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Doll Graveyard
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Full Moon Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (8th September 2024). |
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The Film
 Widowed Lester Fillbrook (Ken Lyle), his teenage daughter Deedee (Gabrielle Lynn), and action figure-collecting son Guy (Dance of the Dead's Jared Kusnitz) have just moved into an fixer-upper of an old mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Lester is getting out on the dating scene again so he saddles Deedee with babysitting her brother and cleaning the inside of the house. While Guy is cleaning up the grounds, he digs up an antique samurai doll. Behind her father's back, Deedee invites easy Olivia (The Haunted Casino's Kristyn Green) and closet-nerd Terri (Anna Alicia Brock) over for an evening of drinking and pot-smoking. When jocks Rich (Evil Bong's Brian Lloyd) and Tom (Scott Seymour) crash the party, they bully and beat up Guy when he tries to get them to leave. Guy curses Deedee and her friends, not realizing that the samurai doll was one of a group of special friends belonging to young Sophia (Southbound's Hannah Marks) who was accidentally killed by her abusive father Cyril (also Lyle) a century before and buried on the property. Soon enough she has possessed Guy, and her other toys Soldier, Dolly, and Ooga-Booga rise from the grave to give the teenagers a party they will never forget. One of the first of a number of films directed by Empire Pictures/Full Moon producer Charles Band and written by Domonic Muir – who went from scripting the hit eighties sci-fi/horror/comedy Critters to the likes of the Evil Bong franchise and other latter day Full Moon low-rent flicks for the final two decades of his career under the pseudonym "August White", Doll Graveyard is pretty much a Puppet Master sequel without even the limited scope of the later entries. While the puppets have character in the designs by Christopher Bergschneider (Nightmare Man) but the rod puppet movements are stiff and lack the charm of the late David Allen's stop motion animation which would have actually made the lame scene when drunk and high Rich carries on a conversation with Ooga-Booga. Performances are generally amateurish and shrill apart from Lyle, making the teenagers even more annoying than might have been intended (Kusnitz's possession could have used some prosthetics or digital effects augmentation). Exteriors were shot at Harry Houdini's Los Angeles mansion but the interiors look much less striking, more so with the workmanlike photography of the usually-stylish Thomas L. Callaway who had been working with Band since the days of Creepozoids and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity. Ultimately, Doll Graveyard barely rates a footnote in Band's filmography as a director or even as a savvy producer who can pull a vaguely-recycled scenario out of the air when money shows up. 
Video
Doll Graveyard was first released on DVD in 2005 by Full Moon under their "Wizard Entertainment" banner and then in 2011 in Mill Creek's Dangerous Worry Dolls single-disc triple feature with Demonic Toys and titular feature. When the Mill Creek deal ended, Full Moon reissued it in the three-disc Devildolls boxed set with Demonic Toys and Ragdoll and reissued the set later that year in a single keep case. The non-anamorphic letterboxed film frankly looked more like flat video with a grain filter at best, but Full Moon's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen Blu-ray claims to come from the original 35mm camera negative. The new transfer is a definite improvement with regard to the film's visuals which are still rather uninteresting for the most part – apart from the opening flashback where Calloway employs some diffusion and shallow focus – but textures of the doll creations are greatly enhanced while the make-up effects fare a bit worse. Facial complexions and textures are also better delineated from the warm cast of much of the film's lighting and dark hair is no longer crushed into the shadow areas of the shots. Either due to the original processing or the archiving, small scratches are evident throughout that probably were either filtered out or just not as noticeable in the original video export. Since the film had digital effects in a few places within the film and entirely during the opening title sequence, Full Moon has simply dumped the originals by Brad Hoplock – who also did effects for Full Moon's first The Gingerdead Man – rather than upscaling them in favor of new digital work. The title sequence drops the original "Astonishing Features presents" card in favor of "Full Moon Features presents" includes different animation and fonts for the credits and includes a few credits that were not part of the original sequence including a credit for the new visual effects work. The end credits have also been redone. 
Audio
The default audio option is the original stereo mix in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 while a 5.1 track can be selected via your remote control's audio button and error-ridden SDH subtitles enabled via your remote's subtitle button. The audio mix does not seem to have been tinkered with as the songs appear to be the same, including an end title track by Band's son, while the 5.1 track is an simple unproblematic upmix. 
Extras
Extras have been ported from the Wizard DVD edition starting with the behind the scenes (17:03) segment – not even a "VideoZone" featurette – in which Band and Bergschneider notes that the dolls were all based on authentic designs (the African doll's inspiration really was called "Ooga-Booga") and Band notes that they are standard rod puppets like the Puppet Master creations (without discussing the other means of animating them). The actors pop up to comment on how "scary" the designs were, and in some cases you can see that the child performers are better "actors" onscreen than spontaneously as real people.  The blooper reel (7:50) features the usual gaffes but also reveals just how far down the company has come since the puppeteering and stop motion animation of the David Allen days. The disc also includes a recreated video trailer (1:34) for the film and other Full Moon trailers.
Overall
Doll Graveyard ultimately barely rates a footnote in Band's filmography as a director or even as a savvy producer who can pull a vaguely-recycled scenario out of the air when money shows up. 
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