Playing with Dolls (2015)

Directed by Rene Perez [Other horror films: The Dead and the Damned (2011), Demon Hunter (2012), Alien Showdown: The Day the Old West Stood Still (2013), The Snow Queen (2013), The Dead the Damned and the Darkness (2014), The Burning Dead (2015), Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust (2016), Little Red Riding Hood (2016), The Obsidian Curse (2016), Playing with Dolls: Havoc (2017), From Hell to the Wild West (2017), The Dead and the Damned 3: Ravaged (2018), Cabal (2020), Cry Havoc (2020), Legend of Hawes (2022), The Vampire and the Vigilante (2024)]

I’ve known about Playing with Dolls for a long time, and because of the little I knew about it, I avoided it. Well, after seeing it, I wish I had kept avoiding it, as it really is quite awful.

To be sure, the movie is not without it’s strong points. The killer, for instance, uses a sledgehammer to kill two people, and that was sort of fun. Uh, perhaps Natasha Blasick had a few moments in which she was quite attractive. Um, the trees were nice?

Okay, there’s not many strong points, and on the flip-side, a whole lotta negative ones. For instance, it seems that little really happens for the first hour of the film. Sure, we get the set-up, but once Blasick’s character is at the cabin, we get nothing for forty minutes save “creepy” scenes of her being followed and watched while not knowing it. It was just tedious and often boring, in my view.

I don’t want to harp on the performances. It’s true that I found pretty much everyone’s acting stilted, including Natasha Blasick (Death of Evil), but I don’t really blame them for it. The story was pretty damn bare-bones, so it’s not like any of these people had much to work with. Blasick looked cute now and again, which was something. David A. Lockhart (The Dead and the Damned) seemed rather weak, but again, I’m hesitant to blame him. Richard Tyson (The Fear Chamber, Flight of the Living Dead, Big Bad Wolf) literally had no character, but boy, was he great at staring at a computer screen menacingly.

There’s also not a real ending here. Sure, where things leave off with Blasick’s character, we’ve seen before, and that’s all well and good, but what happens to Lockhart’s character? What happens to the killer? We literally have no idea. I would hope that this is picked up immediately in the following film, being Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust, but given the quality of the story, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

All-in-all, Playing with Dolls (or, as an alternative title, Metalface, which is the God-awful title I saw this under on Tubi) was pretty bad. When it wasn’t dull af, it was beyond mediocre, and the lack of story doesn’t do this one any wonders. It’s not like the kills make up for that either, which is all the more disappointing.

I wasn’t surprised that this movie didn’t do much for me. Perhaps some out there would enjoy something about it, but it was just terribly bare-bones, in my view, and not at all my type of thing.

3/10