DOLLS (1987) Stranded travelers take shelter in the home of enchanted toymakers Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason, unaware that the couple’s vast collection of dolls are watching (and judging) them. Whenever the guests show disrespect towards Rolfe and Mason, the dolls rise up to clean house, which usually entails murder. A petty criminal gets her face rearranged after trying to steal Mason’s family heirlooms—her friend is splattered to pieces with tiny muskets supplied by little army men. The nasty stepmother of the story’s child protagonist (Carrie Lorraine) is attacked by a horde of dolls that use knives, saws, and other sharp instruments to cut her to ribbons. The only surviving adult (Stephen Lee) is granted permission to leave with his life for being young at heart, while Lorraine’s cruel father (Ian Patrick Williams) is transformed into a Punch doll. Dolls was Stuart Gordon’s third film after Re-Animator and From Beyond, and was largely ignored upon its initial release. True, it lacks the kinetic energy of Gordon’s previous works, but Dolls is better-than-average stuff, with the screenplay focusing on character and atmosphere—the film’s “old dark house” setting is reminiscent of the gothic B&W horror movies of the thirties and forties. Recommended.
THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART II (1985) Filmed the year before A Nightmare on Elm Street was made, this senseless sequel to the 1977 classic was apparently just a paycheck for Wes Craven, and the results are underwhelming. Part II picks up years after the events of the first film with survivor and former cannibal clan member, Ruby/Rachel (Janus Blythe), once again having to fight off her redneck family when she and several dirt bikers get stranded in the desert. The skimpy plot is stretched even thinner by the unnecessary use of flashbacks from Part 1—even the dog has a flashback—which were added by Craven to pad out the running time when the movie was taken off the shelf after Elm Street became a runaway success. Craven disowned this one years later but, quite frankly, Hills Have Eyes Part II isn’t nearly as bad as some of Wes’s later films, including the limp werewolf thriller, Cursed (2005). Still—pretty lame.
VISITING HOURS (1982) A tough-talking female activist (Lee Grant) is targeted by a misogynistic psychopath (Michael Ironside) who follows her to the hospital after she escapes an attack. Like Michael Myers in Halloween II, Ironside combs through the building looking for Grant and killing anybody who gets in his way—mostly pretty nurses who don’t seem to have a brain between the lot of them. When Ironside fails to secure his kill, he picks up a woman at a bar only to beat and terrorize her in his seedy one-room apartment, the walls of which are decorated with pathetic, hate-spewing letters to the government. After reminiscing about his dysfunctional childhood, Ironside’s blood boils once again and he heads back to the hospital disguised as an orderly to finish what he started with Grant. Visiting Hours was heavily marketed as a slasher upon its initial release but the movie is really more of a thriller with a few gory murders thrown in for good measure. Ironside is scarily effective and Grant is sympathetic, but the film mostly pulls its punches.
