Trying to move on with their lives, a woman and her husband move to a remote house in the countryside where she once grew up to help her deal with onsetting dementia, but when she suspects that a series of incidents are tied to a doll she's found starts to suspect her sanity is slipping.
This was a decent enough if slightly flawed genre effort. One of the finer features of this one is the generally solid setup that tries to recreate more of an atmosphere closer to the original by employing a remake-with-a-different-cast formula. Offering the idea of the wife going through something similar where she's developing the same sort of dementia prognosis and the belief that everything will be better with a return to their childhood home to set themselves within familiar grounds where they come under the influence of the doll is a fine way to do this. It sets up the kind of familiar ground to be an easy immersion point into the story while also making more of a connection to the doll's history and purpose by taunting her with a psychic connection believing what she's seeing is really just the dementia taking hold than anything else. That early setup offers up a fine series of hauntings throughout here playing nicely with a bizarre supernatural connection between her and the doll. The early scenes of the doll causing a series of hallucinatory visions and threatening messages left behind the house warning of some dark secret in her past sets up an intriguing mystery that lets us know she's in danger while offering up a fantastic psychological bent within here due to everything appearing as the rantings of her condition taking its toll on her. While still featuring enough of the more traditional stalking scenes with the distraught mother or the drunk playmate who gets taken out in brief ambush attacks and doesn't understand the threat before them, the majority of these scenes are a bit more psychological than anything which adds a fine touch leading into the finale where the stalking becomes more overt and physical. As there's some fine action on display here in this section, there's a lot to like here. There are some issues with this one that hold it back. The main drawback with the film is the wholly convoluted and lackluster finale which is some of the most idiotic and needless material in the genre. The series of twists and revelations here is way too much to be believable as people tend to switch allegiances and sides against each other simply to try to fit in more human villains instead of letting the doll be the culprit it should've been all along, that allows for some absolutely inane retconning trying to make it make sense while also featuring other dumb work here in the generally lazy way it tries to showcase the increasingly outlandish activity of the doll carrying out its plan. That leads to plenty of scenes showing off the flimsy effects and other low-budget work throughout here as these features all manage to hold this one down.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.
