Shudder Saturday: Dolly (2025)

I didn't expect much from Dolly. I was hoping for something grimy and entertaining, and maybe interspersed with some impressively brutal violence. What I got, unfortunately, was absolute trash. There's nothing here for most horror fans to enjoy, one good gore gag aside, and at least one particular element is so implausible and laughably mishandled that I wondered at one point if I would have enjoyed the whole thing more if I viewed it as a comedy. 

Macy (Fabianne Therese) and Chase (Seann William Scott) are in an isolated woodland area when they encounter the titular character of Dolly. Dolly wears a porcelain mask, likes to abuse and kill people, and also wants someone she can treat like a baby. Macy is the latest person she wants to coddle. That's all you need to know.

Directed by Rod Blackhurst, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Brandon Weavil, Dolly seems to be an expansion on their 2022 short, Babygirl. Although I haven't seen that yet, I'd be surprised if I didn't prefer it to this tiresome attempt to overstretch something that doesn't really have enough meat on the bones to make it worthy of a feature runtime. This may only clock in at 83 minutes, but every minute of it is a painful experience, and not in a good way.

Therese doesn't get to do anything good with her character, being put into the role of the struggling victim far too early, Scott struggles to overcome the inherent silliness of what happens to his character throughout the film, and all Max the Impaler has to do, in the role of Dolly, is ensure the mask stays on and they're grimly determined to maintain a situation that keeps them happy, even while anyone else around them is miserable. Ethan Suplee tries to do a bit more with what he's given, but he's unable to make viewers forget that his character has been portrayed much better in a number of other films in this vein.

I cannot stress enough how worthless this film is, and I'd be very surprised to hear from anyone outwith the cast and crew who decided to champion it. There's no originality, scenes seemingly designed for pure shock value end up being as hilariously mishandled as so many other elements, and it's almost as if Blackhurst and Weavil approached the material with a complete feeling of disdain for those who would be most likely to check it out.

I'll give it a couple of points for the fact that it was made, and made with a general level of technical competence, but that's it. Almost every decision, from the development of the main killer to the pointless structuring that presents the tale in a number of different chapters, is wrong. You can make the right decision by choosing not to watch it.

2/10

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Prime Time: Dog (2022)

People always like to go on about their respect for those who have served time with the military. There’s always an element of peer pressure to view everyone in uniform as a hero. But the same peer pressure is rarely applied to ensuring things like decent benefits for veterans, free healthcare, and help with mental health issues (particularly PTSD), readjustment to civilian life, and even housing. Sometimes it feels very much like people are saying “thank you for your service, please let me swerve around your cardboard bed while I vote for someone who has you bottom on their list of self-enriching priorities.” Or maybe I am being a bit too bitter and cynical.

Anyway, Dog is a film that explores PTSD and rehabilitation, but it does so by pairing Channing Tatum up with a dog, Lulu, perhaps because those making the film knew that this would sugar-coat the message better than just having a damaged human character as the focus. Tatum plays Jackson Briggs, an ex-Ranger who really wants to get back into military service. He has somehow managed to convince someone that he is medically fit, despite having some major problems, but a superior officer needs to make a call to finalise everything. That call will be made, but on one condition. Briggs needs to take Lulu on a cross-country trip to attend the funeral of the young man who used to be her handler. That would be easy enough, if not for the fact that Lulu is as traumatised and nervous as many other soldiers who have been in the heat of battle as often as she was.

Co-directed by Reid Carolin and Tatum, both making their feature debuts in that role, Dog is a very easygoing, very pleasing, mix of drama and comedy that aims more for the former than the latter. Even the potentially funniest sequence (in which Tatum pulls off a scam to get a nice hotel room for one night) ends with a moment that brings everything back down to a sombre reality. It’s not depressing though, although it is emotionally manipulative and moving (I had something in my eye on a couple of occasions), and anyone thinking they know how it will all play out is probably going to be 100% correct with their predictions.

The script, by Carolin (from a story developed with Brett Rodriguez), is best when it maintains focus on that strong through line of the central character developments. There are a number of episodic side-steps, played out with varying degrees of success, and one or two moments could have easily been excised to craft a tighter, arguably better, film. Not that it overstays its welcome, thanks to the third act being better than all the rest, but the first half of the film suffers as it shows Tatum trying to enjoy some time away from his new traveling companion.

