The Curse of Humpty Dumpty

Well, from the movie's title and its cover/poster, I have to say that I wasn't exactly harboring much of any grand expectations to writer and director Scott Jeffrey's 2021 horror movie titled "The Curse of Humpty Dumpty". However, I still opted to watch it on the off-chance that it might actually be a worthwhile horror experience.

Let me just be blunt here and say that it wasn't.

The storyline in "The Curse of Humpty Dumpty", as written by Scott Jeffrey, was sort of simplistic. It wasn't that it was lazy writing or anything for the script; it was just sort of very bland and generic. Now, I will say that I thoroughly liked the dementia aspect to the storyline that Wendy Loomas (played by Nicola Wright) was suffering from, and the gradual return of warped and twisted memories as she and her daughters stayed at their family home.

I was only familiar with actress Nicola Wright on the cast list. But I will say that the actresses and actors did actually put on good enough performances, despite of the restrictions and limitations imposed by a somewhat bland script and storyline.

Visually then you're not in for a grand treat here. The doll was so painstakingly obvious just a guy wearing a costume and alternating between two blatantly obvious latex masks, given their inarticulate features.

For a horror movie then "The Curse of Humpty Dumpty" doesn't really impress. The movie just doesn't bring anything new to the genre. And it was lacking somewhat in the scare department.

My rating of "The Curse of Humpty Dumpty" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.

So I was expecting the movie to be a B grade horror, one of those movies so stupid it's funny, but it wasn't at all.

But it was unexpectedly a decent movie.

Worth watching, the acting was good, and the story was pretty good too.

Well, firstly let's get the rhyme out of the way: "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All of the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again".

The rhyme is one of the best known in the English language. Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century, the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. The rhyme or riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian, and "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" or "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in different parts of Germany-although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.

The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle. There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as humpbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armored frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary-held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War. This was on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected. The theory was part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes and was widely acclaimed in academia, but it was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity's sake" and declared to be a spoof. The link was nevertheless popularized by a children's opera All the King's Men by Richard Rodney Bennett, first performed in 1969.

From 1996, the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648. In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty, which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists (or Cavaliers, "all the King's men") attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was so heavy that "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again". Author Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this claim. Elsewhere, he claimed to have found them in an "old dusty library, in an even older book", but did not state what the book was or where it was found. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.

Back to this film. It is a supernatural horror film with occult suggestions. The movie deals with an elderly woman who is dealing with dementia. She is living with her two grown up daughters who look after her as best as they can. Thrown into the mix is a mysterious doll that Wendy seems to have strange, fragmented memories of. As Wendy fights to collect the missing pieces of her past, the daughters discover the dark history of this sinister and deadly doll named Humpty Dumpty.

Verdict: acting, background music, cinematography, editing, script and direction makes for a one-time above average viewing. I have seen a superior film than this one called Dead Silence(2007), directed by the acclaimed cult-horror director James Wan.

I'm almost lost for words. I've seen some bad movies in my time, especially horror ones, this could actually be the very worst. I'll give it a generous two instead of one only because admittedly I have seen worse acting but that's not saying a lot really. I'd rather watch paint dry honestly. How I badly wish I could get that 90 minutes of my life back.

A child caring for their parent (typically a mother) suffering from dementia has been done far better in horror before. This movie makes me think of a film like The Taking of Deborah Logan. Family conflict horror dramas are a popular subgenre right now (e.g., Hereditary), but like any trend, there are highs and lows. This is definitely a low.

I don't mind a slow burn, but there's a slow burn and then there's just tedium. And you know it's real tedium when the film finally gets to the "scary" parts and it's still tedious. The actors and the writing aren't compelling enough to draw me into liking/empathizing with this family. The only one kind of likable is the mother, and that's really because you're sympathetic to those dealing with her medical condition by default. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, the actress was very charming and good-natured and classy when she was herself, and her daughter's laid-back personality coupled with her sincere, heartbreaking concern for her mother kept you engaged in between the scares. This film did not.

This is not a scary movie by any means. Not even close. There is no tension. When the puppet transforms, it's too conventional to be scary. And it's too bland and detached to be touching/bittersweet/heart-breaking in the interim between attacks. The costume design was awful, especially for the scheming sister in law. What in the world were they thinking? I don't even think there was an actual costume designer because the clothes were clearly not tailored.

Anyway, all this movie did was make we want to watch The Taking of Deborah Logan again. If there are any positives, I would say that the puppet looks pretty good (in its normal state), and the actress playing the mom is passable (if not good enough to make what she's going through sad).