Director: Andrew Jones
Year: 2018
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Killer Doll
Plot:
After escaping from Germany, the toymaker takes his dolls on a train to safety while being targeted by a secret Nazi agent looking to get close to a woman escaping from an abusive husband as a means of getting his hands on the spellbook for the Third Reich, and he must get to safety.
Review:
This was an abysmal effort with almost nothing worthwhile. There’s nothing about the plot that becomes fun to follow, shifting through several different timelines that have little relevance to each other, as if there’s supposedly something between them that brings them together. The first storyline here involving the woman trying to escape her abusive husband, who’s trying to secure a deadly book to let the Nazis use the secrets contained within it for their own good, and meeting up with a deranged agent also trying to secure the book for himself, so that their whole journey manages to cover some massively uninteresting points. His exploits make no sense in the grand scheme of things, the power struggle scenarios between them just go nowhere as he’s not that threatening and we’re not given much of a reason to care about her, and as a whole, this consumes the first full half of the film following his journey through the countryside with her as a hostage and getting to meet various individuals along the way looking to get their hands on this strange supernatural book.
The second storyline, featuring the toymaker making his way along the train trip out of Germany and trying to outwit the Nazi soldiers along the trip, hoping also to acquire the book for the Third Reich, has a bit more to like, but even this isn’t without flaws. The fact that it has the film’s action constitution is the lone bright spot here, where the dolls run wild on the military compound and slaughter the remaining troops in the station before going to confront the commander, still doesn’t excuse the fact that so much of the running time is focused on elements away from the killer dolls that they end up barely managing to take up five minutes of screentime total. The endless interrogations, trying to discuss what’s inside the book and what it means for the Third Reich to have it, are just plodding and boring with the way they’re put together, and those first half hostage sequences involving the escaping wife and agent trying to go about their way looking to get to safety, rather quickly runs out of steam when it’s presence and purpose are questioned without tying into the main feature with the man coming across the dolls.
That leaves the rest of the film’s technical qualities to lower this one overall. The means by which the dolls come to life and become the heroes of the story by turning against the Nazis is an easy, lazy way of getting to like them in a way that never seems logical, given how the doll was brought to life in the earlier films, as its evil nature was due to possession by the spirit of the dead child who had been murdered against the earlier owner. Although the whole thing is supposedly a reboot due to the prequel-like earlier time frame, that this still tries to make the events of the original canon in its universe, making these elements all the more frustrating because of how contradictory they are. Even still, the cheap effects and generally lacking special effects are just so comically bad that it all looks quite unnatural, with everything being such simple stabbings or off-screen slicings that it never has the chance to get anything flashy or elaborate on-screen, keeping this one down incredibly low overall.
Overview: 0.5/5
An absolutely disastrous sequel that doesn’t have much going for it, that this is problematic on so many fronts, rather than just going for how much it changes the franchise, leaving this among the bottom of the barrel in the genre. This is really only for franchise completionists or those who enjoy this style, while everyone else should outright avoid this one.
Comments
Post a Comment