Moon Over Miami: Doll Graveyard

Let's close-up with a film by Mr. Charles Band himself.  As part of the Band family, the man has personally directed a lot of the Full Moon films, not to mention producing and/or having his hand in writing many of them too.  This film is another recent one and comes to us from the 2005.  Ah, the good old days when we wondered about whether or not the Batman series could possibly be brought back.  Not to continually beat up on the guys, but this film was also an attempt to recreate the success of Puppet Master.  Seriously, let it go!  Of course, with Puppet Master: Axis of Evil coming out, obviously that's not going to happen.  Since they have yet to make Doll Graveyard II: Let's Add Nazis, you know how well this movie idea worked.  Why?  Find out in my review of...

The film begins with a young girl playing with her dolls.  Her collection includes a Samurai Doll, a racially-insensitive African Doll, a cliched German Doll (complete with spiky helmet) & a normal Girl's Doll.  Gee, you have odd taste, honey!  Just to note: this prologue takes place in the 19th Century, so these are supposed to be acceptable.  The film, however, was only made five years ago.  Do you think that it excuses, Charles?  Anyhow, she breaks a dish by...moving next to a table it's on, apparently, and her father decides to punish her.  His punishment: making her dig a four-foot hole in the ground.  Manual labor will teach you....my 70lb daughter.  He makes her buries her dolls, which she really draws out.  As she climbs out, she falls and dies.  Um, how?!?  The hole was not that deep and there wasn't a rock there or anything.  So, yeah, he buries her and the titles arrive.  Cut to the present day, we see that there is a single father raising a teenage son and daughter.  By the way, they try to disguise that this is the same actor from before.  Next time, don't just stick a fake mustache on top of his real goatee!  He has recently unearthed a watch from the backyard, while the son digs up the Samurai Doll.  This watch, of course, is the one owned by the dad back then.  Does this pay-off?  No, not really. 

The dad goes off for some plot contrivance and leaves the two alone.  The girl is grounded, so she decides to make a night of it by inviting her friends to come to her.  The brother is not happy with this, as he apparently has a feud with her 17-year old friend.  Why, exactly?  The other girl is a much nicer and much more homely (read: not slutty and dresses her age) & actually is nice to the kid.  They share a love of action figures and she is actually interested in the fact that he bought a rare G.I. Joe doll.  The slutty girl hints that she invited some guys over.  Cue the brother being grabbed and taken into his room by the two jerky, older guys.  Um, where is this going?  It ends up with the blond guy (who looks like The Hills' Spencer Pratt) giving some of the worst 'jerk acting' just shy of a drunken Zabka.  He ties up the kid...for some reason and smashes his G.I. Joe doll.  Man, what a...cliche.  They go downstairs and scare the girls, which immediately makes our heroine go make out with one of them.  Um, what?  Meanwhile, the prude (read: normal) girl goes off to see the brother.  Way to...go after someone much younger than you.

Why no talk of the puppets?  Because they don't do crap for 80% of the movie and try to cram everything in at the end.  The slightly-less jerky guy goes off to the parent's room to have sex with our heroine, who decides to handcuff him first.  While she is in the closet (literally, not figuratively), the German Doll comes out and, well, gives him a Prince Albert.  It's bloody and weird.  The girl shows the film's biggest problem by lightly knocking the Doll away with ease.  She runs off for help, while more shit goes down.  The slutty girl goes to talk to the jerk after his attempt to get into the nice girl's pants fails.  He gets really, really drunk and mistakes the Racially-Insensitive African Doll for...a person.  Damn, he must have gotten into some Absinthe!  Blah blah blah, he dies.  The girls try to get the Slutty Girl's cellphone, but the Girly Doll has it and proves that she has a new power.  Basically, her head is cracked open like Canadians on South Park and she bites people- big whoop.  The Prude Girl frees the boy, who learns that he is being used as a channeling point for the dead girl's spirit.  After this, they run around some more before the dad comes home.  The dolls attack him until the boy decides to finally call them off.  They decide to bury the dolls...which worked so well last time.  We get a sequel-bait ending involving the boy morphing into the dead girl though.  The End.

So yeah, this is a bad movie.  It is barely 60 minutes (roughly 64) and still drags like all hell.  It takes forever to get to a kill and, even then, we only get two.  Geez, I think that there were more deaths in Fried Green Tomatoes!  The dolls are not that great, which is something you should at least take for granted here.  You've had so many movies full of dolls & this is the best you can come up with.  Never mind the fact that you have a doll with a pointy-head...again.  Incidentally, we also get a doll that has a gun that fires bullets...somehow.  My favorite part: the fact that the dolls blinking is done with CG effects.  You couldn't put motors in the damn thing after all this time?!?  It's a pretty bloodless horror movie and barely qualifies as that.  The whole thing is just bad.  Fail, fail and fail again, Full Moon.

Next up, Blockbuster Trash returns with the final (I hope) Return of the Living Dead sequel.  It has zombies, ravers and completely unnecessary fan service.  Stay tuned...