Best movie ever!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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.

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.

It's not the MST3K influence. The Great Vorelli is the biggest problem with the film. Whether it's the character or the performance that's more to blame I don't know, but Vorelli is for whatever reason a dull, flat, one-note villain. He plays every scene at the same pitch, no matter what's going on. Seductive or scared out of his wits he sounds exactly the same. He's got no backstory; he's evil...just because, I guess, and even his greed for an heiress's money seems more a requirement of the plot than anything else. He's not charming and he's not visibly talented, and the movie gives us no earthly reason why anyone should applaud his act. Who wants to pay to see a monotonous ventriloquist heap abuse on a dummy? In any case, with such a dead lump of a villain at the heart of the movie, and a hero who does nothing at all, the best production values in the world couldn't save this movie.

After seeing Devil Doll, I do have to say that it is not a great film; but it's certainly not a particularly bad one either and in no way does this film deserve a rating of 2.8 on this site. The plot is similar to a number of more modern films such as Magic and Child's Play and focuses on the common horror theme of a malevolent ventriloquist's dummy. I'm not an expert on this type of film - or a big fan of it - but to the best of my knowledge, there weren't too many films like this that predated Devil Doll - the best segment of Dead of Night and 1929 film 'The Great Gabbo' are the only ones that spring to mind. The central plot idea is the evil dummy but there's a fairly complicated story revolving around it. The main character is "The Great Vorelli", a ventriloquist with a dummy named Hugo. Vorelli sets his sights on rich heiress named Marianne and sets his sights on her fortune. He hypnotises her, and that induces a strange coma. However, Vorelli's mistress Magda soon finds out about the hypnotist's plans and threatens to expose him; but she is soon dealt with, leading Marianne's boyfriend to suspect Vorelli...The main problem with this film is that there's a bit too much going on and at just eighty minutes, there's not a lot of time to fit everything in. However, director Lindsay Shonteff does a good job of telling the story in spite of that and the film does remain interesting for most of the duration. Bryant Haliday takes the lead role, and I wasn't surprised to discover that he hasn't had many roles other than this one because he's very hammy and his performance does give the film a ridiculous edge, which is a bit of a problem. The film does have a good atmosphere, however, and the dummy used looks suitably malevolent. The film never becomes boring and it more or less succeeds in explaining all the important elements about the plot and how the doll at the centre of the film came about. There is another subplot that takes centre stage towards the end that plays out rather well and is very similar to an idea used in a recent Chucky movie. Overall, I do have to say that I'm surprised at all the flack that this movie takes but do have to admit that it's a long way from perfect. Still, Devil Doll gets my recommendation.