Rod Blackhurst has the grain, the woods and, in Max the Impaler, a monster worth the film stock. What he does not have is a second idea: after a fierce opening, Dolly says the same thing about motherhood for eighty minutes and then stops.
Rod Blackhurst has made an 83-minute exploitation picture and he wants you to know it. Dolly is shot on 16mm, set among trees and rusting metal, and built on the family from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: a monster in the woods who wants a household and a young woman who is going to be made to fit. Blackhurst wrote it with Brandon Weavil, and the script has one idea, which is that Macy does not want to be a mother and Dolly is going to make her one. It is a decent idea for a horror film. It is not, on this evidence, enough of one.
The look is the thing everybody agrees on, and we agree too. Justin Derry shoots on grainy stock that turns the woods into a green-brown smear and the night into something you cannot see the back of, and when the blood comes it looks like paint on a wet wall, thick and dark and wrong. The opening killing is done with practical effects and no cutaways, and we flinched, properly, in a way we had not expected to in a film so obviously assembled from other films. For ten minutes it seemed possible that Blackhurst had something.
Max the Impaler is the other reason to be here. Dolly is played as a wall that has learned to move, all shoulders and patience, and the performance works because it never asks for our sympathy and never once winks. Fabianne Therese, as Macy, is given a part rather than a character, but she plays the fear as exhaustion rather than screaming, and the film is at its best in the stretches where the two of them simply look at each other and wait to see who moves. Those stretches are where the tension is. There are not enough of them.
The trouble is everything between. Once the premise is set, Blackhurst and Weavil have nowhere to take it, so they take it round in circles: a capture, an escape attempt, a recapture, a foolish decision, another. Justin Oakey cuts at the pace of a film that has more story than this one, so scenes end before they have built and the next one starts before we have caught up, and the effect is of eighty minutes passing more slowly than eighty minutes should. Nick Bohun’s score sits under it as a low, dirty drone, right for the picture and unvarying, and by the halfway mark it had become wallpaper. We were bored, and then, because the opening had promised so much better, we were cross about being bored.
The theme does not help. Macy’s feelings about children are stated in dialogue early, then restated, then acted out in the plot, then stated again, as if the film were worried we had stepped out. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre never explained its family and was the more frightening for it. This one explains its monster’s household, its heroine’s anxiety and the connection between them, and each explanation makes the picture a little less frightening.
The supporting cast are stranded. Seann William Scott, as Chase, is used as a body to be moved about, which is a waste of an actor who can do panic and comedy at once. Ethan Suplee and Russ Tiller, as Tobe and Billy, are given a look each, and Michalina Almindo and Kate Cobb, as Aunt Sadie and Rachel, get less. Blackhurst’s interest is in Dolly and Macy, which is reasonable, but a film this short cannot afford five people it does not care about.
Most critics have gone cold on it, with a couple of warm dissenters who found it nightmarish rather than repetitive, and we can see what they saw in the first reel. Our own view sits close to the general one. See it if the look of the trailer is what you want and you are prepared for a film that has spent most of itself by the twenty-minute mark. The 18 is earned, the runtime is a kindness, and Max the Impaler deserves a script with two ideas in it.
