818 - DEVIL DOLL

Genre:  British Horror (1964, B&W)

Synopsis:  This movie is about The Great Vorelli, a hypnotist-ventriloquist with an extremely popular act featuring his independently walking dummy Hector.  A guy named Mark English (William Sylvester from 2001) wants to examine the dummy to find out how Vorelli does his act, so he gets his girlfriend Marianne to first volunteer to be hypnotized by Vorelli (who hypnotizes her into doing the Twist with a young Warren Christopher – absolutely proving his talent because she’s a Republican!).  Next, Mark gets Marianne to invite Vorelli to her aunt’s party so that he can examine the dummy (Hector, not his girlfriend).  Mark secretly examines the dummy and is satisfied that, yep, it’s a wooden dummy.  But soon afterwards, Hector-the-dummy comes to Mark and begs him for help by digging up information on Hector’s past in Berlin.  Meanwhile, Vorelli is hypnotizing Marianne to now be his girlfriend... and more.  Mark travels to Berlin and finds out that Hector was once Vorelli’s human assistant but Vorelli used some trick he picked up in India to transfer Hector’s soul into the dummy.  And, it turns out, Vorelli plans to do the same thing to Mark’s girlfriend Marianne (which would be the world’s first dummy-to-dummy transference).  But before Vorelli can carry out his nefarious plans, Hector-the-dummy has a cheesy showdown of sorts with the hypnotist and the whole thing ends with a surprise twist ending.

Don’s Review:  This was actually a halfway decent movie with a fairly interesting story and a definite serious tone throughout.  So, IMO, it really was too somber of a movie to be a very enjoyable MST episode.  Although M&tBs have some good lines here and there, most of the riffs fell flat because the movie itself held together pretty well.  I think BBI made a mistake in selecting this movie for the show and since my rating is based on the humor value of the experiment, I have to give this a rather low score because I simply didn’t laugh very much.

Don’s Rating: