In 2016, “Blood For Dust” director Rod Blackhurst made a short film about a haunted swimming pool. However, he left the feature film version, which was released in German cinemas eight years later, to his then co-director Bryce McGuire. A good decision, after all, “Night Swim” not only turned out to be terribly boring, the would-be horror also drank mercilessly at the box office. Instead, Blackhurst expanded his four-minute “Mommy” from 2022 to feature length: “Dolly” won’t pull any punches at the box office either – but at least this time it’s less due to the quality than to the fact that the grindhouse homage is aimed at a very specific target audience.
Shot on Super 16mm analogue material, the film, with its worn-out, grainy look for long stretches, actually looks as if it came from the height of the terror wave in the 1970s, like its obvious counterparts. Instead of Leatherface from the genre masterpiece “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, this time the killer is not wearing a mask made of human skin, but rather made of porcelain. The title character looks like a wrestling colossus after a crossdressing accident – and can handle it in the pleasingly tactile gore passages. However, it always becomes particularly disturbing when Dolly reveals not her murderous side, but her motherly side.
As a slasher killer, Dolly (Max The Impaler) is obviously in the 1970s tradition of Leatherface and Co.
Single parent Chase (Seann William Scott) has it all figured out exactly. At a remote viewing point in the woods of Tennessee, he finally wants to propose to his girlfriend Macy (Fabianne Therese). But already on the path there, the couple comes across a mysterious collection of porcelain dolls – and just as Chase is about to get down on his knees in front of his beloved, he is stopped by a noise from the bushes: the gigantic Dolly (Max The Impaler), always masked with a doll-like porcelain face, knocks Chase down – and kidnaps Macy in order to “raise” her like her own baby from then on…
Doubly disturbing
When Chase meets Dolly for the first time in the forest, one expects at most a brief skirmish before the spiral of violence ramps up steadily over the course of the film. But puff cake! It's only a matter of seconds before you're just staring at the screen with your face contorted in pain and between your fingers: Even a shin bone severed with a spade is just kindergarten compared to what comes next – especially since the result looks so grotesque from a purely visual point of view that you can hardly look away for the rest of the film as soon as “American Pie” pen master Seann William Scott shows up. The team really did a great job with the practical gore effects.
Now you almost want to write that Dolly would take no prisoners. But she does it very well – and then it gets really disturbing: The wrestler Max The Impaler (approx. 178 centimeters tall and 110 kilos), who is notorious for her hardcore matches, embodies Dolly like a clumsy giant baby who follows his motherly instincts, but uses his superhuman strength with cruel consequences at the slightest hint of frustration. Macy, who has certainly been housetrained for decades, is put in diapers whether she wants to or not – and when Dolly pulls out her enormous breast for the first time to breastfeed her baby, there is deserved applause in the hall (along with exclamations of disgusted disbelief).
The grainy 16mm footage of “Dolly” captures the look of its role models like “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” pretty well.
“Dolly” is divided into chapters with titles like “Mother,” “Daughter,” and “Home.” But even if the structure suggests a certain complexity, it doesn't hide how simple the narrative actually is (although the one small catch in the “Father” chapter slows the film down unnecessarily in the home stretch). Now it's actually not a problem to make a terror slasher as reduced as possible, quite the opposite – but it could still have had a few more original ideas, such as how Dolly deals with her new “baby”, that go beyond a pure genre homage. In any case, extending the four-minute original to a feature length of 83 minutes is not possible without one or two lengths creeping up in between.
Speaking of sneaking up: A common criticism of “Dolly” is that the title character constantly appears (and surprisingly silently for her size) somewhere where it might not necessarily make logical sense. But to be honest: with this claim you're probably in the wrong film anyway…
Conclusion: At least fans of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” & Co. shouldn't miss this disturbing 16mm terrorfest on the big screen – even if there was certainly a lot more in it.
We saw “Dolly” at the Fantasy Filmfest White Nights 2026.