Island of the Dolls (2023) by Jack E. Bell

Director: Jack E. Bell

Year: 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Supernatural

Plot:

Heading to a remote island, a group of strangers looking to uncover the truth about the area’s haunted past find that the stories about it being littered with broken dolls are true when they spot the mysterious objects there, which gives them the chance to encounter the spectral owner of the dolls.

Review:

Overall, this was a disappointing if still watchable genre effort. One of the better elements present here is the rather solid atmosphere generated by being at this particular location, which offers the concept at play. Giving off a rather strong backstory about the gruesome history of the island being a location of a tragic death of a young girl and the dolls being placed there to quell her vengeful spirit only to find it never worked and her spirit now haunts the island, this works well enough to set up a location involving plenty of tragic accidents that prove it perfect for a ghostly spirit to roam. With that, it gives an explanation for the imagery to run rampant, with the logical explanation given for why the area is home to thousands of dolls, as that’s a genuinely creepy and unnerving concept, which has quite a lot to like about it. The idea of the ghostly spirit coming to life and stalking others with the ghostly voices in the distance and the potential of the dolls coming to life to kill others, which looks well enough for what it is, gives this some admittedly creepy scenes.

Beyond this, though, there’s not much going on here. That’s mainly due to the utterly dull and glacial pacing that doesn’t have much to do for such long periods, and it’s possible to drift off before the action happens. There’s long stretches with the couples going around talking about being together, who’s being cheating on who, or whether the island’s history is coming to pass or not, giving this one of the blandest bits of character development in between such few attacks that it’s a struggle to get through anything here. The characters delivering this are just plain insufferably dull, doing all of this with very little of anything happening to be of interest when it’s not involving the creepy dolls or the ghost girl running around. Given that it’s all draped in a cheap, ultra flimsy production that is never convincing as an island, looks like it was filmed quickly to boot, and was devoid of extravagant kills on top of everything, it all makes for a weak and underwhelming feature.

Overview: 0.5/5

An utter waste without much of anything interesting happening, there’s so little to this one that it happens to be among the lowest rungs of the genre as a whole. Those with an appreciation for this style or the creative crew are the only ones who should give this a shot, while most others out there should heed such extreme caution as to outright avoid it.