Movie Review: Dolls (2019)
Dolls is a horror film written by Justin Hawkins, Josh Hawkins, and Jeff Miller. It was directed by Cuyle Carvin, who has been involved in quite a few projects as an actor, but this is his debut feature film as a director and not a bad one at that. It was actually pretty enjoyable for the most part which we will get into below.
Distributed by Uncork’d Entertainment, Dolls offers some pretty decent indie horror and scares, and has some decent acting including Dee Wallace, who is pretty much horror royalty. She has been in a lot of classics like The Hills Have Eyes, The Howling, and Cujo to name a few. She was also in Rob Zombie’s Lords of Salem, and is in his upcoming 3 From Hell. Needless to say, it was a pleasure seeing her in this. The two stars of the film, Thomas Downey and Trinity Simpson as the father (Robert) and daughter (Sammey) in this film were also pretty good, and it was Simpson’s first acting credit so kudos to her for a great job here.
The film is about some dolls that were possessed and left in Robert’s mother’s house who has passed away recently. Robert moves in there for a while and finds them in the attic. They do some childish laughing and you can hear them pattering around the house as dolls like to do in these types of films to make them extra creepy. Robert is a children’s book author that decides to take a sharp turn in writing style, and write a story about the creepy dolls called “Attic Dolls” while there. His daughter Sammey shows up to get away from her mother who is in the middle of a divorce with Robert and decides to help him with the book.
There were actually some decent scares in this film from time to time. The tension isn’t really there all the time, but in the moments when it was present, they did a great job with the score and sound. The cinematography is alight in this, and it definitely seems like Carvin has a good eye for directing. The only real shortcomings came in the writing department. There were a few things that didn’t make sense.
They developed a romance between the groundskeeper James (Bret Green), and the 17-year-old Sammey, which was awkward. We aren’t sure what age he was playing in this film, but the actor is 32, and noticeably older. Robert even makes a point to tell James that she’s 17, and they still have a romantic scene or two. Also, it didn’t seem like Robert was aware that the dolls could be evil, even though he is writing a book about the evil dolls. There were a couple of other small things that didn’t make sense, but these were two of the most noticeable.
Overall, Dolls is a pretty decent first effort from Carvin in the directing department. It has a few scares peppered in here and they were done pretty well. The story was ok, but they could have done better in the writing department. And the acting was solid overall. We would definitely recommend this to horror fans who like evil dolls, because who doesn’t love a good creepy doll film?
Dolls releases today, July 2, 2019. Catch it today on VOD. It’s available here on Amazon Prime Video!
Uncork’d Entertainment is handling worldwide distribution on DOLLS.
For more information and updates, please visit the film’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/dollsmovie.
