Doll Graveyard (2005)

September 28, 2005

by Nathan Shumate

Produced and directed by Charles Band
Written by August White
Starring
- Jared Kusnitz
- Gabrielle Lynn
- Kristyn Green
- Anna Alicia Brock
- Brian Lloyd

After Decadent Evil (2005) came out under his new “Wizard Entertainment” production company, Charles Band decided that the Full Moon logo was just too cool and well-recognized to give up, so he slapped it (now with the name “Full Moon Features”) on the box and in the opening credits for Doll Graveyard. It’s an especially fitting move for this movie; while Decadent Evil dealt with vampire strippers (not an original concept by any means, but certainly outside the Full Moon comfort zone), Doll Graveyard goes back to the well on which Band built his direct-to-video empire: Killer toys.

For anyone else, this would be considered well-trodden territory. For Band, it’s a rut worn as deep as a World War One trench. But maybe that very practice and familiarity pulls him through. No one would mistake Doll Graveyard for great art, but it does manage to entertain better than Decadent Evil did.

Our prologue in 1911 Los Angeles finds young Sophia (Hannah Marks) playing with the most butt-ugly dolls that anyone ever gifted upon a child. There’s a German from the Kaiser’s army, complete with handlebar moustache and pointy helmet; a bug-eyed “Ooga Booga” witch doctor with a bone through his nose; a samurai; and the only normal one of the lot, a flaxen-haired, baby-faced china doll. I was hoping for some backstory as to how such an unappealing assortment of toys ended up in the hands of a middle-American child, but such was not to be.

Suffice it to say, her father (Ken Lyle) probably didn’t buy them. He hates them. Of course, “hate” seems to be the only flavor he comes in; when he discovers Sophia playing in the entryway of the house, which he has expressly forbidden, and broken a vase to boot, he takes sadistic delight in tearing down her intelligence. He stops short of beating her with his belt; instead, he marches her out into the back yard and has her dig a deep hole to bury her beloved dolls in. As she tries to climb out of the hole, she slips and breaks her neck. So Dad just fills the dirt back in, making it a common grave for Sophia and her dolls.

Gee, how could anything so sweet and benign possibly be dangerous?

After a title sequence that really doesn’t fit the look of the rest of the movie (hey, it’s a graveyard composed entirely of dolls!), we’re introduced to the present-day occupants of the house:

- Dad (Ken Lyle again), a single parent trying to enter the dating scene again. Just in case having the same actor play both father roles is too subtle for you, he’s also found the old pocketwatch which Sophia’s dad had always been fidgeting with.

- Guy (Jared Kusnitz), a high school freshman who’s very into collectible action figures. In fact, as we meet him, he’s exulting at the arrival of the mint 1973 Hydraman figure which he won on eBay. (Is it just me, or are we sensing a bit of Charles Band’s personal wish fulfillment in this character? All I know is that I can’t make one of my patented “I wonder how much this would go for on eBay?” caption jokes.)

- DeeDee (Gabrielle Lynn), high school senior and standard-issue Hollywood teenaged bitch. You know the type; any time someone in authority wants her to behave responsibly and not do whatever comes into her pea-sized brain, she rolls her eyes and stomps off, complaining about how unfair the world is because it doesn’t conform to her whim. It is my observation that bitchy older sisters survive to the closing credits far too often to suit my tastes. Granted, the fact that she bears a sharp resemblance to Alanis Morissette may have pushed my natural distaste to extremes.

Hey, it’s “Guy and Dolls!” I just got that!

At the present moment, Dad’s getting ready to go on a date. DeeDee’s been asked to clean up the house, which elicits, “Lincoln freed the slaves, you know!” (Dad misses the opportunity to remind her that he also suspended habeas corpus.) Guy’s half of the work is to clean up the back yard, which is where he finds the samurai doll, protruding just slightly from the far-too-loose earth. (And lets not even wonder about how the dolls, which were under Sophia’s body, ended up nearer the surface.) Being a collectibles geek, he immediately takes it inside to clean and display.

And while the doll sits on his shelf… it blinks. I mention that specifically because it was an effective little gimmick. The first time. But the dolls keep blinking throughout the movie, and after the first “Oooh!” reaction, the novelty fades, and gives the fanboys in the audience the opportunity to think about how it was done (digitally, in post-production) instead of concentrating on the movie itself. (Later, the rods controlling the puppets are also erased digitally, allowing simpler technology to be used on the set. Ain’t the 21st century wunnerful?)

