How to Make a Doll

How to Make a Doll (1968)

* (out of 4)

A nerdy professor (Robert Wood) knows absolutely nothing about women, love, sex or anything that deals with the opposite sex. He goes to see another scientist who just happens to have created a machine that can make beautiful women.

Herschell Gordon Lewis' HOW TO MAKE A DOLL is a pretty boring film that's not going to appeal to too many people. The director will always be best known for his Blood Trilogy but he also made a great number of children's movies as well as softcore sex pictures. This one here seems like a mix between the two but those who enjoy the director's sex pictures will be disappointed that there's not even a hint of nudity here.

I'll be honest and admit that I'm really not sure who this film was aimed at. As a comedy there were a few funny bits but certainly not enough to fill up the 81 minute running time. After a while the nerdy scientist becomes rather boring as does the film. Even when the beautiful women show up there's just nothing overly thrilling seeing them in bathing suits. Again, I'm sure someone paid to watch this back in the day but it's pretty boring today.

While the whimsically weird, Low-Fi Sci-fi, artificially fabricated farce 'How to Make a Doll' by the venerable Gorefather Herschell Gordon Lewis is, perhaps, not one of Florida's foremost fear-makers most talked about feature films for good reason, since it is, quite frankly, undeniably silly, and yet, that being said, the microbudget maestro's quick-buck crowd teaser remains a scintillatingly strange, fitfully funny, goofy cosmic-age comedy about how the amorous frustrations of an uncommonly square brain-box professor are mechanically alleviated by the Promethean capabilities of a crazy computerized glamour girl-making, leviathan-sized gizmo! This bizarrely burbling, wickedly warbling, room-sized, babe-making, jumped-up typewriter magically manifests a perfectly perky, plastically permissive Playboy Pet for this terminally loveless simp to sordidly satiate his long latent lusts! His rampant, albeit clumsy ardour actively encouraged by this robotically randy, switched-on, super-swinging, sympathetically synthetic strumpet! Put simply, this is the charmingly well-thumbed, cross-wired tale of boy makes girl, girl makes boy, beleaguered boy runs away from this oversexed, sensually synchromeshed sex-bot, and finally settles down with a nice, respectably bespectacled girl replete with disarmingly fluffy bunny ears, and a deliciously Pom-Pom'd, perfectly picturesque bot! 'How To Make a Girl' is an eerily prescient film, fearlessly foreshadowing the existential complexities of so unthinkingly creating a rogue, hyper-sexualized A. I., the myriad dangers borne of manufacturing a synthetically sensual, inventively inquisitive, unquestioningly pliable, consistently reliable, bodaciously bonking, soft-bodied simulacra, and resolutely reaffirming that the lurid love of a lap-headed lovely conquers all! 'How to Make a Doll' proved to be far more of a contemplative, consciousness-raising opus than I had initially expected it to be!

Nothing makes sense, Nobody can act, there's mostly one single room that looks like a unfinished Star Trek Original set and I love it. It sucks 100% but there's so much bizzare things said and happening, it's a feast. It's sexist af but who watches HGL films for their political correctnes? Just enjoy it, shut your brain off with whatever you like to take and get ready to laugh your ass off.

Argh! How can I begin to try to describe this? It's all about this science-type professor named Percy who drives a hilarious car and doesn't care about girls, even though his creepy mother really wants some grandkids. His lab partner is a dirty old man who invents a machine that can build robot girls after twenty minutes of making annoying belching and screeching sounds. The robot girls love this old guy down so hard that he decides to go on with the rest of his life inside his computer. Then, he coaxes Percy into having these wild adventures so that he can soak them up and live vicariously through him. Well, at least that's what I think is happening, the movie isn't very clear. After some time of this, Percy decides that he's tired of living for his pervert robot partner and reprograms him to get away. I really hoped the movie would be over at this point, but it goes on for another five hours or so when Percy leaves the lab and meets up with the girl of his dreams. They go out for a date where he gives her not one, but two stuffed toy rabbits and they leer at another couple making out in the park. How romantic.

Now, I love bad movies, but this was really hard to take. Especially the neverending scenes of the computer wheels turning and the irritating noises coming from them. I would only recommend this to watch with lots of friends and booze. A prime candidate for MST-ification.

A nerdy professor who has no luck with women builds beautiful female robots to satisfy his sexual desires.

Herschell Gordon Lewis made 12 movies between 1967-1968, and this is not one of the better-known ones, for good reason. "Rosamond Chudnow, who was David Chudnow's wife, had the idea to shoot a picture called How to Make a Doll," reflected Lewis. "She just loved that title." Lewis reflected years later that the film was a mistake, primarily because of the lack of budget. He noted a more appropriate director for the material would have been Blake Edwards, who could have had the financial backing to make a better machine.

In fact, just a few years prior, was the release of "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine" (1965). Although quite different in a number of ways, it had a similar concept at its core: a machine that created beautiful women. This film is far superior, and starred Vincent Price. Such a success should have made "Doll" redundant.

Anyway, the rarely-seen film is lovingly restored by Arrow Video, using a 2K scan of a 35mm print and cleaning it up from there. The negative, sadly, has been lost and was not available. For the most part, the picture and sound are pretty good, at least as decent as "Gruesome Twosome". The film does not have much in the way of special features, and really works best as a companion to another film. In the case of the Arrow set, it is paired with "Wizard of Gore".