00:00Dolly aspires to be a throwback to 70s grindhouse horror flicks, but I found it was mostly just a grind.
00:06Sean William Scott takes Fabian Thress on a hiking trail to propose,
00:10but they're interrupted and attacked by the titular porcelain masked killer played by Max the Impaler.
00:15Dolly kidnaps Thress and takes her back to her home where Thress discovers that she is Dolly's new toy.
00:22Dolly is written and directed by Rod Blackhurst, who proves the how the Kit Harington thriller Blood for Dust
00:27and a short film that inspired Night Swim, and this is expanded from his short film Baby Girl,
00:32which was basically a proof of concept trailer for a feature anyway.
00:35You can tell that they wanted to give this a retro exploitation feel by the fact they shot this on
00:39a super grainy 16mm film,
00:41which gives it the authentic aesthetic of the movies that it's trying to emulate,
00:46especially the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
00:48In the film's favour, it is very gross and grungy, in large part because of the fantastic practical gore throughout,
00:54which are very impressive for a movie that clearly had a very low budget,
00:58and sometimes those limitations do show up on screen, like the bad digital effects.
01:03Non-binary wrestler Max the Impaler makes their acting debut playing the shovel-wielding title character,
01:08and I think they do a solid job giving Dolly a twisted, at times almost pitiful personality,
01:13as she effectively tries to play Mommy in a very childlike way,
01:17and is easily angered when Thress tries to resist.
01:19Even the mask is quite distinctive and creepy,
01:22but it's hard to ignore that Dolly herself is very reminiscent of Leatherface,
01:26just with porcelain replacing human flesh and the mask,
01:29especially when the characters appeared in drag in various entries.
01:32And that was my biggest issue with Dolly,
01:34it's so intensely derivative of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that it goes well past the point of homage,
01:39and I felt like I'd seen this all done before,
01:41because it's just content to retread all the old grotesque tropes,
01:45without adding anything fresh or shocking to them.
01:47There's clearly a dark humour to parts of Dolly,
01:50but it's not absurd enough to be funny,
01:52nor does it feel particularly self-aware when so much of it relies on characters making stupid decisions for the
01:57sake of the plot.
01:58They really miss an opportunity to play on fears of motherhood,
02:01as in the opening scenes Thress admits that she's reluctant to become a stepmother to Scott's daughter,
02:06as her relationship to her own mother was apparently abusive.
02:09But then they trap her in this twisted mother-daughter roleplay,
02:12and do absolutely nothing with these setups whatsoever,
02:15even though it would have given the film a more distinct identity.
02:18Sean William Scott spends most of the film crawling on the ground with his jaw hanging from his face,
02:23in a rather gnarly effect,
02:24while his regular co-star Ethan Suplee turns up as another one of Dolly's captives,
02:29who's in remarkably good shape considering he's been supposedly chained up for months.
02:34It's pretty thin, even at 80-odd minutes,
02:36and then at the very end,
02:38there's an extra scene and a singer talking to the audience over the credits,
02:41where it's heavily implied there'll be a Dolly too.
02:44Nah, I think playtime's over.
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