I will say that Tatum is good in his role, very believable as the damaged and desperate veteran wanting to get back to the only life he really knows, and there are enjoyable small turns from Kevin Nash, Jane Adams, Bill Burr, and Ethan Suplee, but the real star of the show is Lulu (played by a number of different canine stars, named Zaza, Britta, and Lana 5). If you are watching a movie named Dog then you should feel something for the dog. Although starting off perceived as a vicious and uncontrollable “monster”, Lulu is always just the same as Tarik’s character, a soldier deemed unfit for service who hasn’t known any other way of life. The parallels running between the two, and how they end up complementing one another, are as obvious as they are emotionally affecting.

There are things that could be improved, including that pacing in the first half. Thomas Newman’s score isn’t great, the music choices are bland, and it’s not a visually interesting piece of work. But the central pairing of Tatum and the dog, the battle between them, is easily good enough to recommend this to fans of either kind of movie star, be it hunk or hound.

7/10

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Prime Time: The Trust (2016)

Part dark comedy, part crime thriller, The Trust is a very odd film that deserves to be seen by more people. The fact that it gives another starring role to Nicolas Cage may have put some people off, this was released before his latest renaissance (although *cough* some people have always enjoyed Cage onscreen, no matter the majority opinion), and maybe the fact that it's a hard film to pin down, tonally.

Cage plays Stone, a cop who comes up with what he thinks is a great plan to deliver a huge payday for himself and Waters, a friend and colleague (played by Elijah Wood). Stone has figured out the location of what could very well be an overflowing safe, one that has been filled up with profits from criminal activity. If Stone and Waters can break into it then it's a win-win, because they end up rich and the only immediate victims are the crooks. But it doesn't take long for things to start going . . . a bit wrong.

Directed by Alex and Benjamin Brewer, the latter also having co-written the script with Adam Hirsch, The Trust is an enjoyably slippery film, moving from something close to a buddy cop film to a riff on the “heist gone wrong” movie. The central characters are easy to like, even as circumstances start to push them to act more unpleasantly, and the third act is an enjoyable storm of bad luck and confusion.

Cage and Wood are both very enjoyable in the lead roles. Cage plays his character in a very controlled, and slowly deliberate, manner. Wood, on the other hand, is a bit more antsy, and his character is really only willing to go along with everything if he can keep convincing himself that it is risk-free. There are a few other supporting cast members, including Sky Ferreira, Ethan Suplee, Steven Williams, and Jerry Lewis (given a cameo that pops up at just the right time to remind viewers to keep paying attention).

Although everything is well put together, the easy rapport between Cage and Wood is the main reason to watch this, and your opinion of the film will depend on how you feel about the two stars. They are bad cops, but good bad cops, if you know what I mean, and it is fun to see them put more energy and effort into their plans for robbery than they put into their standard workdays. There’s also a very enjoyable score from Reza Safinia, which I have to mention here because of the feeling I had that I’d heard it elsewhere (it turns out that parts of it were reminding me of the remix of “Radioactivity” by Fatboy Slim).

Maybe a difficult one to recommend, the comedy is very dark and the crime/thriller side of things is played lightly in between sudden bursts of violence, but I will recommend it anyway. It’s good to watch something occasionally that is quite hard to place neatly in any pigeonhole.

7/10

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Walk Of Shame (2014)

Steven Brill isn't exactly a writer-director you may want to rely on for your comedy movie needs. He does, after all, have a filmography that includes Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, Drillbit Taylor, and even a segment in Movie 43. I'm not saying that I dislike all of those films. I'm just saying that many other people dislike them. Despite how you feel about those films, Walk Of Shame still ends up being worth a watch thanks to the fact that it stars Elizabeth Banks.

Banks stars as Meghan Miles, a news reporter poised to get her dream job as an anchor. When it looks like she's lost the job, Meghan takes up an offer from her friends (Gillian Jacobs and Sarah Wright) to go out and drink lots, and LOTS, of alcohol. She ends up heading off with the cute barman (James Marsden) and they enjoy a magical night of shared booze, pizza and frolics. Waking up the next morning with a sore head, hazy memory of the events from the previous night, and a voicemail message informing her that she is now back in with a chance for the anchor job, Meghan has to get home and prepare to impress her potential new employers. Unfortunately, an incident with an aggressive cat leaves her outside with no phone, no car (it's been towed), and no knowledge of what button to buzz to wake up her new maybe-boyfriend. Things quickly go from bad to worse.

