Search - Doll Graveyard on DVD

Deadly dolls don't deliver dread

Chadwick H. Saxelid | Concord, CA United States | 01/26/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Producer/Director Charles Band returns to his roots with Doll Graveyard. A Puppet Master style thriller with a promising premise, but with deadly dull execution. When young Guy (Jared Kusnitz) uncovers a Samurai doll in the backyard of his house, he also digs up the vengeful spirit of its previous owner. A young girl accidentally killed by her abusive father. Soon the girl's spirit is trying to possess Guy while the Samurai and its friends (an african warrior, a german soldier, and a regular baby doll) are attacking Guy's sister DeeDee (Gabrielle Lynn) and her partying friends (Anna Alicia Brock, Kristyn Green, and Scott Seymour). Play time is over.

While Doll Graveyard has its moments, the overall quality of the movie is far removed from Full Moon's far superior Puppet Master movies. Not helping is the clumsy pacing of the story and Band's inattention to storytelling detail. There are plenty of moments where the characters could just leave the house, but don't. Band's next project, the insane killer cookie movie The Gingerdead Man, also suffered from the exact same problems. What Band needs is a director that can inject some b-movie energy into his productions, because he doesn't seem to capable of doing so. Too bad, because the concepts are full of potential.

The disc has the usual behind the scenes documentary and a blooper real. Both are far more entertaining than the movie itself, but neither are worth the full retail price of the disc. This one is for Full Moon fanatics only."

A return to Full Moon's glory days!

William G. Piper | English, IN United States | 11/30/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I'll keep it short and sweet. This movie reminded me of the early Puppet Master flicks. Some good kills, decent storyline and acting (!). The dolls look really great and are quite convincing. The movie itself is short, but never really gets boring. If you're a fan of Full Moon's killer doll films, you definately need this one!"

Dull Graveyard

Ghoulie Guru | 01/09/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Charles Band invites you into his Dull Graveyard...

This movie starts with a little girl playing with a bunch of dolls. She mistakenly bumps into a table and breaks a vase. Her father comes downstairs and decides to punish her by forcing her to bury her little buddies in a grave outside. She somehow trips and falls into the grave, killing herself. Dad buries the daughter with her beloved toys. Flash forward to thirty years later, a new family has moved into the house. The youngest son is a nerdy geek who likes to collect action figures. Imagine his joy at discovering a whole gaggle of antique dolls buried in his back yard! These dolls come to life and start protecting their new owner by killing everyone that ever picked on him. There are no spoilers here, I'm not giving away anything that isn't on the back of the DVD case.

Charles Band returns to what he knows best, making evil puppet horror movies. But just because this is what he knows best, doesn't mean he's any good at it. This is really just a reboot of Puppet Master and Demonic Toys with a new set of evil dolls. The production is shoddy, shot on a cheap DV camera with horrible lighting and a soundtrack that someone did on a Casio keyboard from 1982. Not to mention the fact that the puppets are the best actors in the movie.

Ever since Charles Band came out of retirement or hiding, the Blockbuster shelves have been graced with horrible Full Moon movies that are a few pegs below what they used to be. Even in his prime, Charles Band was nobody's genius, but time has definitely taken its toll. Titles like DECADENT EVIL, DOLL GRAVEYARD and THE GINGERDEAD MAN prove that you can't keep a hack director down. Band is back, folks.
"

This ain't no freakin' tea party

Daniel Jolley | Shelby, North Carolina USA | 08/10/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Some folks just aren't going to buy into the idea of little dolls/action figures coming to life and killing people, even when all the fun comes direct to DVD from the same guys who gave the world The Puppetmaster, but I call it grand entertainment - as long as the kills are sufficiently gruesome and numerous. Demonic doll fans everywhere should be excited by the news that Fool Moon and Charles Band, the famed low-budget director and MonsterBra inventor who has killed enough characters with dolls over the course of his career to make Chuckie feel like a demonic beginner, are back - and they're not here to put on any fancy little tea parties.

Doll Graveyard is a far from perfect little horror film, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. It's really all about the dolls, man. What a quartet of doom: a Samurai warrior (with sword); a pre-WWI German soldier (with gun and really pointy helmet) I affectionately call the Kaiser; "Ooga Booga," a spear-wielding African witch doctor; and a cute little china doll with quite a mouth on her. What could inspire this motley crew of toys to animate themselves with a lust for blood, you ask? Well, how about being buried since 1911 alongside their owner, a cute little girl who more than paid the price for breaking one of daddy's vases while playing? If I were buried and forgotten for 94 years, I'd be pretty grouchy, too.

We have the deadly dolls, so all we need now are some horror film staples: hot chicks - check; a likeable geek who is always being picked on - check; jerk jocks who all but beg to be killed - check; a little blood and gore - check. There's no nudity on the part of the aforementioned hot chicks, but I guess you can't have everything. The story couldn't be any simpler, really. Jared Kusnitz plays Guy, a geeky freshman who's into action figures and irritating his older sister, Deedee (Gabrielle Lynn). Stuck with babysitting Guy while their dad is out on a hot date, Deedee invites girlfriends Olivia (Kristyn Green), a ditzy blonde always in search of a good time, and Terri (Anna Alicia Brock), who's actually quite nice and almost sensible, over to enjoy some alcohol and weed. Naturally, a couple of young jocks show up to paw at the womenfolk and tyrannize young Guy, thus creating the perfect conditions for a devil doll bloodbath.

Earlier that day, Guy had dug up a neat old samurai doll in the backyard. Now, the other buried dolls and the spirit of Sofia, the unfortunate little girl from 1911, emerge from the hole as well. As Sofia begins the process of possessing Guy's body, the dolls seek vengeance on those who would hurt him/her. I thought the death scenes were really quite satisfying in detail and execution - not as gory as I would have liked, but bloody nonetheless. The special effects guys did a great job with the little killers - nothing fancy, just some blinking, simple movements and efficient killing strokes. What truly excited me, however, was the fact that the dolls seemed to be taking orders from me. Time and again, they attacked in just the way I wanted them to - and I was rather specific in some of my requests.

The film whizzes by in little more than an hour (with the last ten of its seventy-two minutes consisting of some extremely slow-moving end credits) - which has its good and its bad sides. On the good side, it helps distract the viewer from some of the film's inconsistencies - why, for instance, did no one in the house ever think of actually turning tail and escaping through the door? And why, assuming there's at least one phone in the house, do the girls only scramble for a missing cell phone in the midst of their crisis? On the bad side, the film is just way too freakin' short. By the time the dolls go on the rampage, you've only got a half hour left in the whole movie. Couldn't they have thrown in a couple more teenagers to kill or something? They had a good thing going here, so why stop at just an hour? Additionally, the whole possession thing between Guy and Sofia could have used some more work, and any impact the last shot might have is negated by the viewer's sudden astonishment upon realizing the film is actually over already.

I have a feeling that viewer response to this film will vary considerably - and you probably already know if you're the type of person who would enjoy watching dolls come to life and start killing people. I really enjoyed Doll Graveyard, but I must admit that the dolls really aren't all that scary, the plot would leak in several places if you filled it with water, and the whole thing really is predictable from start to finish. You don't come to Doll Graveyard to be stimulated intellectually, though; you come to see dolls kill people, and the movie definitely succeeds in that department."