stuart gordon’s third film for empire pictures is a horror fairy tale. a violent thunderstorm strands six people at a mansion in the english countryside: young judy (carrie lorraine), her father david (ian patrick williams), her cruel stepmother rosemary (carolyn purdy-gordon), a businessman ralph (stephen lee), and two punk hitchhikers isabel and enid. the owners are gabriel and hilary hartwicke (guy rolfe, hilary mason), an elderly couple who make toys and dolls.
the guests are not random. gabriel and hilary are something more than toymakers. the dolls in the house are former visitors who failed a test. adults who have lost their inner child, who are cruel or petty or dishonest, get transformed into dolls. children and adults who still love toys are spared. ralph, a grown man who carries toys in his luggage and plays with them without shame, passes. judy passes. everyone else does not.
the effects work is the draw. david w. allen’s stop-motion animation gives the dolls a wrong, twitchy life that cg still cannot replicate. the doll attack sequences are staged with practical puppetry, miniatures, and forced perspective. the transformation scenes where living people become dolls are wet and painful and memorable. gordon shot the film in italy at empire studios before from beyond, but empire held it back to let from beyond ride the success of re-animator. it finally premiered at the seattle international film festival in april 1987.
ed naha’s script draws on bruno bettelheim’s the uses of enchantment. the structure is hansel and gretel: lost travelers, a gingerbread house, a witch who eats children. but gordon plays it as horror, not dark fantasy. the hartwickes are charming and polite, and that makes them worse. guy rolfe, who would later play andre toulon in the puppet master series, gives gabriel a grandfatherly warmth that makes the cruelty underneath more unsettling. at 77 minutes the film does not waste a frame. it knows what it is and does not overstay.
the legacy is the puppet master franchise. when empire pictures collapsed, producer charles band took the concept to full moon productions and built a series out of it. puppet master is the spiritual successor to dolls. but dolls is the original, and it is tighter, stranger, and more personal than anything that followed.
image: tmdb backdrop (ralph and judy with mr. punch, surrounded by dolls), source luma 72.4, baked at factor 0.45, final mean brightness 27.5