You may or may not already know that Walk Of Shame didn't do well, to put it mildly. Not well at all. It flopped hard. Which I think is a great shame. I am willing to concede that, once again, I may be the lone voice of dissent here, but this is a fun romp that wrings most of the comedy from putting the lovely Miss Banks into increasingly dire circumstances. Whether she's avoiding police who think that she's a prostitute, stuck in a crackhouse or trying to get a ride on a bus despite having no money for the fare, Banks is always a lot of fun. Jacobs, Wright and Marsden all do well as the people who end up trying to track our leading lady down, while Bill Burr and Ethan Suplee provide laughs as the police officers doing the same thing for very different reasons. Lawrence Gilliard Jr, Da'vone McDonald and Alphonso McAuley are enjoyable enough as Scrilla, Hulk and Pookie, the three main men in the crackhouse that Banks ends up in, and Kevin Nealon is a lot of fun in his small role, the traffic reporter who looks down on the action from a helicopter.

Brill doesn't do anything to set your world on fire. He keeps everything moving along, and peppers the whole thing with a selection of amusing characters and lines of dialogue. In short, he does what's required. I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy extolling this as some kind of misunderstood modern classic. It's not. I'm just surprised that it fared quite as badly as it did. There were quite a few movies released in 2014 far more deserving of your ire than this one. Although I admit that maybe my love of Elizabeth Banks makes me slightly biased.

6/10

http://www.amazon.com/Walk-Shame-Blu-ray-DIGITAL-UltraViolet/dp/B00JQF7ZTE/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2_twi_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1420911341&sr=8-1&keywords=walk+of+shame

Rise Of The Zombies (2012)

Another zombie movie from The Asylum, and another one directed by Nick Lyons (who also gave viewers the poor, but slightly better than this, Zombie Apocalypse), Rise Of The Zombies features the usual selection of jobbing actors trying to invest their paper-thin characters with something, anything, to make the movie more watchable as it repeats the same cycle for 90 minutes until a weak, weak ending.

Things start off promising. Survivors of the zombie outbreak are holed up in Alcatraz. There's potential here, but it's soon squandered. Zombies still get in and the main characters all make stupid decision after stupid decision, culminating in the moment when they set off from the island in search of safety elsewhere. Because that's a better decision than killing the zombies that managed to get in and reinforcing the huge stronghold that is Alcatraz. Zombies munch on folks, people bicker, zombies munch on folks, people bicker, repeat ad nauseum. Oh, there's also LeVar Burton, stuck with having to play possibly the stupidest doctor that I've ever seen in any zombie movie. Ever. He is determined to find a cure that will save the one he loves.

There are one or two decent moments here, with one scene showing how easy it is for zombies to climb up the Golden Gate bridge being as enjoyable as it is ridiculously stupid, but there's no reason to ever seek this film out beyond stumbling across it accidentally on the TV schedules. Lyons isn't the worst director, but writers Keith Allan and Delondra Williams didn't make his job any easier by churning out such a laughable and lame script.

The cast includes Mariel Hemingway, Danny Trejo (currently tied with Ving Rhames in the "pay me and I'll turn up for anything" category), Ethan Suplee, the aforementioned Burton, French Stewart, and Chad Lindberg. The rest of the cast is made up of the usual supporting players for The Asylum AKA people who can rack up a long list of credits on IMDb thanks to their portrayal of "screaming zombie victim #8". Hey, nothing against that, a job is a job, but all I'm emphasising is that the rest of the cast features nobody truly memorable. There are one or two other main characters, but the cast can't do enough to overcome the weak script. Without having any recognition factor they just blur together into one featureless crowd.

Rise Of The Zombies isn't good, in case you didn't gather that already. Some of the effects are okay, but a lot of the film just feels rushed and/or lazy. Critics of The Asylum may rush to tell me that ALL of their films feel that way, but I'd disagree. Sometimes they do appear to be trying. Just not on this occasion.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Zombies-DVD-Danny-Trejo/dp/B00BFCJLT8/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1395320665&sr=1-1&keywords=rise+of+the+zombies