Really Awful Movies

Not a fan of doll bands (Pussycat Dolls, Goo Goo Dolls, New York Dolls). Or doll horrors. The fact that the best of the bunch, 1988’s Child’s Play* isn’t even a Top 5 Horror movie in the year it was released, is a testament to the tepidness of the sub-genre – and Dolly Dearest is no exception.

A Los Angeles executive, family in tow, heads to an Mexican hacienda to restart the Dolly Dearest toy empire, unearthing blueprints, prototypes, models, etc.

Unfortunately, the structure abuts a Mayan burial ground which an archeologist has been tampering with, unleashing something supernatural pre-credit roll.

If we’ve learned anything from horror, it’s that disturbing grave sites comes with a price, whether it’s Poltergeist, The Shining, Demons, Demonia, and…oh about hundreds of others.

Soon, a Dolly Dearest doll is inhabited by an evil spirit, a la Child’s Play and begins to possess the ad exec’s young daughter and terrorizing the locals, dunking a granny in a laundry tub and zapping her.

Star Trek TNG’s Denise Crosby plays the mom, Sam Bottoms (brother of Hollywood legend, The Last Picture Show’s Timothy) the dad, and Rip Torn is the archeologist.

This one is decently made, and has a dynamite cast, all things considered – and better than Dolly Dearest deserves.

There are some occasionally, ahem, spirited moments in this, but otherwise don’t expect too much.

**3/4 (out of 5)

*The best sorta “doll” film is 1988’s Pin – and as a therapeutic medical dummy, that is not even a doll you play with, so it stretches definitions.

Nature run amok horrors have proliferated thanks to CG, but you can’t replace the human touch – at least as far as screenwriting is concerned.

That’s what made Jaws so good, with a slew of unforgettable exchanges – something that no doubt influenced Upstate New Yorker John Sayles when he wrote the script for Alligator, one of the better killer croc films along with Rogue or Alex Aja’s Crawl.

So Sayles is who we have to thank for banter like this:

We got a big toe in the morgue once. Nothing else; just a big toe. Never found the rest of him. But, we figured out who it was. Had a funeral and everything.

Must have been a pretty small casket.

Paradoxically, when it comes to comedy, being serious about it is what makes it funnier as Leslie Nielsen has proven time and time again. That’s what the makers of say, Sharknado don’t appreciate: when your movie is already over-the-top and wacky, mirroring that tone with your characters is exhausting. There’s something to be said for being understated – and that’s an understatement.

In Alligator, an Illinois kid on vacation in Florida, hits up a gator farm and purchases a baby one to take home. Much like what happened during COVID, she’s acquired a pet she’s unequipped to deal with, with her frustrated pops flushing “Ramón” down the toilet and into the Chicago sewer system.

Because this is a John Sayles movie (he wrote Piranha), there is some anti-corporate subtext – a pharmaceutical company subplot involving a degenerate pet store owner stealing neighbourhood cats and dogs and selling them as lab specimens and hormones being flushed down the sewer.

Carnivores and random hormones are not a good mix, it turns out.

Soon, “Ramón” grows and grows and grows amidst subterranean filth, methane and most importantly for a poikilothermic creature, a complete absence of sunlight (not to worry, science buffs: a herpetologist weighs in on how cold-blooded creatures make do in the cold confines of a drainpipe).

The massive creature soon begins chomping on sewer workers, finally drawing the attention of investigators.

Everything’s very Old Man and the Sea / Moby Dick / Jaws and there’s even a doff of the fisherman’s cap to Jaws with a Big Game Hunter conscripted to track the giant beast.

What’s great about horror (and in particular eco horror when it’s done right) is that it’s a supposedly “dumb” genre, but has hidden smarts: at its best, it manages to inject all sorts of subtext about class resentment, scientism, the environmental protectionism into the proceedings, making what is essentially a monster movie infinitely more interesting.

***1/2 (out of 5)