• Produced and directed by Michael A. Hoffman
• Written by Bill Cassinelli and Michael A. Hoffman
• Starring
  • Bill Cassinelli
  • Lindsay Horgan
  • Thorin Taylor Hannah
  • Lee Pinder
  • Joel D. Wynkoop

By now, you’ve probably gotten as tired of reading my philosophical little two-paragraph intro to anthology movies as I am at writing them. So if you want to know what I think are the strengths and weaknesses of the anthology movie format, you can go check out my reviews for Evil Streets or Night Songs or Trilogy of Terror 2. I’ll wait right here.

…

Okay. You’re all up on my take on the anthology format, and I had time to go make myself a cheese sandwich and confirm that, as normal, the kids ate all the Doritos before I got any. So let’s get down to business.

“I’m the co-writer and star — I need to look cool in at least one scene!”

Down-on-his-luck Dennis Frye (Bill Cassinelli) encounters a newly-posted flyer for Mr. Longfellow’s Job Placement Agency at the local Quikky-Mart. He calls in for an appointment and finds them in an unmarked suite of a moribund stripmall. Mr. Longfellow (microbudget fixture Joel Wynkoop) is something of an imposing presence as he goes over some of their openings with Dennis. The distinctive feature of his agency, he explains, is that he goes to great lengths to explain what the job entails — and further, what effect taking the job might have on the applicant’s future.

Which forms the framing device, as each of the three segments is represented as Longfellow’s little speculation on where the job will take Dennis. (Hey, this reminds me of a Donald Duck cartoon where the fat job service guy sent him out on all these odd jobs. The last one was working in a nutbutter stand, and being tormented by Chip ‘n’ Dale. I doubt we’re going to see vengeful chipmunks in this feature, but I’ll keep you posted.)

The first job, at a catering company, barely figures into the story at all. When Dennis locks up and drives home one day, he distractedly drives right over a little girl playing with her doll at the edge of the pavement (which, truth be told, is a damned stupid place to play). He panics and drives off to deposit his bent license plate in his garbage.

“Mommy says if I eat my vegetables, I can grow up to be just like Barbie!”

His night is tormented by dreams of the bloody streak on the pavement and the vacuously-smiling doll lying across it. And in the morning, it isn’t long before he notices that the doll is there in his apartment. He absently throws it out, but then it’s on the passenger seat of his car. Next morning, it’s brought friends — five dolls in all, simply sitting around the apartment, looking at him, waiting for him as he gets out of the shower. And when he goes for a knife in his kitchen, the dolls disappear.

It’s not a terribly original idea, but it doesn’t have to be; the things that scare us most aren’t the things that we’ve never thought of, but the things that occur to us all. And dolls, along with mannequins and other inanimate “false people,” have great potential to be spooky. (Wanna hear something that freaked me out as a kid? There was an episode of The Waltons — stop laughing — in which youngest daughter Elizabeth apparently was the focal point of poltergeist activity — stop laughing, damn you! Naturally, this was freaking Elizabeth out, and late at night she peeked out of her sheets to see her Raggedy Ann doll which she had put on the window sill — and the doll was sitting up. She looked back — and the doll was standing, unsupported. Not moving, not boogah-boogahing at her; simply standing. Cut to commercial. Freaky-ass image that stuck with me all these years, and if you send me e-mail ridiculing me for it, I’ll simply delete ‘em.)

Where was I? (Dang, what the hell was in my Mountain Dew this morning?) Oh yeah. Dolls. Can be very spooky, and this is the segment that gets nearest to accomplishing the ambitions of the title. Problem being, really, that onec you’ve established the dolls’ presence, and you’ve committed to not seeing them actually move, there’s very little you can do with them. And while it’s easy to read ironic menace in the vapid plastic smile of your standard baby doll, a poor directorial choice included a Cabbage Patch Kid as one of the accompanying dolls — and it’s beyond the skills of any director in the world to convey a sense of unsettling malevolence in the face of a Cabbage Patch Doll.

Aw, isn’t it cute — they’re giving each other cancer!

The other thing hampering the effectiveness of this story is that we get no impression that Dennis has any sort of life which is being interrupted by the dolls. We don’t see him in conversation with a single other soul, in fact. Is his normal social life or his working relationships soured because he keeps spooking every time an oh-so-innocent plaything shows up? Dunno.

