Director: Lawrence Fowler
Year: 2018
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Killer Doll
Plot:
After a devastating bombing raid, a woman moves to get closer to her daughter, who’s become disillusioned moving to the house, and lets her keep an antique doll found at the house, but when a series of strange occurrences strikes her finds that the doll houses a vicious witch’s spirit looking for revenge.
Review:
Overall, this was a decent enough, if overly problematic, genre effort. Among the better factors here is also one of the more troublesome factors in how the build-up occurs to start the hint at supernatural activity present within here. The arrival at the house in the countryside, where she and her daughter meet up with the butler who tries to help them get used to the experience of being out away from everyone, creates a really strong starting point to the type of predictable killer doll film that this setup puts into motion. This all works in some generally enjoyable but overly cliched types of factors, especially once she finds the specific doll and gives it to her daughter, which results in the sequences involving the doll moving to new places where it shouldn’t be found, the daughter starting to act out with the belief that the doll is her best friend, or strange noises in the middle of the night where no one was.
This is all rather routine in making use of time-honored sequences to help highlight the belief that something’s going on, and even though it’s all overly familiar, the effectiveness of these scenes taking place at the ornate Gothic mansion here helps to provide some more chills than expected. What’s not as expected is the constant intrusions where the specific witch haunting the house and tormenting her by kidnapping the daughter, as the whole thing is presented as if she’s going crazy trying to prove both things are true. While the doll is there with everyone at the house is aware of it, and the daughter has disappeared, the connection between both is never made all that clear until later on, so that these sequences have a somewhat more chilling air than expected. As the doll itself is utterly creepy and not suitable for children, it helps these moments feel clearer and more pronounced.
However, there’s the huge overriding factor with this one in that the halfway point turns this into a different kind of film altogether that’s not at all based on the killer doll film we’ve been following. The sudden inclusion of these doctors and their search for a cure to a patient’s belief in the supernatural doll coming to life and taking the life of her daughter is incredibly jarring and distracting, taking us away from a formulaic but likable film that has been done dozens of times over into something else entirely that’s not all that interesting and comes into a completely different form of genre effort entirely. Some of it, looked at objectively, is somewhat chilling, but there’s a lot of work needed to overcome this change of presentation that’s not all that necessary based on where the story was going, much like the utterly bland epilogue that has no purpose being there and doesn’t do anything for the film other than run up the running time. These all come together to keep this one down.
Overview: **.5/5
A wholly watchable if troublesome genre effort, this one has enough going for it to not be a complete waste, but it has a few big hurdles to overcome with some pretty detrimental factors involved. Those with an appreciation for these types of genre fare or who aren’t bothered by the flaws will have the most to like, while most others out there should heed caution.
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