MOVIE REVIEWS : NASTY ‘DOLLS’ THAT PLAY FOR KEEPS

Ah, the pleasures of terror, the delectations of fear! Like ghoulish bonbons, Hollywood’s horror movies keep popping out of the dream factories, their fudgy surfaces bursting open to reveal blood-red centers, sugary with greed, gore and goo. Though, all too often they’re stale or stomach-turning to boot.

Not so the low-rent horror movies of Stuart Gordon. Gordon, who established an eerily congenial personality in his two H. P. Lovecraft adaptations, “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond,” now strikes out a bit more gently, in a more lighthearted, whimsical--if no less bloody or imaginative--entry called “Dolls” (citywide).

Gordon’s forte is usually humor; most of his scare effects have a playful edge, a satiric undertow. He likes to fool around with old forms--Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, B-movie archetypes--to get the audience giggling quickly. Then he pushes the conventions to the outer edges.

That’s what happens in “Dolls.” The movie dredges up the trapped-in-a-dark-mansion-in-a-hideous-rainstorm genre and then plays around with Hitchcock’s theories of contrapuntal terror in the commonplace. As in “The Birds,” murder and sadism here spring from a seemingly unlikely source: a legion of painfully cute dress-up dolls, Punch puppets, tin swordsmen and the like. Cheeks bright red, clothes fluffy and immaculate, they’re almost ickily adorable--until, suddenly, their eyes begin to swivel and follow menacingly the all-too-human bunch who’ve taken shelter for the night in the Dollmaker’s musty old mansion.

The dolls’ human playthings include two infuriatingly self-absorbed and snappish parents (Ian Patrick Williams and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon), their long-suffering 7-year-old daughter, Judy (Carrie Lorraine), a sensitive young lout named Ralph (Stephen Lee) and two venal young punkettes (Bunty Bailey and Cassie Stuart). All are doomed to confront their own darker, or lighter, natures during the night--under the arch eyes of their sometimes benevolent, sometimes sinister hosts, the Hartwickes (Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason).

Gordon and writer Ed Naha structure the movie as a cautionary fairy tale. Like the classics of Andersen or the Brothers Grimm it even has a moral: a kind of Ray Bradbury-ish anti-materialist, pro-imagination wrap-up. Using the Empire house team--cinematographer Mac Ahlberg and the others--Gordon gives the Hartwicke mansion a fond, creepy, gingerbread-and-bones look. It’s the type of house where you’d expect Ernest Thesiger and Elsa Lanchester to pop up, eyes alight--and, in this film, Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason aren’t bad substitutes. Along with Lee and Lorraine, they give the movie’s most charming performances.

The bright garish dolls, their painted cheeks, button eyes and scarlet-daubed togs, make a neat contrast to the shadowy mansion--and when the scares come, they have a measured playfulness. This is a campfire sort of horror story. Unlike “Re-Animator,” it never gets crazily out of line, and, by modern standards, the blood-spilling is relatively modest. But, even if it contains enough gore for an MPAA R rating, “Dolls” is still one of the most ingenious, amusing and oddly affectionate horror movies of the year--a bloody bonbon that you chew with relish.

‘DOLLS’

An Empire Entertainment release. Producer Brian Yuzna. Director Stuart Gordon. Script Ed Naha. Camera Mac Ahlberg. Editor Lee Percy. Music Fuzzbee Morse. Executive producer Charles Band. With Guy Rolfe, Hilary Mason, Stephen Lee, Carrie Lorraine, Ian Patrick Williams, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon.

Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).