Film Review: DOLL GRAVEYARD (2005)

I’m usually a big fan of the Full Moon Entertainment library of films as long as they can entertain me and showing me something new or at least crazy and interesting but none of this can be found in Doll Graveyard (2005). 

In 1911 Sophie has an accident when playing with her dolls that anger her father.  As punishment, her father forces her to take her dolls and bury them in the backyard.  An accident happens and Sophie is killed and her father buries her with the dolls in the backyard of the house.   Years later (modern day) Guy (Jared Kusnitz) discovers one of the dolls and realizes that he’s got more than he bargained for when the spirit of Sophie starts to control the doll and take over Guy’s fragile psyche.  All of the corresponds during a secret house party that his sister DeeDee (Gabrielle Lynn) is having while their father is away giving us plenty of lambs for the slaughter.  People run through the house, people get killed and that’s generally the rest of the film.

Now I enjoy the occasional slaughter-athon especially in a Full Moon film but this is a film written and directed by Charles Band himself so I was expecting a little something more.  Characters are pretty dumb from beginning to end and Guy comes off as an overly confident geek/nerd who gets possessed by a doll or in his words an “action figure.”  One of the true travesties of the film is the lack of all “real” characters as all the characters in this film do stupid things for stupid reasons and come off as caricatures.  Doesn’t make for the most interesting of Band films.

If the dolls were at least interesting I could probably forgive most of the rest of the film’s shortcomings but even the dolls lack personality and finesse and the most interesting of characters is Sophie herself who controls the dolls but doesn’t show up into the final moments of the film.  I will say that the gore is more plentiful in this film that in some of Full Moon’s other films (which means that there is at least one good point for the film) and Band, as usual, knows how to stage and direct the onscreen mayhem when it is called for, so, at least there are very few moments that drag.  Overall, this is one of Band’s lesser films that’s a curiosity but nothing more.