Dolls (Stuart Gordon, 1986, USA/Italy)

Shot in 1986 but not released until 1987, Stuart Gordon's Dolls marks the horror auteur's third collaboration with Charles Band following Re-Animator and From Beyond. Instead of drawing inspiration from Lovecraft as in the first two films, Dolls, based on a script by science fiction author Ed Naha, draws from The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian interpretations of fairy tales (this book also inspired Kubrick's The Shining). The film centers on six characters who take shelter in a strange house owned by an elderly puppetmaker and his wife. As it turns out, the puppets in the house are not just puppets.

Clocking in at a mere 77 minutes, Dolls moves at a very quick pace. We are introduced to our protagonist Judy Bower, a young girl traveling the English countryside with her father and stepmother. As portrayed by Ian Patrick Williams and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, these are the quintessential evil 80s parents. They take refuge at the puppetmaker's house and are joined by a young man named Ralph, who is traveling with two petty thieves - Isabel and Enid. Ralph turns out to be one of the film's protagonists, as his youthful spirit prevents him from being pursued by the dolls in the house.

Preceding 1988's Child's Play and Charles Band's own Puppetmaster in 1989, Dolls might be the earliest of the films that reignited the trend for killer dolls in the late 1980s. While Dolls is perhaps not the strongest of those films, it is one of the more charming. The stars of the film are the puppets and the stop-motion animation by David W. Allen, who would later collaborate with Charles Band on Puppetmaster on other films. The dolls are suitably creepy, and the film's final transformation sequence is - while not on American Werewolf in London levels - still memorable.

7/10