Studio:   IFC/Shudder
Director: Rod Blackhurst
Writer:   Rod Blackhurst, Brandon Weavil
Producer: Ross O’Connor, Rod Blackhurst, Noah Lang, Joseph C. Grano, Isaiah Smallman, Bryce McGuire, Betty Tong, Esteban Sanchez
Stars:    Fabianne Therese, Russ Tiller, Eve Blackhurst, Michalina Scorzelli, Kate Cobb, Ethan Suplee, Seann William Scott, Max the Impaler

Review Score:

Summary:

A deranged serial killer wearing a porcelain doll mask terrorizes a woman stranded in remote woods.

Synopsis:

CHAPTER I – MOTHER

After dropping off his young daughter Evy with her Aunt Sadie, single father Chase brings his girlfriend Macy to a scenic overlook in the remote woods near Hooper Mine to propose. Distracted by strange music coming from a children’s toy nearby, Chase pauses the proposal to investigate. Chase ends up stumbling upon Dolly, a brutish killer who wears a mask reflective of her obsession with dolls and infantilization, as Dolly buries her mother’s dismembered body in a pit encircled by creepy dolls. Dolly crushes Chase’s throat with her bare hands, then uses a shovel to break his leg and violently separate his jaw from his skull.

CHAPTER II – DAUGHTER

Searching for Chase, Macy finds him brutally mutilated and near death. Macy flees from Dolly, but Dolly captures Macy after choking her into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER III – HOME

Macy wakes up wearing a doll’s outfit in a crib inside Dolly’s macabre woodland home. Tobe, an unseen man being held captive in an adjacent room, advises Macy through their shared wall to play along with Dolly’s bizarre family fantasy.

Dolly treats Macy like a toddler, including changing her diaper after she urinates on herself in fright. Macy grows upset upon seeing Dolly wearing the ring Chase planned to give to her. Dolly paddles Macy as punishment for a failed escape attempt.

When Macy refuses to be spoon fed or drink from a baby’s bottle, Dolly forces Macy to suck her breast. Macy uses the opportunity to bite off Dolly’s nipple and run upstairs, where Tobe pleads for Macy to retrieve the key that will free him. Macy is eventually recaptured, and Dolly cradles her in a chair while sewing back on an ear she previously cut off Macy.

CHAPTER IV – FATHER

While Dolly sleeps the following morning, Macy swipes the key from around her neck and uses it to unlock Tobe’s room. Macy is confused to find Tobe chained in shackles. After mentioning that Dolly has been behaving bizarrely since her mother died, Tobe promises to explain further once he is freed. Tobe also claims a dead man in the room is his brother who came looking for him after he went missing, but Tobe reveals he is actually Dolly’s father as soon as he takes Macy captive.

Threatening to kill his daughter’s “plaything,” Tobe uses Macy to lure Dolly out of hiding. Tobe forces Dolly to unlock an exit door, then uses a shovel to beat both her and Macy to the floor. With his attention turned toward Dolly, Macy stabs Tobe in his back. As soon as he turns to Macy, Dolly punches a hole through Tobe’s torso and smashes his head with the shovel.

Macy stops Dolly’s subsequent assault by calling her “Mommy” and claiming she loves her. Having crawled the entire way to Dolly’s house, Chase unexpectedly arrives outside. Macy dives out of a window to reunite with him.

CHAPTER V – REUNION

Dolly rushes outside to tear off the remainder of Chase’s jaw, finally killing him. Dolly then pursues Macy into the forest.

CHAPTER VI – FIGHT

Macy falls into the burial pit encircled by dolls. Dolly catches up. The two women engage in a vicious struggle until Dolly is beaten down and Macy escapes the pit.

CHAPTER VII – GOODBYE

Macy runs into a park ranger, Billy, and hurriedly explains the situation. Billy puts Macy in his truck and calls in the case, which he says is something that has happened before, over his radio. From behind, Dolly decapitates Billy with her shovel.

