Dolly Dearest - 1992

As Child's Play ripoffs go, this one's nowhere near as terrible as it could have been in the special effects department. The shots of creepy little doll legs running behind furniture work pretty well for building suspense. At least, up until the doll finally attacks someone in a long shot. It's not the puppeteering that brings the suspense to a grinding halt, though. No, it's the actor playing the dad, who braces himself before the doll even raises the scissors to stab him. In my book, telegraphing a stabbing is almost as golden as jumping into the monster's mouth in a low budget creature feature, so there's one point in this movie's favor.

Here's another point: an archaeologist behaving unbecomingly to the profession (a fairly common occurrence in trashy movies, especially when an animate doll is involved). In this case, the scientist has been trying to quash superstitious rumors that his crypt-opening ways will awaken the ghost of a devil child and bring destruction upon the community. So when he finally opens the crypt and finds the skeleton of an infant with both human and goat-like features, what does he do? Would you guess that he:

a) theorizes that the body has been tampered with postmortem to make it look like a devil child, and then carefully takes samples to be analyzed in a lab.

or:

b) immediately abandons every precept of his training to run off and blow up the doll factory.

If you guessed a, congratulations, you possess sound reasoning skills and understand the scientific method. If you guessed b, congratulations to you too, because you understand the goofy logic of trashy movies (also, you are right). To be fair, the tomb's lid blowing off by itself, complete with ghost light, might have been a little difficult to rationalize. Not impossible, though. If Scully could come up with a logical explanation for liver-eating monsters on a weekly basis during The X-Files, surely this dude could have come up with something about phosphorescence and trapped gasses. Just because a devil-possessed doll is on the loose is no reason to start getting sloppy with your methodology.

Speaking of the devil child, though: here's another trashy movie which offers an explanation for events that makes no sense at all (spoilers ahead). The backstory reveals that the devil child was created in the distant past by some evil shamans, and that the shamans fed it children from the village. Okay. What on earth would the shamans want with a devil child? Did they need it to intimidate their people into blind obedience? If that were the case, wouldn't it have been much simpler to have a pit of jaguars to throw people into? Why go to so much trouble creating something that's surely going to cause your messy death someday when you lose control over it (because you know they did)?

It is the paradox of trashy movies that occasionally something profound seems to be lurking just under the surface, like that crazy neighbor who waits to jump out of a trashcan and scare your ass every Halloween.