Starring Heather Murphy, Precious Cox, Natasha Talonz
Rated X (By an all-white jury!)
USA
"Ya'll got some big ass titties, but you ain't got no muthafuckin’ brains!"
Written and produced by two of the internet’s biggest hucksters/loudmouths – Brawlin’ Broads visionary Mitch Mayes and Rotten Cotton’s own Shawn Lewis – Black Devil Doll has been hyped in horror mags and blogs for what seems like decades. In actuality, the film was produced in ’07, and has steadily made fest and midnight screenings for the past two years. It’s finally on DVD, and now the world-at-large can see what all the moral outrage and panic the streets is about. Ostensibly a mash-up of 84’s weirdo camcorder epic Black Devil Doll from Hell and the Zuni fetish doll segment of infamous 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, Devil Doll also throws in odes to Soul Vengeance, Faces of Death, Combat Shock, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and any interracial gonzo porn video from the past ten years. It’s the tender tale of a lonely girl with a huge rack and the mass-murdering, rape-happy ventriloquist’s dummy she falls in love with.Our story opens with Mubia Abul-Jama, a 60’s era black power revolutionary, getting the electric chair. At some point he went berserk and raped/murdered a slew of white women. During the execution, he appears to be wearing a salad bowl on his head. I believe the scene is supposed to resemble the electric chair scene in Faces of Death. Anyway, he gets fried.
Meanwhile, a curvy chick named Heather (Heather Murphy) sits around watching TV, bored. She calls up her friend Natasha (Natasha Talonz), but she’s busy with a gang bang. Heather finally opts to play around with an Ouija board. She happens to experiment with it the same time as Abul- Jama gets executed, and he channels her through the board. Somehow his spirit shoots out of the board in a ball of fire and turns the ventriloquist doll she’s got sitting on the sofa into…that’s right, a black devil doll from hell.
Heather’s not all that shocked by this strange turn of events. But then her best friend is a gang-bang girl, so probably nothing rattles her at this point. Abul-Jama maintains his innocence, and Heather seems to be ok with it. And then she blows him. They develop a relationship, signified by a montage of days at the beach and the playground set to a slow jam. There’s a lot of girl/puppet sex too, which affords us ample opportunity to ogle Heather’s ample charms. So that's good.
The Devil Doll informs Heather that he cannot be happy with just one girl, and when she protests, he beats her about the face with his puppety arms. The puppet gets Heather to call her slutty friend Natasha and invite her and her friends over for a party. Devil Doll tells her to get her friends liquored up, and when he gives her the signal, she’s supposed to split. Go to “McDonalds or some shit”, he says. So then a bunch of big-assed porn chicks show up and, for whatever reason, wash a car. Then they head into Heather's. They even brought wine coolers.
There’s a plug for Rotten Cotton in there. One for Brawlin’ Broads, too. And then everybody shows off their giant boobs. One of the girls notices the puppet, but Heather just tells her she was thinking of taking up ventriloquism. Seems valid.
Then they all play Twister. Halfway through, Heather gets her cue to split. The other girls take the opportunity to shower, bathe, and tan. Why not? The puppet spikes Buffy’s (Precious Cox) drink and then puppet-rapes her. And then stabs her to death. Candy (Christine Svendsen) gets it next. He tosses a hairdryer into her bath and electrocutes her. Then he mouth-rapes her. While he does this, he flashes back to his days as a Black Panther style revolutionary.
Meanwhile, Heather’s ex-boyfriend Harold (Martin Boone) – AKA would-be rapper White T - is so distraught by Heather’s rejection that he vomits. He decides he’s going to kill the midget she’s going out with. He thinks the doll is a midget. He has not heard of reanimated fuck-hungry death-puppets. Also meanwhile, the puppet does a bunch of drugs. Then he beats another girl (Erika Branich) to death with an aluminum baseball bat. And then he fucks her.Harold shows up and meets the puppet. They have a stand-off. Harold flashes his gun, but before he can shoot it, the puppet pulls out a blow-gun and shoots him the neck with a knock-out dart. When he wakes up, Puppet strangles him to death with a rope. And then he fucks him.
Natasha’s the last one left. She slips on her way out of the shower and smashes her head, but manages to snap out of it and fight with the puppet, Trilogy of Terror style. This affords us the opportunity to watch her naked ass jiggle as she runs around the apartment trying not get killed by the puppet. The Devil Doll tries to sweet-talk her out of the bedroom she’s locked herself in, but when that doesn’t work, he squirts acidic diarrhea against the door until it melts. And then he bangs her. I think he hypnotizes her first, though. And then, guess what? He kills her. He got the devil in him, this doll.
Heather comes home to find her friends dead. She pulls out a gun and starts shooting at him, but he smooth-talks her out of it. Or does he?
Listen, there’s no subtext or hidden meaning here. It’s just gut-bucket exploitation, with junky HG Lewis-style gore, moronic adolescent humor, and lots of fat asses and enormous jugs. While Black Devil Doll clearly aims to offend, it is very unlikely that anyone outraged by puppet-rape and cheap gore would watch it in the first place. It’s not like Black Devil Doll is going to sneak up on you next Saturday on Creature Double Feature. The film’s knee-jerk will to provoke is probably its weakest point – the shit and semen gags are more eye-rolling than shocking or funny – but director Jon Lewis makes up for it with a grisly handbag’s worth of cheap visual tricks – scratches, washed-out colors, split-screens – that quite often give off the illusion that you're actually watching slimy, early 70’s drive-in trash.
He also knows when to call it a day- the film clocks in at an economical 70 minutes. While it is not the quite the sick-fuck flick it aims for, Black Devil Doll is consistently entertaining, and should please blood-hungry sleaze beasts, especially those of us with an affection for big, floppy tits. Which is all of us, as far as I know.- Ken McIntyre
