Sometimes a poster is all it takes, and though it isn’t winning any awards for originality, Dolly seems to have made just enough of an impact with its broken-eyed porcelain doll face that the movie is getting a surprisingly wide release. And boy, is that frustrating. We are in an era of brilliant, innovative, thought-provoking horror; we are also in an era of streamer saturation and of real struggle for indie movies to get their heads above water, so exactly why this unimaginative and completely boring movie was the one to get this many resources thrown into its distribution is anyone’s guess. It would never have been a game-changer, but there are seeds of decency in Dolly that make it that much more irritating to watch, as absolutely nothing ends up being done with any of it. Think junior high school students making Barbarian, and this is pretty much what you end up with.
What Is ‘Dolly’ About?
Macy (Fabianne Therese) and Chase (Seann William Scott) are a couple on the brink of the next step in their relationship. He has a young daughter from a previous marriage and is about to propose, and she is apprehensive of the commitments of both marriage and step-parenthood. They head out for a hike in some national park or other, where they discover a creepy shrine with dolls hung in the trees, and Macy just can’t help but mess with them, which we all know is a classic horror mistake. They make it to a beauty spot, but before Chase can whip the ring out, he is distracted by the sound of a music box and insists on venturing back into the forest to investigate while Macy just hangs around and waits.
In the woods, Chase encounters Dolly (wrestler Max the Impaler) and rather than turning on his heels and running before she even notices him, he calls to her, walks right up to her, touches her… Even when she turns around to reveal a creepy porcelain doll mask and a hulking stature, he seems to forget that his mama grew him legs for a reason, and is swiftly incapacitated. Turns out Macy is equally lacking in survival instinct, and when Dolly snatches her and takes her back to her spooky house in the woods, a night of utter tedium ensues in which Macy makes more or less zero effort to escape, while a few uncomfortable moments of perversity are sprinkled in.
‘Dolly’ Wants to Be a Rob Zombie Movie
To give the movie credit, it was filmed on location in Chattanooga on 16mm, a nice stylistic choice that hearkens back to the early days of ’70s exploitation like Last House on the Left, and it could have made for a decent aesthetic, with its grain and washed-out color palette, had it not insisted on introducing modernity where it serves almost no purpose. The opening of the movie sees the couple in a sweet vintage muscle car, and so the audience naturally assumes it is a period piece, but then Macy whips out her smartphone to face-time with a friend, and the entire look of the thing falls to pieces. With a few more cigarettes and dagger-collared shirts, it could easily have gone for a ’70s throwback vibe like House of 1000 Corpses, and while it wouldn’t have made a huge difference to the overall quality, it would at least have fine-tuned the aesthetic and prevented these stylistic discrepancies.
While the direction and editing leave a lot to be desired, there is some fairly decent cinematography on display here, but the movie lacks a sense of complete vision. Director Rod Blackhurst is far from inexperienced in the film industry, but Dolly feels desperately student-ish, like the beginnings of a career that might go somewhere in the next decade. It is genuinely perplexing to me that this movie has not only been bought by Shudder but is getting a theatrical run. It feels like a twenty-year-old, low-budget exploitation wannabe that you’d have found in the 1.99 bin at Blockbuster because nobody rented the damn thing. Cut corners like unconvincing prosthetic work can be forgiven, but a director with no sense of pace, thrill or suspense in a horror movie is really pushing his luck.
At the beginning of the third act, it becomes very evident that what Dolly wants to be is a Rob Zombie movie. It is full of tastelessness throughout and has a certain eye for filthy production design, but the introduction of a big, beefy redneck pervert who hoots and hollers in a Southern drawl brings this comparison to the forefront. Zombie’s movies might not be to everybody’s taste, but there is no denying that the fella has visual style, tonal consistency, and a certainty of what he wants and who he is as a filmmaker. Dolly seems content in serving quick bursts of edgelord griminess before getting back to its grinding, poorly paced centerpiece. The utter pretentiousness of dividing this very basic, thematically barren, barely 80-minute movie into six “chapters” with titles like Mother and Father is beyond the pale.
‘Dolly’ Makes a Short Horror Runtime Boring
Horror needs momentum, whether it’s a slow-burning, gradual escalation or an explosive start, but it needs to feel like it’s going somewhere and taking you on an emotional journey. The first ten minutes of Dolly establish some ideas that may not be fresh, but offer plenty to play with. Will Macy and Chase end up on the same page as to the direction of their relationship? Will Macy’s ordeal at the hands of a motherly monster change her own perspective on motherhood? It somehow manages to drop what little it has to work with and devolves into a thoroughly boring walk-through scare attraction in which any progress is quickly undone, and the main character is back to the start again. It makes for a seriously frustrating watch, not at all helped by an incredibly bland and zoned-out performance by Therese, whose emotional maximum seems to be boredom. I have looked more perturbed by scam phone calls than she does at the sight of mangled corpses.
It pains me to have to be so scathing towards an indie horror movie, but Dolly is by far the worst thing I have seen so far this year. I hope it serves as a stepping stone to bigger and better things for the more talented of its crew, and doesn’t turn buyers off to low-budget genre films. Icons of 2000s pop culture, Seann William Scott and Ethan Suplee, served as producers on the film, and their involvement is truly the only reason I can think of that Dolly has gathered as much steam as it has. I suppose I will chalk that up as a good thing, that people with even the slightest industry pull are using it to champion small films, and long may that continue. But Dolly is a miss of considerable proportions, and one I certainly will not be posing creepily on my shelf.
Dolly is now playing in theaters.
- Release Date
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March 6, 2026
- Runtime
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84 minutes
- Director
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Rod Blackhurst
- Writers
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Rod Blackhurst, Brandon Weavil
- Producers
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Betty Tong, Bryce McGuire, Esteban Sánchez, Isaiah Smallman, Joseph C. Grano, Noah Lang, Rod Blackhurst, Ross O’Connor
- The 16mm aesthetic is pleasant.
- The lead performance from Fabianne Therese is incredibly stilted.
- A sluggish pace and lack of momentum kills any tension.
- An inconsistent directorial vision makes for a muddled and boring film.
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