Devil Doll (1964)
*** (out of 4)
Effective and perfectly made British horror film has Bryant Haliday play The Great Vorelli, a hypnotist/ventriloquist who can do things that no other can. Why is that? Because his dummy actually has the soul of his former assistant in it and Vorelli plans on making another dummy and putting the soul of a woman (Yvonne Romain) he's hammered with in it. This film has an incredibly low rating on IMDb, which I'm sure is going to keep many people away but I'd guess a lot of those low votes come from people just giving it low votes because MST3K did an episode with this. A lot of other books and magazines praise this film and I'm going to do so as well. I normally tend to find British horror films a tad bit boring and while this one here begins to lose steam as it rolls along, it still manages to be quite effective. What's most impressive is the cinematography and editing, all of which is done on a very low budget. Some have said the film has a made for TV look but I'd disagree with this. Yes, it's mostly close ups used but I think this works out to be very effective because it puts us so close to Vorelli and the dummy that you can't help but feel as if you're under a trance as well. I really loved how the film was edited and this could be used as evidence that editing is the most important thing in a film. Just watch the first stage show where the dummy first begins to walk. It's rather obvious that a midget is doing the dummy but the way this sequence is put together makes it rather chilling when you see him start to walk. The ending, while a bit over the top, also features some great editing as well. I found Haliday to be quite pleasant in his role as was Hammer queen Romain. I wasn't too impressed with William Sylvester but he too was still better than you'd normally get in such a low budget film. I watched the European version of the film, which features a tad bit more nudity and features a few strange sequences like a striptease. This isn't the most original movie ever made but it's the perfect example of something done right with very little money.