Anyway. Given that the “catering” story had absolutely nothing to do with catering, I’m surprised Dennis stuck around for Longfellow to describe the working conditions at the next position, as clerk in a used bookstore (i.e., “heaven on earth”). Dennis is here portrayed as something of an ineffectual nebbish, moreso than in the other tales; he continually drops costumers’ change, stammers, etc. None of which endears him to Jamie (Lindsay Horgan), a bitchy customer for whom he has the hots. (Side note: This girl is a frequent customer. Like, a real frequent customer. She comes in and buys two or three books a day. Wish I had that kind of time to read.) She derides and verbally abuses the poor fella, making him miserable with unrequited love… until he discovers a book among the stacks about astral projection. (Not some musty old tome, mind you. No, this was Astral Travel for Beginners, the trade paperback.)

Not only does the book teach him how to detach his soul from his body while sleeping, but it also mentions that an astral traveler can exert a persuasive influence over other sleeping individuals. All of which means that Dennis can pull himself out of his body (accomplished cheaply but effectively with overlapping transparent shots), spy on Jamie as she towels down from her shower, and then spend considerable time convincing her sleeping self that she’s really in love with him, honest.

It’s like one of those dreams where you think you’ve gotten up to use the bathroom, but then you realize you’re still asleep.

The only drawback to all of these phenomenal powers is that there’s a four-hour time limit before the soul becomes permanently separated from the body (in technical terms, we call this “death”). Gee, you don’t think this is going to impact the plot in some way?

It’s a nice little story, but it saunters along at a pace not unlike the wandering astral form of Dennis, looking for Jamie’s house. Much of the running time is taken up with Dennis’ repetitive daydreams of skipping through the surf with Jamie on his arm or other equally (and intentionally) hackneyed images of romantic bliss, which are amusing in their own right but don’t really push things along. But hey, at least he gets to interact with other characters in this one.

The third story has the most tenuous connection to employment; Longfellow picks up on Dennis’ interest in writing and movies, and spins a tale which posits him as a dejected and rejected screenwriter, trying desperately to interest someone in such scripts as “Night of the Drinking Dead.” Despite the support of his girlfriend Annabelle (Thorin Taylor Hannah — hey, he’s got a girlfriend in this one!), he’s about at the end of his rope, especially considering the surprisingly invective rejections he gets first-person from producers and agents. (Of all of the fantastic story elements in this collection, this one strains my disbelief the most: that an unknown screenwriter could get appointments to see all of these people, hand his script to them, and have them read it on the spot and reject him before he leaves the office, with deriding and insulting comments to boot.)

Yeah, like anybody’s gonna take movie advice from a disembodied head.

Depressed beyond rational thought (despite an extraneous pick-me-up sex scene with Annabelle), he gets drunk and stoned on prescription medication, accuses Annabelle of having an affair, bewails the fact that when Edgar Allan Poe was thirty he was a successful author, and falls asleep in his own drool on the kitchen table. When he wakes up… Edgar Allan Poe (Lee Pinder) is in his kitchen. (At least, it’s supposed to be Poe, though they couldn’t spring for anything like a wig or period costume — they just had a conservatively-dressed man with dark hair and moustache, and then had Dennis look pointedly between the actor and an illustration in a book to draw a picture for us.)

Of the three stories, this one is the least coherent, and falters considerably for it. I mean, I admire Poe as much as the next English Lit geek, but I certainly wouldn’t want his input on a script for a medium that didn’t even exist during his heyday. And when Dennis’ drug-addled brain hatches the plan to kill Poe, then replace him in his own century and write his stories for him… well, that makes so little sense that I’ve had to check this sentence three times.

Anyway, once the story is done, the wraparound story ends on a shocker (Longfellow is crazy — or hadn’t you guessed?).

Overall, the production is on the high end of the microbudget spectrum, just on the other side of the amateur/professional divide from recent Full Moon offerings. Acting is also on the high end of amateur (in the sense that they’re not quite good enough to get paid for it). Bill Cassinelli comes up wanting largely because of his near-constant presence on screen; he doesn’t quite have the chops to carry an entire feature as the lead. Wynkoop is wisely dispensed in minimal qualities, as he has a tendency to completely overpower everyone else on screen; in fact, you can almost see the leash around his neck in his scenes with Cassinelli to restrain him from chewing up his co-star along with the scenery.

General audiences will probably be offput by the up-front cheapness of the production, but within the confines of the microbudget admirer community, this is one of the better recent films out there.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count (counting those in the three stories, which were admittedly hypothetical): 4
• breasts: 4 (or 2, rather, since the same person body-doubled in both cases)
• shower scenes: 3
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• vengeful chipmunks: 0 (told you I’d keep you updated)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0