BLOOD DOLLS

Special to PollyStaffle.com

Before getting into Charles Band’s straight-to-VHS masterpiece Blood Dolls (1999), let me pontificate for a moment on the importance of selectivity in cultural consumption an issue of great importance to me. I’ve heard it said and said it myself that here in Las Vegas we have a shortage of art, a conspicuous lack of artists, and few cultural events. I understand where they are coming from with that, strip clubs and obviously casinos being money traps. Still, I only care about a small sliver of artistic or cultural expression. You want those art world assholes from New York here in Vegas? Have you ever met a New York gallery owner? I’ll pass, thanks.

This paragraph here is going to seem totally off topic but in fact isn’t. There was about a fifteen-year span in which you'll find “goth” bands that made music that's still fairly listenable. That fifteen years was fifteen years ago. There where a few excellent bands in the 80s and then there was an underrated little second wind when I was in high school with the Cleopatra label.

About the same is probably true of oi, the variation of punk associated with skinheads. Oi is a lot funnier. You can find a compilation or two of either used or online. Good to go - that should end it. Now what I said about goth being over hasn't changed, but let me qualify that indie rock - that never was anything really. So on this general train of thought, I downloaded the NWOBHM 79' Revisited compilation (originally compiled by a metal magazine editor with help Lars Ulrich from Metallica at some point in the 90s from British bands 79-81) on someone on FB’s advice. That is excellent. Done and done, good to go. That and a Cleopatra Records gothic compilation from 94 I found used, In Goth Daze are about the same quality. In Goth Daze has a little more sentimental value to because I owned one in high school, but they’re roughly the same quality. A lot of the tracks on In Goth Daze are from the 80s though and were from years ago even then. That New Wave of British Heavy Metal era (late 70s early 80s, after punk people might have thought metal was dead in the U.K. and then it came back with a vengeance unseen) those bands could play; that was a great sound. An oi collection would probably also be about the same. I couldn’t get a download for the Strength Through Oi, collection so I ordered one on Amazon. Therefore, there is no reason to BE goth. NWOBHM 79’ Revisited is just as good as In Goth Daze and I’m sure Strength Through Oi will be just as good as both.

While I did not get Strength Through Oi in the mail at time of writing, I did find a used copy of a much more obscure oi compilation, Son of Oi from 1983, which features better known oi bands like Cock Sparrer as well as totally obscure bands I’d never heard of. It does unfortunately feature oi poetry though. I found some of Strength Through Oi online today; that’s pretty sweet. With things like that, realistically you can get a compilation or two and be done with it. I know I’m talking about products of angst ridden youth cultures from decades ago, but that’s kind of where the center of rock and roll really was - and not always with bands that ever escaped obscurity.

I now hate the music of all of those artsy bands in Williamsburg I was surrounded by; the only bands that were part of all of that that retain any lasting positive impact on me are Circle and Earth. They existed as metal bands as far back as the early 90s, and Circle are obsessed with the NWOBHM era. I suppose that puts some perspective on it all, doesn’t it? It may be hard to admit that sometimes, even to oneself, but that’s how rock and roll really is, what it really was. Most of the better rock and roll came out of those pissy little high school subcultures in back decades, and you can grab the compilation album and be done.

There is a similar closed-minded and narrow approach to the arts applied to our little World of Wheaton column here. My approach has been primarily to find the most bizarre horror cinema and sex flicks I can to throw in people’s faces, and if they’re films that are rude to bring up in conversation, all the better. By that standard, a perverted inverse of general cinematic standards of taste operates here. Films generally reviled as heinous become by that standard golden, and then the new standard of poor films becomes simply that they bore the living fuck out of me, which accounts for most films, and a good portion of human social functioning.

On top of that, I often go off topic and write, in words used to describe Charles Manson’s speech in a Manson parole hearing, “in a vague and tangential manner.” If you fully understand what I’m talking about, then I haven’t done my job. These films are by a rule from older periods, in some cases dug out of obscurity, where they probably needed to stay. I ranked pretty hard on the original Amityville Horror, but in general the films described here are at the very least distinctive in order for me to write about them.

Charles Band, now he is a master, and even when he wasn’t in the director’s seat, for example on Demonic Toys, the Full Moon Direct company in the 90s was able to put out a number of highly entertaining films, even if a whole lot of them are about evil toys, dolls and puppets. I even like Surrender Cinema, the Full Moon Direct subsidiary that did a string of odd sci-fi themed softcore porn films in the 90s that I wrote about on the first review featured here.

Blood Dolls is distinctive, that much is true. The general plotline involves a software tycoon named Virgil Travis, who has a head the size of a fist, being the product of genetic engineering gone wrong. He has a midget (same midget that’s in many Full Moon films) and a psychopath in clown make-up that work for him, and an all girl rock band in a cage that gets electrocuted by the midget to get them to play songs on demand.