Dolly starts smashing the truck’s windows to get at Macy. Macy recovers Billy’s dropped keys, which she uses to start the vehicle and run over Dolly. Macy gets out to retrieve her ring from Dolly’s motionless body. Macy then returns to the truck and drives away while laughing hysterically.

Review:

21st-century films can have a hard time recreating retro vibes without going overboard. ‘80s homages show tendencies to go too hard on synth scores or Aqua Net hairstyles. ‘70s throwbacks do the same thing with costumes that can be more cartoonish than era appropriate, or sets overstuffed with more dated products than a Pluto TV rerun of “Supermarket Sweep.”

“Dolly” intentionally goes overboard on its gore but stays relatively reigned-in on the other way it aims to visually capture a grimy grindhouse feel. The entire movie was shot on 16mm film for that scratchy, speckled look of a reused reel that’s passed through a projector too many times. It’s a good gimmick, because without the old-school exploitation imagery, there isn’t much else to distinguish “Dolly” from the glut of similar movies where deranged murderers play 60+ minutes of cat-and-mouse against a terrorized woman running through remote woods.

As if to get out in front of potential plagiarism accusations, the movie’s marketing makes it abundantly clear that “Dolly” takes heavy inspiration from the original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which is something anyone can easily figure out without a press release’s admission. Like Leatherface, masked killer Dolly is a childlike but imposing hulk who anxiously rocks back and forth when distraught. Like Sally Hardesty, Macy is a resilient heroine caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and whose final flight involves diving out of a window as well as driving away from danger while her blood-soaked smile laughs hysterically. There are even two separate references to TCM’s director, with a key character named Tobe and a location named Hooper Mine.

At least the PR doesn’t tout Dolly as “the next horror icon” like some indie slashers do when they’re desperate for attention. Cut from the same cloth as any other mute or murmuring maniac with an insatiable desire for dismemberment, Dolly is a basic brute who spends most of the movie tormenting Macy, a woman brought to the forest so her single-dad boyfriend could propose, only for the two of them to inadvertently trigger Dolly’s ferocious rampage.

Finding the film frightening requires being as fascinated with creepy dolls as much as Dolly, because the camera cuts to closeups on them A LOT. Creepy dolls spiked to trees. Creepy dolls encircling the dirt pit where Dolly mournfully dumps her mother’s mutilated body. Creepy dolls all over the dungeon-like home where Dolly plays “House” with captive victims. Even someone with a phobia could become desensitized to dolls due to how often the movie puts another pile of them onscreen.

An infantilization fetish would also help get into the movie’s grungy mood, because Dolly has that too. One scene features Macy sucking on a pacifier while Dolly changes her dirty diaper. Then Macy gets spanked with a paddle as punishment for a failed escape attempt, followed by being forced to suckle Dolly’s bare breast like she’s a baby needing nourishment from mother’s milk. Although other moments are interspersed, everything recounted just now takes place during a 10-minute stretch, so individual mileage definitely varies depending on how much a viewer jives with “Dolly’s” specific brand of exploitative gruesomeness.

“Dolly” could be criticized for not having much flesh to go with its buckets of blood. Dots are connected with typical tropes such as someone tripping while fleeing, twice, with one of those times resulting in a knockout from a rock that happens to be where their head hits. Macy mostly runs from each harrowing ordeal only to immediately find herself in a worse situation as the runtime stretches itself out with one brutal sequence after another, with details like weapons, results, and room of Dolly’s house as the main differences between them.

Then again, “Dolly” never sets out to be more than a sleaze-soaked shocker in the first place. With that as its sole goal, the movie has merit. Unapologetically gritty and gory, “Dolly” is proud to be as battered as the boyfriend crawling while his severed jaw hangs from his face, or as grisly as either of the two decapitated bodies. With graphic practical effects like these, Dolly” almost gains enough gas to accelerate past its photocopied premise, and it arguably does so provided a personal palate appreciates a taste others might find repulsive and repetitive.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score: 50