Worry Dolls begins where plenty of horror movies end. A young woman escapes from her serial killer captor, is chased for a while on an abandoned property, and is eventually rescued by the police. Police detective Matt (Christopher Wiehl) has been chasing this killer for years, and it’s an obsession that tore his marriage apart. He recovers a box of four little charms that belonged to the killer from the crime scene, and that box accidentally ends up with his daughter Chloe (Kennedy Brice). The young girl makes necklaces out of those charms, which then end up in the hands of a bunch of different people.
Unfortunately for everyone, those charms turn out to cursed worry dolls. They cause whoever holds them to do terrible things. As the seemingly random murders pile up, Matt has to figure all this voodoo out, and track down the dolls in order to save his daughter from a horrible fate. It’s a pretty straightforward film, and there isn’t really much in the way of subtext. This is one of those films where the audience is basically made to wait for the main characters to figure out a piece of information provided to the audience early on.
This is a narrative structure that can be hard to work with. What happens is that the main character isn’t the one pushing the story forward. That is the case with this movie, which mainly has Matt puttering around for majority of the film, brooding about how tracking down this serial killer took him away from his family. The film seems to hint at the idea that he realizes that he was wrong, but the story doesn’t really bear that out. In the end, the movie plays him up as a hero for doing the same kind of stuff that probably ruined his marriage.
The film clearly wants us to root for Matt, but it doesn’t give us much reason to. He seems to be a terrible policeman, a bad dad, and an even worse ex-husband. He fails to save several people from grisly deaths, in spite of being the only one in the room with a gun. And the horrible things he witnesses don’t even really seem to affect him. In the film’s worst moments, it almost seems to vilify his ex-wife for rejecting him. It isn’t overt, but there is a strain of misogyny in this movie that becomes difficult to ignore.
The film relies mainly on violence to convey its horror. It isn’t very creative with the killing, however. The film can’t really do much more than put sharp objects in people’s hands and have them stab others repeatedly. The film’s production is pretty standard for a low budget horror film. The acting is standard, too, which is to say that it’s pretty bad. Christopher Wiehl, who also co-wrote and co-produced the movie, is a leaden lump in the lead role. But he comes out as a real professional when held up against the actors in the supporting parts, who feel like they came straight out of an infomercial.
Worry Dolls offers the promise of something different, then just throws that away to deliver a painfully standard horror movie experience. The film’s opening sequence suggests something more interesting, a story of the aftermath of a killer’s rampage, of how people deal with the trauma of such horrible events. It wouldn’t be hard to turn that into potent horror movie fare, with the violence haunting these characters. But it turns out that the opening was just a set up for something we’ve seen too often. It’s a disappointment, to say the least.
My Rating:
