CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

morrison-dylan-fan Gathering up titles to watch for this year's IMDb's Horror Challenge,I was happy to discover on the side of a shelf a movie which I've been meaning to re-watch since 2012!,which led to me getting 'Hugo' off the shelf,so that he could at last speak again.The plot:Note:this is a review for the 'British cut' of the film.Attending a performance by a magician called 'The Great Vorelli' journalist Mark English finds himself becoming unexpectedly unsettled by the display of aggravation from Vorelli towards a dummy which he calls Hugo.Requesting for an audience member to come up on the stage,English's girlfriend Marianne Horn decides that if no one else in the crowd will go up,then she will go up for them.Recognizing Horn as the daughter of a wealthy heiress,Vorelli hypnotises Horn to perform a dance.Desperate to keep some grip on her,Vorelli secretly leaves Horn partially hypnotised.Being incredibly interested in finding out more about Vorelli and Hugo,English gets Horn to arrange for the pair to perform at her mum's party.As everyone starts to leave the party,Vorelli invites Horn to his room.Using his hypnotising skills,Vorelli seduces Horn and begins making plans for how she can become his slave.As Vorelli seduces Horn,English witnesses a living nightmare,when Hugo enters his bedroom from out of nowhere,and gives English a cryptic message.View on the film:Opening on a stage performance of Vorelli and Hugo,director Lindsay Shonteff and cinematographer Gerald Gibbs give the title a haunting Film Noir flavor,thanks to Shonteff and Gibbs making each of the locations look like a macabre magician's playhouse,with hues of smoke,abrasive low-lights showing the mysterious world that Horn and English find themselves entering.Along with the Film Noir mood,Shonteff also shows a tremendous skill in pulling every shred of terror out of Hugo's wooden face,with Shonteff using low angles so that the viewer is unable to escape from Hugo's (voiced eerily by actress Sadie Corre) actions.Adapted from Fredric E.Smith's 1951 London Mystery Magazine pulp short story,writers Robert Kinnoch and Charles F.Vetter smartly match the titles most wonderfully rough moments (from strippers to a fighting dummy!) with a number of striking psychological chiller aspects,as Vetter and Kinnoch gradually unravel the history around Hugo,and reveal who the real puppet master really is.

Michael_Elliott Devil Doll (1964) *** (out of 4) Effective and perfectly made British horror film has Bryant Haliday play The Great Vorelli, a hypnotist/ventriloquist who can do things that no other can. Why is that? Because his dummy actually has the soul of his former assistant in it and Vorelli plans on making another dummy and putting the soul of a woman (Yvonne Romain) he's hammered with in it. This film has an incredibly low rating on IMDb, which I'm sure is going to keep many people away but I'd guess a lot of those low votes come from people just giving it low votes because MST3K did an episode with this. A lot of other books and magazines praise this film and I'm going to do so as well. I normally tend to find British horror films a tad bit boring and while this one here begins to lose steam as it rolls along, it still manages to be quite effective. What's most impressive is the cinematography and editing, all of which is done on a very low budget. Some have said the film has a made for TV look but I'd disagree with this. Yes, it's mostly close ups used but I think this works out to be very effective because it puts us so close to Vorelli and the dummy that you can't help but feel as if you're under a trance as well. I really loved how the film was edited and this could be used as evidence that editing is the most important thing in a film. Just watch the first stage show where the dummy first begins to walk. It's rather obvious that a midget is doing the dummy but the way this sequence is put together makes it rather chilling when you see him start to walk. The ending, while a bit over the top, also features some great editing as well. I found Haliday to be quite pleasant in his role as was Hammer queen Romain. I wasn't too impressed with William Sylvester but he too was still better than you'd normally get in such a low budget film. I watched the European version of the film, which features a tad bit more nudity and features a few strange sequences like a striptease. This isn't the most original movie ever made but it's the perfect example of something done right with very little money.

ferbs54 What an act the Great Vorelli has, in the 1964 British horror thriller "Devil Doll"! Not only can he hypnotize audience volunteers to perform any kind of outlandish stunt, but he can also make his ventriloquist's dummy, Hugo, talk and act most uncannily lifelike. But how to explain Hugo's ability to locomote all by himself? That's what reporter Mark English (excellently portrayed by American actor William Sylvester) tries to find out, in this very effective little sleeper. While I would never dream of revealing Hugo's back story, I will say that he is a much creepier presence than the modern-day Chucky, if perhaps not as homicidal; the filmmakers of "Devil Doll" get maximum bang out of Hugo's merest eye movements and head turnings. It really is remarkable how much emotion can be inferred in the little puppet's homely mug; his is hardly a wooden performance! In addition to this living doll's eerie presence, the film boasts stunning B&W photography, uniformly fine acting (especially by Bryant Haliday as Vorelli, who comes off far more sinister here than the evil hypnotist played by Jose Ferrer in 1949's "Whirlpool"), intriguing FX (negative images, freeze frames) and a literate script. Despite the central doll character, this is very much an adult film that is not suitable for the kiddies. The crisp-looking DVD from Image that I just watched also includes the so-called "Continental" version of the film, which contains a striptease sequence and several bits of nudity not present in the American release. As does producer Richard Gordon, I prefer the American version, simply because the "racier" print excises an entire scene between Vorelli and his assistant Magda that helps us better understand Vorelli's character. Either version, though, is a surprisingly winning entertainment.

lemon_magic I don't think I will ever regard "Devil Doll" as a classic or even a "good" film, but I have to admit that there is, in spots, some decent film making going on here. The obvious comparisons for this movie would be to "Magic", "Child's Play" or even (for the real film buffs among us) "Dead of Night". Indeed this movie works many of those same visual aspects and themes. "Devil Doll" does have a good twist, though in that the dummy, who initially seems to be a sinister, evil figure, turns out instead to be a victim of the the ventriloquist (the "Great Vorelli"), rather than the usual way around. And Hugo (the dummy) manages to turn the tables on Vorelli at the very last moment (in an unintentionally hilarious fight scene that will make you snort milk out your nose). "Devil Doll" also reminds me of "She Creature", another black and white horror manqué about a hypnotist/magician using his Svengali like powers to make a beautiful woman his slave. Same grainy black and white noir photography, same dreary staging and pacing, and the same morally repulsive villain locked in a struggle with a rather bland 'hero' for the soul of a beautiful woman.I know all this sounds good, but alas, the execution is somewhat lacking. In spite of a very energetic opening orchestral introduction and enigmatic credit sequence, and some interesting acting choices and creepy individual scenes and close-ups, "Devil Doll" soon bogs down into an endless succession of scenes of people talking, smoking, talking, smoking some more, talking some more, mixed in with disturbing moments of Vorelli taunting the dummy, both on-stage and off. Bryant Haliday and William Sylvester (as Vorelli and the chain smoking reporter hero "English", respectively) give this material their best shots. Unfortunately, Vorelli is an amoral creep, and English is bland and uninteresting. Every other character in the story is either a victim (the man whose spirit is stuffed into "Hugo" and his family, the girlfriend) or a dupe (all the audience members, Vorelli's stage assistant). So there isn't a whole lot here to root for. If Sylvester's character had been written to be more effective and interesting, maybe the movie might have had more energy to it. Or maybe not. While some of the individual shots and closeups of Hugo, VOrelli, and English are quite effective, and while Haliday does a great magician/slime-ball, there is an aura of seediness and dreariness over all the proceedings that is compounded by smeared lighting and photography , and muffled, garbled sound design.(This might have been the fault of a bad print, I can't tell.) Seediness and dreariness might have been the feelings the filmmakers were trying to create - as I said, Vorelli is a human hairball, and the movie is essentially about him and his attempts to enslave a woman via hypnosis - but 90+ minutes of this atmosphere and pacing doesn't go down well to my modern American palette. Still, if you keep your eyes open and your attention tuned, you will find some nice acting and some moody moments buried among the smothering farina of the screenplay. I wouldn't spend any money to buy this, but I would watch it on late night cable if nothing more interesting was on.