USA Saturday Nightmares: The Dummy (1981)

In the spirit of Living Dolls, the next short feature I now present is entitled, The Dummy which is yet another tale of inamimate objects behaving badly.

The Dummy starts innocently enough with a married couple (Carri Vickerey as The Wife and Ezra Titelbaum as The Husband) entering their aparment during a dark stormy night. Director Louis la Volpe is generous enough to provide just enough discussion between the two to set things up. The Wife is more than a tad annoyed with her spouse over the prospect of getting their apartment ready for some sort of dinner party for their respective parents.

The Husband then abruptly heads off for an evening shift at work; leaving the wife all alone in the apartment with the namesake of the short film.

The stage is now set. Time for some mayhem.

The Dummy is a little hamfisted when it comes to action and direction, but what do you really want from a short film with barely over a seven minute runtime?

If you've ever had the hairs raise up on the back of your neck while watching Magic (1978) with Anthony Hopkins or the infamous Zuni Fetish segments of the Trilogy of Terror films, or even the Child's Play movies, then this little gem will tap into those primal childhood fears when shadows played on your wall at night and you really did hate that smiling clown doll your aunt gave you that one Christmas.

USA Saturday Nightmares: Living Dolls (1980)

I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon, but horror on cable television these days ain't worth jack. Back in the day, you could always count on late-night cable networks to pull out nearly all the stops and serve up something that was just as creepy as anything you could see in theaters.

The struggle for identity in the early days of the USA Network was particularly enjoyable. USA didn't know whether it wanted to make you laugh or freak you out, so you could always count on an eclectic variety of programming. However when it came to Saturday nights, USA followed in the proud tradition of the local affiliates of the major networks and reserved the nether hours following the late news for horror films.

And what great stuff that was, but USA didn't stop there. They kept the creepiness going on even during the commercial breaks with the introduction of short films and introduced a whole new facet of the medium to an appreciate audience.

One of the first movies that ever freaked me out as a kid was Living Dolls by Todd Coleman. It follows a day in the life of a poor guy named Melvin (Park Dougherty). Melvin works at a bridal shop as a janitor and sufferes the merciless slings and arrows of the condscending women that saunter in and out of his life.

One afternoon, Melvin decides that he has had enough and goes upstairs to the storage area above the shop. Since he doesn't quite have the courage to tell off the shop owner or the customers that make his life unbearable, he decides that he is going to practice being assertive on the mannequins first.

Little does Melvin realize that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned… even one made out of plaster.

There's certainly nothing in Living Dolls that you haven't seen in similar pieces of work (most noteably an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "The After Hours"), but Coleman's attention to lighting, music, and setting really makes this short film something special.

I thought that Coleman would end up a big-time horror director, but the guy seems to have faded into obscurity. Thankfully, the online community has kept Living Dolls from suffering a similar fate.