Year released: 1999
THE CHARGE: This master of puppets is charged with pulling strings, twisting minds and smashing dreams, and probably imbibing too much whiskey in the jar-o.
THE EVIDENCE: Not many people know the name Charles Band, but his name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as renowned low budget horror veterans like Roger Corman and H.G. Lewis. Since the early 70s, Band has produced almost 250 films and directed over 30. He also has an odd preoccupation with dolls, which appear in many of his films like Puppet Master, Dollman, Demonic Toys and Dangerous Worry Dolls. But Blood Dolls might be the craziest of them all.
Virgil Travis is an inventor who hides behind a metal mask to hide his deformity: a remarkably shrunken head. His greatest invention is a device that turns people into tiny dolls that do his bidding. He has a butler who always wears clown makeup and who doubles as Virgil’s personal assassin. He also has an all-girl rock band caged in his basement, held captive there by a midget with an eye patch. I couldn’t create this combination of weirdness even if I took the most potent combination of hallucinogenic drugs known to man.
What's everyone looking at? Never seen an oriental rug on a wall before?
And here’s the strangest part: Blood Dolls is, at its insane core, a love story. A raven haired beauty named Moira shows up and eventually reveals that she has even more twisted plans for Virgil’s inventions than Virgil himself. Virgil is shocked... and intrigued. An odd romance blossoms between the two that could lead to them living happily ever after, if they don’t kill each other first.
It all sounds like a case of somebody throwing the leftovers from a dozen scripts into a cinematic stew pot and hoping for the best. Heck, the movie even gives you two different endings so you can pick which one you like best. No, it’s not an alternate ending you'll only find on a DVD, it’s actually incorporated into the movie itself! The story ends and then one of the characters emerges from a stage curtain to basically say "If you didn't like that ending, here's another".
The craziest thing of all is that the bizarre bouillabaisse works, thanks mainly to the performances of the two lead actors. Jack Maturin as the shrunken-headed Virgil and Debra Mayer as Moira infuse their characters with a delightfully exaggerated gravitas normally reserved for prime-time soap operas. They plot, scheme and smolder while occupying the eye of a hurricane of hysteria. Like a modern Gomez and Morticia Addams, they don't see the weirdness going on around them as being weird at all. They’re creepy and kooky, over-the-top and campy, and the performances are perfect for the story line they’re involved in.
Brutal Pimp Barbie and Midget S&M Ken, arriving soon in toy stores.
For something marketed as a horror flick, the horror is pretty subdued. There’s very little gore and the effects are kept simple. The titular dolls come across as an afterthought, introduced early and causing some mayhem in the middle of the flick but pretty much disappearing for the rest of it. If you’re looking for blood and violence, there’s not much to be found here.
But if you want extreme weirdness, you’d have to search long and hard for anything equal to the marvelously manic madness displayed by the criminally misunderstood Blood Dolls..
THE VERDICT: Blood Dolls is NOT GUILTY by reason of insanity. The only question is what's more insane: the movie, or me for liking it so damn much.
