering time!” barrage of fists. His fists don’t hurt too much as different characters eat a few punches and then toss him away. The main problem as always is they don’t finish the job. Rip the puppets arms off, keep the head detached, etc. Instead they just wait as the puppet very slowly puts himself back together.

Yeah the small hits will add up eventually so just take them out. Near the end we get an extended fight scene where somebody takes on multiple puppets at once and you just can’t help but feel like he could have done a lot better. The movie never actually makes the puppets look all that scary. I mean they were scared of humans with guns in the opening scene after all. They are fighters but not particularly good ones.

I’d also say that the ending is rather rushed with the puppets doing a 180 for no reason. You’re not sure why the main villain is suddenly afraid of them or why Alex suddenly wants to help the villain. Did he think the death would be too gruesome? I just don’t see why, if Alex frees the guy then Alex will quickly be murdered. It again makes Alex look dumb as rocks here. So not only is he making all of the wrong decisions over and over again but now he’s actively going out of his way to help the villain?

The writing throughout the film is terrible but that’s par for the course. The villains aren’t very intimidating at all and the characters are really bad. The violence is extremely over the top and so the movie doesn’t really have much of anything going for it. It’s not very long at least which I can say is a good thing. That may be the only real good thing I can say about it. There was a lot of potential here but the film used none of it.

There is one good thing I can say about the film and that is that I liked the designs of some of the puppets. The one with the knife was rather scary and I also liked the one with the big fists. The sound effect every time he would punch someone was intense. Maybe a bit funnier than scary but it worked well. The puppets could hold their own in a survival setting. The movie just didn’t execute on anything around them.

Overall, The idea of a bunch of psychic people getting together to solve a mystery of their dead enemy is really interesting. You could have done a lot with that but instead they don’t actually get to interact a ton before they split up and start getting picked off. None of them have any survival instincts with how they drink a lot and get tied up. Different members felt danger and evil when they walked into the mansion, did they just forget that? They underestimated the dummies to a painful degree and I’d argue the only smart thing to do would have been to leave the house immediately. If not, at least stay together and it would be hard to be defeated. Their overconfidence got to them and I still find it hard to believe that the franchise got so many films. Maybe the sequels will be better but this was a really rough start for the franchise. It was just L after L and you want to stay very far away from this one.

Overall 2/10

Dolls Review

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This review is of the edited TV-14 version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative

Dolls is one of those films where you figure the main characters are going to be doomed but the question is…how doomed? Will they be able to put up a fight or are they doomed right out of the gate? In the end I wouldn’t say the Dolls are the strongest horror villains as the humans can put up a fight but it’s fair to say that they’re still a solid threat. This is a horror film that’s mostly going through the motions, I wouldn’t recommend it but the novelty of evil dolls is always intense.

The movie starts off with one of the meanest families getting stranded as their car goes in the mud. You have the stepmother Rosemary who can’t stand her husband’s daughter Judy and makes no secret of this. Rosemary wants to send her off to boarding school and insists on being mean for no reason. Then you have David who is so desperate for Rosemary’s attention and devotion that he will basically grovel and will take her side against Judy’s every time. Finally you have Judy who has dreams of the parents getting eaten alive by her teddy bear. So these 3 have a whole lot of issues but at least they have a place to sleep now.

See, there’s an abandoned mansion owned by a senior couple named Gabriel and Hilary. They don’t mind having company for the night. The family is soon joined by the two hitchhikers they nearly destroyed while driving to the mud patch as well as a guy named Ralph who is being manipulated by those two. Ralph seems like the only decent adult here so will he be able to escape the wrath of the dolls or is it too late? One thing’s for sure, nobody is going to be having a very peaceful night here.

Now you may be wondering…how can you lose to a bunch of toys? Well, in some cases it’s really the surprise factor. When the toys have already stabbed you before you’ve begun to fight then it’s difficult to do much. For example I wouldn’t say Rosemary had much of a fighting chance from the jump. As the meanest character in the film you figured that the movie was definitely going to cook something up for her. Being mean pretty much never pays in a horror film. Often times nice characters will die too but they tend to get off a little easier at least.

Then for Isabel and Enid, they’re petty thieves who don’t mind stealing from old people so of course things aren’t going to go well for them. Isabel’s death goes more into the surprise factor but Enid plays this one quite horribly. Okay so you’re outnumbered by the toys but you do have a flaming weapon plus you’ve had time to adapt which is more than most of the other characters got. So now you can plan a proper counter attack and start taking these guys down right?

Well, she unfortunately forgets the basic rule of combat which is that if someone is pointing a gun at you then you need to get out of range. She already knows that the toys are real so why stay in front of them like this? I thought the scene was a bit annoying because she had already taken down so many of them, only to freeze up at the absolute worst time. That was not the way to go about things, not at all. Big mistake on her part and it cost everything.

As the only real decent character here, Ralph’s a solid guy to root for. He has to deal with a whole lot and he’s a bit too naïve at times but at least he means well. Ralph does his best to protect Judy and while he is really slow on the uptake, it all eventually makes sense to him. I did think a scene near the end wasn’t handled well though as it comes across almost as if Ralph was trying to instigate the villains to attack him. Just go away while you’ve still got your life in tact. Why are you trying to make this into a bigger deal? I thought that was nearly a big miss for him so he got lucky…in that scene at least.

As for Judy, well you can cut her a lot of slack next to the other characters because she is still a kid. I’d say that has to count for something after all and she does try to talk to the toys a little. She did well in evading her father as well since that nearly got tricky for her. She does apparently lie a lot which is part of what makes this situation tougher for anyone to believe her so I like to think that her lying days are over now.

As for Gabriel and Hilary, I thought they were fairly interesting. They’ve certainly got grand ambitions but I wouldn’t say they are perfect ones. For example, if you’re trying to go the sympathetic route with them then shouldn’t they have more control over what the dolls do? They nearly bumped someone off who wouldn’t have been on their hit list all because the dolls have such a mind of their own.

By the end of the film it’s left fairly vague on exactly how this works. I assume the toys are on semi automatic where they work to accomplish the old couple’s goals but have some personality and control over themselves. If that is the case, I’d say that Gabriel and Hilary need to tighten the reigns just a bit or it’s going to go against their goals in the end. It sort of defeats the purpose if they’ll just destroy anyone who goes into the house. It’s an interesting dynamic though so it could be interesting to learn more about the villains some day.

At the end of the day what holds this film back is what holds most horror films back. It can be quite violent. Most of the deaths are definitely trying to be as gruesome and painful as possible. These dolls are absolutely not the kind of villains to give you an easy death. In part this is because of the size but expect to be shot and stabbed numerous times before going down. Each death takes forever and the way one of the girls dies is particularly gruesome as it’s like she is early on in the process of being a toy and so it all looks off with the eyes and everything.

Overall, Dolls is not really anything special in the slasher/horror genre. I dare say the dream near the beginning should have been real as it would have been such a crazy start to the adventure and would have switched things up. Realistically it wouldn’t have helped the score all that much though. I did appreciate the twist ending as it reminds you that some cycles are not too easy to break or stop. Things will just keep on happening over and over again. If this is your kind of film then you may as well jump on it but otherwise you can probably guess whether you’ll like the film or not right from the poster.

Overall 2/10