Full Moon Fever: BLOOD DOLLS

 by Patrick Bromley

Water's wet. Women have secrets. Killer toys are in a Full Moon movie.

Even by the standards of Full Moon movies, 1999's Blood Dolls is fucking unhinged. Though the company has always been known for producing oddball cult and DTV exploitation movies, it's as if the makers of this one deliberately set out to be as weird and often offensive as possible -- button-pushing in a ways that are both earned and unearned. Released several years after the halcyon days of the Paramount distribution deal that afforded their productions higher budgets and better distribution, Blood Dolls feels like Full Moon's angry, shitty little edgelord cousin. That's also the best thing about it. The movie goes out of its way to be demented and mostly succeeds, as among the elements featured are a bad guy with a shrunken head, a female lead who's a dominatrix, a henchman in clown makeup, an all-woman band kept in a cage (called, appropriately, the Caged Babies) and forced to play rock songs every time they're electrocuted, and the bald guy (Nicholas Worth) from Darkman and Swamp Thing.

Written (under the name Robert Talbot) and directed by Charles Band, Blood Dolls tells the story of Virgil Travis (Jack Maturin), a small-headed psycho who lives in a mansion and performs experimental tortures on people to get back at the world for the experiments performed on him as a kid and the business associates who stabbed him in the back. Like Andre Toulon in Puppet Master, Travis has created little killer dolls to do his bidding: Sideshow, Pimp, and Ms. Fortune, at least two of which are like offensively racist. When he falls in with the dominatrix wife of one his enemies (Debra Mayer), Travis has to decide if it's true love with a kindred spirit or if she's just another businessperson out to get him.

At 85 minutes, Blood Dolls is one of the longest Full Moon movies ever made. Sometimes it feels like it. While there are a lot of offbeat and eccentric aspects to the film, much of the screenplay is handed over to corporate warfare -- people in rooms talking about business deals and backstabbing. It helps that some of those people have tiny heads or are dressed in leather underwear, but that doesn't make the dialogue or the plotting any more interesting. Though it supposedly had about a $1 million budget, it often feels cheap and chintzy in a way that's more like modern Full Moon, not the '90s heyday (which, to be fair, was over by the time Band made Blood Dolls). Gone is David Allen's incredible stop motion animation with the titular dolls, meaning we see move sometimes through robotics and sometimes via an offscreen hand jerking them around. It's a decent middle ground between the prime of Full Moon and what they would eventually become. Again, though, the Blood Dolls take a back seat to the human characters. It's no doubt for budgetary reasons but it leaves me feeling like they don't really need to be in the movie at all -- they're less the puppets from Puppet Master and more the Subspecies from Subspecies. My real Full Moon heads will know what that means.

Except for those times that the dolls feel somewhat done on the cheap -- it's not too often, truth be told -- the effects in Blood Dolls are pretty fun. Forced perspective is used to create the illusion of Virgil Travis's tiny head except for in scenes when he's shot alongside another actor, in which case Band relies on a little puppet head (dude loves puppets). There are only a few moments of bloodshed or gore, which I guess are handled well, but there probably needed to be either more of it or less. A bloodier movie would deliver what audiences want from Full Moon fare, while a tamer one probably could have gotten a PG-13 (though the sexuality and BDSM content probably wouldn't prevented that, so fuck me). I like that Blod Dolls doesn't just try to push the nudity or the violence, though, because as Full Moon has continued and the budgets have shrunk, Band seems to think those things are the way only to maintain the fanbase. I would argue that Full Moon fans aren't into these movies for nudity or gore. There are plenty of movies to watch if that what they're after. No, Full Moon fans remain loyal because of weird shit like Blood Dolls. 

Band does a weird thing in Blood Dolls where he refuses to settle on an ending so he does two completely different ones and leaves them both in. The first finds Virgil taking off his mask and revealing his true face, which horrifies Moira; the Caged Babies are freed by the dolls and escape while everyone else in the house dies. In the second ending, Virgil reveals his face and Moira still wants to marry him, with the two plotting to take over the world together. It's like Clue but stupider and more nonsensical because the two endings are totally at odds with one another and there's no reason to have both. It's not even a William Castlesque gimmick where the viewer gets to "decide" the climax. It's just a movie with two endings. I supposed it adds more quirk to a movie already loaded with quirk -- even the alternate ending is introduced by clown-faced henchman speaking right to camera -- but, like too much of Blood Dolls, it just feels like an idea pulled out of a drawer instead of being of a piece with the rest of the film. Maybe I have to accept that it is of a piece, if the "piece" is a collection of eccentricities that add up to a movie.

Got a suggestion for a title you'd like to see covered in a future Full Moon Fever? Let us know in the comments below!