Made two years after the seminal Re-Animator and once again produced by Charles Band and Empire Pictures, Stuart Gordon's Dolls is part horror movie, part black comedy and part fairy tale and while it does tend to lean towards the clichés often associated with horror films, that doesn't diminish the film's entertainment value. Go into this one with expectations in check and it turns out to be a whole lot of screwy fun.

The movie begins on a rainy, stormy night where we see a girl named Judy Bower (Carrie Loraine) and her crotchety dad David (Ian Patrick Williams) and step-mother Rosemary (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) driving out in the middle of nowhere. They run into some car trouble but are relieved to see, on the other side of the woods, an old mansion home. They head to the home in search of some assistance and meet an elderly couple, Gabriel Hartwicke (Guy Rolfe) and his wife Hilary (Hilary Mason), who seems to have a strange thing for creepy old toys. It turns out that they're doll-makers, and they let the family inside.

Shortly after the Bowers arrive, so too do two punk girls named Enid (Cassie Stuart) and Isabel (Bunty Bailey) and a dopey guy named Ralph (Stephen Lee). It seems that the Bowers aren't the only ones who ran into car trouble this night, and the Hartwickes let these three into their home as well. Young Julie is far more perceptive than any of the adults she's surrounded by but when she tries to warn her parents that the dolls in the house are alive and considerably nastier than they might expect, but of course, they don't believe her. She's just a dumb kid with an overactive imagination, right…?

It's no spoiler to note that yeah, of course Judy is right and of course the dolls are alive, otherwise this wouldn't really be much of a horror movie at all. Made in a decade where other ‘killer doll' movies were fairly popular (think the Puppet Master films and of course, Child's Play), Gordon's picture doesn't really stand out as all that original but it is well paced, atmospheric and pretty entertaining. The story doesn't give us a whole lot of character development: we know Judy is smarter than the adults realize, we know her parents are jerks, we know the punk girls and Ralph are a bit ditzy and we know that the Hartwickes have a secret of some sort. That's about it, there's not a ton of depth here, but it is enough to move the story along nicely and to keep us interested.

The dolls themselves are the real stars of the movie. John Carl Buechler handled most of the doll effects and he does do a fine job here. The little buggers move in an unearthly and super creepy way thanks tom some really effective stop motion techniques mixed in alongside traditional puppet work and what looks like some (admittedly less effective but still pretty good) green screen work. Breathing life into inanimate objects can often times go wrong and when not done properly, if your film lives or dies based on this idea, it'll easily crash and burn. Dolls doesn't do that. It gets the effects work right and compliments this by dressing up the old mansion to make it the perfect location for a twisted, dark fairy tale like this to play out in. If this is a movie based more around effects and set pieces than characters, at least it is successful in that regard.

Add to this some of the effective gallows style humor that makes a lot of Gordon's directorial efforts as amusing as they are and it is easy to see why Dolls has remained a bit of a cult hit. It might not reinvent the wheel but it mixes quirky, cool and creepy together in equal doses and makes for a fun time at the movies.

Dolls is presented on Blu-ray in AVC encoded 1080p high definition framed at 1.78.1 widescreen. While for the most part the transfer is pretty good, some shots look a bit softer than others, probably stemming back to the way in which the movie was initially shot. There's a bit more print damage here than some might hope to see, but it's almost entirely in the form of little white specks, nothing massive. These are visible throughout the movie though. Having said that, the good definitely does outweigh the bad here. Black levels are pretty decent and there are no issues with any noise reduction, as such, skin tones look lifelike and not waxy. Detail is typically pretty solid and there's a fair bit of depth to the picture as well. Color reproduction is problem free and while a little bit more cleanup work would probably have helped a bit, all in all the movie looks quite good on Blu-ray.