At the start of the film, Virgil Travis’ three major competitors have staged a billion dollar loss for him by buying off a judge and a federal prosecutor in an anti-trust ruling. Travis has a machine that turns people into little dolls that serve him, and at the beginning he turns one of his employees into a doll. The killer clown and the three dolls kill off the competitors in very violent ways. The problem is that one of his competitors is much controlled by and sexually submissive to his wife. The wife becomes a kind of love interest in the end and offers to marry Travis. Two alternative endings are shown. There’s one in which Travis kills himself; the woman, the clown and the dwarf and the girl band and the dolls escape. The other one Travis gets married and lives happily ever after.

This a near perfect film, very violent, sexually perverted, and out of a dream. There is one flaw with the film. Have you guessed it? Have you wondered why I left in that huge paragraph about bands? Now you know what it is. The music played by the four chicks in the cage, which is very central to the film, is supposed to be some kind of gothic or punk rock type of thing. I think it was most likely made by bored studio musicians. Someone could look it up and call me on it, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t studio musicians, it still sounds like it was. Tell me that the band in the cages competes with the bands on the compilations in that overly long paragraph at the beginning that seems totally off topic, but actually isn’t!

The music in Ghoulies from the 80s actually kind of sounds like some of the music on In Goth Daze, so when I write that angst ridden youth subcultures a decade back is where the center of rock and roll really was, that’s something Charles Band had forgotten really when he made Blood Dolls most likely. That being said, the actresses that played the women in the cages that are the on-call band - they are hot. In one part, one of them flashes her breasts at the screen. Special bonus credit must be given to Charles Band for knowing the correct meaning of the term “countermeasures” as used by contemporary private investigators.

Its worth noting that the disc of Blood Dolls that I found used for a few bucks has trailers for over forty titles (breakdwon below) carried at that point by Full Moon, at just its tenth anniversary. These trailers demonstrate how surprisingly vibrant the straight-to-VHS era and whatever 80s films Full Moon picked up at the time were - a whole lot of busty women, a lot of cool electronic incidental music, special effects generally not heavily CGI yet, and that one midget actor. These films seem endless, and straight-to-VHS films weren’t limited by any means to Full Moon. Full Moon never had their hands on the Leprechaun series for example.

I don’t have time to watch over an hour of trailers at one time (who does?), but it is illuminating to have a peek at. Those where some demented films, very low budget, very campy. Fuck yeah!

- William Wheaton, June 2010

William Wheaton can be reached via email at WorldofWheaton@PollyStaffle.com

You can also visit The Wacky World of William Wheaton on Facebook.

FULL MOON TRAILERS FEATURED ON BLOOD DOLLS DVD

* 10 YEARS OF MADNESS (introductory Full Moon compilation trailer; 2:54)
* ARCADE (1:52)
* BAD CHANNELS (1:41)
* BLOOD DOLLS (2:05)
* CASTLE FREAK (2:24)
* CRASH AND BURN (1:06)
* THE CREEPS (1:35)
* CURSE OF THE PUPPETMASTER (1:48)
* DEMONIC TOYS (1:17)
* DOCTOR MORDRID (1:06)
* DOLLMAN (1:16)
* DOLLMAN VS. DEMONIC TOYS (1:39)
* HEAD OF THE FAMILY (2:25)
* HIDEOUS (2:00)
* INVISIBLE: THE CHRONICLES OF BENJAMIN KNIGHT (1:26)
* LURKING FEAR (2:30)
* MANDROID (1:53)
* MERIDIAN (1:44)
* NETHERWORLD (2:43)
* OBLIVION (1:44)
* OBLIVION 2: BACKLASH (1:28)
* PIT AND THE PENDULUM (2:31)
* PUPPETMASTER (1:58)
* PUPPETMASTER 2 (2:07)
* PUPPETMASTER 3 (2:16)
* PUPPETMASTER 4 (1:59)
* PUPPETMASTER 5 (1:55)
* RETRO PUPPETMASTER (1:35)
* ROBOT WARS (1:26)
* SEED PEOPLE (1:35)
* SHADOWZONE (1:54)
* SHREIKER (1:34) widescreen
* SHRUNKEN HEADS (1:57)
* SUBSPECIES THE AWAKENING (1:17)
* SUBSPECIES 2: BLOODSTONE (1:44)
* SUBSPECIES 3: BLOODLUST (2:08)
* SUBSPECIES 4: BLOODSTORM (2:15)
* TALISMAN (1:38)
* TOTEM (1:46)
* TRANCERS 2 (3:04)
* TRANCERS 3 (3:15)
* TRANCERS 4 (1:54)
* TRANCERS 5 (1:25)
* VAMPIRE JOURNALS (2:36)
* WITCHHOUSE (1:50)