Stuart Gordon, throughout his career as a horror movie director, has been responsible for a few undisputed classics of the genre like Re-Animator and From Beyond, and some dreck, like Robojox and Space Truckers. His 1987 effort, produced by Charles Band of Full Moon Entertainment, falls somewhere squarely in the middle of his filmography and proves to be an entertaining diversion with a few stand out scenes, but not much more than that.

Judy Bower (Carrie Lorraine) is on a trip with her lazy dad (Ian Patrick Williams) and her wicked stepmother (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon who has appeared in most of Stuart's films from Re-Animator to Space Truckers) when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A storm moves in and around the same time, a friendly goofball named Ralph (Stephen Lee) picks up two loser punk girl hitchhikers (Bunty Bailey and Cassie Stuart). All six of them end up taking refuge in the home of Gabriel (Guy Rolfe of the Puppet Master films) and Hilary (Hilary Mason) Hartwicke, a pair of seemingly innocent old coots who make and collect handmade dolls.

After a few scenes of cliché ridden dialogue that allows us to get to know some of the characters better, we learn that Ralph is a good natured type, Judy's father and step-mother are self serving and ignorant, and the two loser punk girls are thieves who hope to rip off the Hartwicke's and maybe Ralph too while they're at it. In short, the only redeeming characters that are in the house are Ralph and Judy – everyone else is either untrustworthy or horribly selfish.

As the movie unravels from this point, a few of the characters start noticing strange things around the house and about their two elderly hosts until one by one, the nastier characters in the movie started dropping like flies and it looks like the culprits are the dolls…

The first half hour or so of Dolls is pretty painful stuff. IT takes its sweet time getting going with things and not a whole lot really happens that is of interest. Once the half hour mark hits, however, things definitely pick up and when the carnage begins, the movie turns out to be a lot of goofy fun. A few of the murder set pieces in the movie are pretty atmospheric and even a little creepy in spots, as the inanimate becomes the animate and while the special effects are a little primitive by today's standards, the lack of CGI and digital effects definitely gives the movie a nice sense of nostalgia.

Performances are nothing to write home about here, as no one is particularly good in the movie but then again, on the other hand, no one stands out as truly awful either. These are the standard type of b-movie performances you'd expect from a movie that was bankrolled by the man behind Full Moon Pictures (and in that regard the similarities to some of the Puppet Master films are probably not all that unintentional).

In the end, Dolls is what it is – a cheap b-movie that entertains and throws in a few inventive kills. It's a silly affair and it's pretty hard to take any of it seriously at all, but in the defense of the people who made it, I don't think you're really supposed to. The final result is a fun popcorn movie that will definitely appeal to eighties horror enthusiasts (and I know you're out there).

Video:

MGM offers an anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen presentation of the film on one side of the disc and a fullframe version on the other. Print quality is more or less the same regardless of which one you opt to watch, though the compositions definitely look stronger on the widescreen version of the movie. Some of the lighter scenes that take place outside are a bit washed out looking, but the indoor scenes, which make up the large majority of the movie, look pretty decent. There is some mild print damage present throughout in the form of the odd speck here and there and the expected amount of film grain is also present, but for the most part Dolls looks alright. There's some decent foreground and background detail present in the picture and there aren't any real problems with mpeg compression artifacts. Some light edge enhancement is there if you want to look for it but it doesn't really hurt things too much.