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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Shudder Saturday: Sequence Break (2017)

It is probably my own fault. I may have brought along some unfairly high expectations when I sat down to view Sequence Break, written and directed by the very likable Graham Skipper. I was rooting for Skipper, and I had heard people make shorthand comments comparing it to some murky hybrid of Tron and Cronenbergian horror. How could it fail?

Chase Williamson plays Oz, a young man who works on many arcade machines, getting them back in working order for his boss (Lyle Kanouse). Unfortunately, he is about to lose his job. His place of employment is no longer making money, times are hard. The good news is that he meets a young woman, Tess (Fabianne Therese), and a date looks very likely in his near future. He heads back to his work, finds an envelope with a motherboard stashed inside, and when he places that motherboard inside a game cabinet things start to get weird.

Written and directed by Skipper, Sequence Break is an odd film that deliberately blurs the lines of the onscreen reality until things are almost impenetrable, and then decides to use the very last moments to turn things back to a more traditional film style. It's quite the paradox, being both experimental and daring and yet also surprisingly safe. It's a film full of impressive small details that can never push everything together to make a satisfying big picture. The low budget is obvious in every scene but just a bit more creativity and madness could have distracted viewers from it.

Williamson is a solid lead, Therese is just as good alongside him, Kanouse does fine, and John Dinan pops up occasionally to be the mysterious man who knows about the situation well enough to provide oblique hints regarding how to resolve things. None of the main cast members are bad, which helps the film immensely because they're not given much to work with. The film is more concerned with the idea of the machine, the way it affects the mind and what else it may cause to happen, but it doesn't even explore that central stand as fully or effectively as it could. As the runtime is only 80 minutes, this is something that could have been improved upon throughout most of the second and third acts.

Skipper, perhaps tellingly, does better in the scenes that just have characters talking to one another. He clearly makes an effort to let the acting be the focus of dialogue-heavy scenes. Which makes it a shame that most of the film is taken up with characters gazing at, and being gazed back by, the machine.

But hey, I've seen a lot of people praise this, a lot of people liked it more than I did. I could be wrong in my view. It happens (rarely). So you may want to give it a go for yourself and see what you think. Just don't take any notice of anyone trying to compare it to other, better, films.

4/10

You can buy the DVD here.
Americans can stream the movie.

Bonus Review: Starry Eyes (2014)

Starry Eyes is a smart, disturbing horror movie that cuts away a layer of plastic coating to show the flesh and bone of wannabe stars. That flesh and bone can be, more often than not, dead and broken, but it's still there. It still makes up part of a business constructed on hopes, chance, exploitation, entitlement, and vanity. Not ALL of it is that way, but most of it is.

Alex Essoe is the young woman who keeps trying to battle her way through her dayjob, while simultaneously looking for that big break into the movie business. She ends up auditioning for a breakthrough role with a couple of people who insist on pushing her way beyond her comfort zone. As the process moves further along, things get stranger and stranger. But it IS a great part.

Playing out like a cross between "Son Of Celluloid" (from the incomparable Books Of Blood, written by Clive Barker), Mulholland Dr. and any number of Cronenberg movies, Starry Eyes is a bold movie that won't be for everyone. Thankfully, those who like it should REALLY like it.

Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer share both the writing and directing duties, which allows them to give each other a pat on the back. There may be moments of surreal madness here and there, especially in the third act, but it's all held together by a sharp script, one that constantly delivers seemingly innocent lines of dialogue all coated in a thing film of venom.

But that script would be nothing without the capable talents of the main performers, who help to clarify the meaning of each sentence, and even each word, uttered. Their body language turns almost every compliment upside down, and makes every innocent question an exploratory probe for anything that can be exploited. Essoe is the centrepiece, of course, and gives the kind of brilliant, brave performance that the film deserves. Pat Healy and Noah Segan both do fine with supporting roles. Both actors probably rank as the most recognisable faces in the cast, and both are given one or two great scenes apiece. Maria Olsen and Marc Senter are suitably off-kilter as the people looking to cast a movie, and Louis Dezseran is slightly creepy and able to make your skin crawl even as he flashes his showbiz grin and attempts to convince Essoe's character that he can help her out if he knows that she's willing to go further than anyone else. Amanda Fuller, Fabianne Therese, Shane Coffey, Natalie Castillo, and Nick Simmons flesh out the cast, all portraying young hopefuls who want to break into the world of movies, but hopefully on their own terms.

Add the moody score by Jonathan Snipes, impressive work on every technical aspect (from cinematography to editing to lighting, etc.), and an ending that manages to leave you thinking about everything without also becoming frustrated, and you have something pretty special. In fact, it's my new favourite horror of the year, and I highly recommend it to all genre fans who are willing to try something a bit different from the norm.

9/10

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