This film is not to be confused with Takeshi Kitano's wonderful movie of the same name from 2002 which I love, but I also have a soft spot for this cheapy, imaginative film. The producer Charles Band made an incredible number of low-cost genre films from the 80s onward under his Full Moon production company as producer and occasional director and writer, originally shooting in Italy and later in Romania -- anything to keep the budgets low. Most of his output is thankfully forgotten, but others like this one do pass the test of time. Mind you Band had a good trio going here with director Stuart Gordon at the helm and co-producer Brian Yuzna (himself an interesting director before he took himself off to Spain and some pretty awful horrors).
To me there are two things that represent a hidden menace in movies: clowns (scary, scary) and dolls. What we have here are a recently remarried father reluctantly taking his visiting daugher with him and his new rich and bitchy wife on their summer hols. When bad weather forces them to ditch their car, they take refuge in a nearby mansion where they encounter their elderly and seemingly kindly hosts, Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason -- two actors who have a mini-history of horror between them He was the original Mr. Sardonicus and latter the puppet master and her most memorable role was as the blind psychic in "Don't Look Now". Another carload joins them in their refuge, a strangely child-like bear of a young man who has given a lift to two punkettes who look like something out of early Madonna material girl and who plan to rob the household.
Anyhow it seems that the old man is a master doll-maker and he is somehow more than this -- as is his wife -- as the dolls come to life to punish any behaviour of which they and their masters disapprove. They bare their teeth and roll their bloodshot eyes and attack with knives and power tools. The seemingly bland faces of the dolls can morph with frightening menace and each dead body somehow becomes a new doll -- and there are hundreds in the house! Only the young girl and the childish man survive, but as they leave another car has broken down outside the mansion with its family of four waiting to be tested.
2 comments:
I remember watching this one some years ago. Nothing flash, but easy viewing.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/acoward15/andy-the-bastard
Sounds like a classic laugh-along horror. Even has that classic ending. Even better though - what if the camera panned back..... and back.... and there's someone watching the film on a TV set just the way you the viewer is, and the camera pans back further, further and out of the dolls house window. It's you kind of thing. That would be great camp horror.
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