Anyway. Dad goes out for his date, and no sooner does the front door close – literally – than DeeDee’s on the phone, inviting her girlfriends over for a little party. Said girlfriends turn out to be Olivia (Kristyn Green), the blonde cheerleader who’s something of a high school pincushion, and Terri (Anna Alicia Brock), who seems a little non-trendy to be hanging out with the others. Not only that, but she treats Guy with respect! She even knows who Hydraman is, and is impressed with his eBay find! (Did I mention yet that there’s obviously some fantasy fulfillment at play here?)

Proudly setting race relations back to 1911.

Well, where there are loose high school girls, there are bound to be testosterone-addled high school boys, who show up in the form of Tom (Scott Seymour), the one who seems almost human in comparison to Rich (Brian Lloyd). Rich is the classic football neanderthal, thinking with his penis, and impressed by his ability to terrorize nerdy freshmen in their own home. He goes so far as to tie Guy up in his bedroom, then step on the prized Hydraman figure, just to show his manliness.

Oh yeah, there’s a smackdown coming. The conveniently loose earth in the backyard yields up the other three dolls, as lightning crackles…

So while Guy’s lying facedown on his carpet, hearing Sophia’s spectral voice saying, “We’re coming to be with you,” the girls and the boys are proving their consummate stupidity downstairs: getting drunk, smoking dope, and getting into each other’s pants. At least, Tom and DeeDee are; Rich isn’t interested in Olivia anymore, since he’s explored all there is to explore with her, and instead is on the prowl for Terri, mainly for the challenge. Meanwhile, not a damned soul among them thinks ahead to when Dad comes home to find his beer all drunk, the house smelling of weed, and condoms clogging the toilet. Actually, it never comes to that last. Tom and DeeDee decide to adjourn to her bedroom to get busy, where DeeDee decides that, contrary to popular opinion, the first time IS a good opportunity to introduce handcuffs into the relationship. Unfortunately, while Tom is cuffed to the chair and DeeDee’s out finding her riding crop or something, German Soldier Dude shows up and uses that point on his helmet to emasculate him.

“Ve haff vays of makink you do, y’know, stuff!”

As you can imagine, the meat of the movie is the various scenes of rod puppets punishing and killing teens while they mumble. That’s part of the innovation here, I guess; halfway between the silent puppets from the Puppet Master movies and the wisecracking doll from Demonic Toys (1992), this movie gives the dolls some proto-verbalization; the china doll hisses, the German mutters into his moustache as if he were talking to himself, and the witch doctor mumbles some sort of pseudo-African chanting. (You don’t know what I mean? Sure you do. Go ahead right now and chant some vaguely-African sounding gibberish under your breath. There! You’ve got it! You, too, can work as vocal talent in low-budget Hollywood!)

This is one of the rare instances in which a short running time (if you leave off the closing credits, the movie proper comes in at a lean 62 minutes) works to the movie’s advantage, since we don’t have to invent as many reasons for the designated victims to stay in the same locale as the deadly thingies. It’s a big house and stereos are booming, so no one else hear’s Tom’s death cries and DeeDee’s shrieks of fear; Rich and Olivia are drunk beyond the point of self-preservation; cell phones are lost or kicked under furniture, and car keys are almost impossible to find in disorganized purses. The thought of running for help to the neighbor’s house never even comes up; there’s an implication, though it’s not spelled out, that the family is new in the house, so they may not even have met their neighbors. And the requisite call to 911 ends abruptly when Olivia tries to convince the dispatcher that, no, really, we’re being attacked by killer dolls.

And to top it off, it turns out that the dolls will obey Guy. Unfortunately, he’s also slowly being possessed by Olivia’s spirit, which conflates Guy’s ill-treatment with her own abuse into one big lust for revenge. (In his non-possessed moments, Guy and Terri easily figure out that he’s the victim of possession, since she, like he, is into sci-fi and mythology and stuff. I’ve mentioned the fantasy fulfillment angle already, haven’t I?)

Having believably stupid characters is a definite plus for the movie (as opposed to populating a script with conveniently or contrivedly stupid characters), but 62 minutes is still enough time to throw in some duds. There’s a subplot here that Dad is himself becoming possessed by his predecessor, but it neither makes much sense nor impacts the plot much. And the girls calm down and forget about the football player corpses in the house much too easily. And then there’s the supposed “shocker” ending, which makes very little sense.

Now THAT’S a love bite.

But by the standards of Charles Band’s new kingdom, it succeeds much more than Decadent Evil did, and manages to get the job done with a minimum of stretching and padding, never giving viewers enough time to reflect on whether they’re enjoying themselves. In the arena in which we’re playing, that counts as a minor but definite victory.