DOLLY (2025)

3 stars

Vertigo Releasing in association with IFC and Shudder. Cinema. 6th March

Dropping off his daughter, Chase (Sean William Scott, the one familiar face here) heads out with his girlfriend Macy (Fabianne Therese). They are going for a hike in the woods, which we know will be a bad idea, and he has plans to propose – though she knows and isn’t sure how she will respond.

As they walk to the Scenic Overlook they come across creepy dolls lined up on the ground in the forest and affixed to the trees. Taking pictures in the supposedly idyllic setting, they hear tinkling music playing. He decides to go and investigate and comes face to face with the huge hulking titular character – a frightening killer wearing a doll’s dress and with a porcelain doll face mask with a cracked eye hole and a glass eye. It obviously doesn’t go well for Chase.

Trying to find him, Macy encounters the slow moving, silent menace. Trying to escape she hits her head and ends up being dragged back to Dolly’s house.

What will this strange creature do to her? Can she escape?

Directed by Rod Blackhurst, who co-wrote the script with Brandon Weavil – it’s an expansion of their 2022 four minute short BABYGIRL. The director does wring some sense of tension out the scenario. The production is clearly going for a 70s TEXAS CHAIN SAW vibe, being shot on 16mm – there’s even a character named Tobe and early on a signpost to Hooper Mine. It does that pretentious thing of breaking the film into chapters — which seems needless here. The imposing and brutal killer is played by wrestler Max the Impaler. Grisly and grimy with some of the violence quite nasty – the whole thing has an air of freakiness about it. Fabienne Therese gives a committed performance as the put upon victim.

There’s an odd post credits sequence and the cheesy song at the end promises (or threatens depending on your perspective) a Dolly 2.

Steve Kirkham