"He's a lover. He's a killer. He's a mothafuckin' puppet."
Sometimes creative artists just want to see our reactions. Andy Kaufman's
greatest thrills came from seeing how much hate he could engender from
audiences when he played Tony Clifton or engaged in intergender wrestling. The
guys who created this film are cut from the same cloth. Black Devil Doll is a
hybrid between the Chucky movies and 70s blaxploitation, a non-stop transgressive
orgy of race jokes, splatter, and gratuitous nudity. The DVD box claims it has
been "Rated X by an all-white jury."
Here's the premise. At the same time that a black radical is
executed for murdering "Caucasian women," a suburban woman is playing with a Ouija board. The executed man's spirit enters the board and proceeds from
there into a dummy she had recently purchased in order to study ventriloquism.
The dummy then turns into a Killer Black Panther puppet filled with an
appetite for rape and murder.
Actually, Mr. Evil Puppet starts out benignly enough by simply wooing the Ouija board girl in a
parody of those romantic movie montages we are so often exposed to. You know
what I'm talkin' about, the ones where a mellow song plays while the
lovers share cotton candy, walks in the park, bumper car rides, kite-flying and other irritating cliches, except that those same activities don't seem to be cliches when they
involve a white woman with huge breasts lugging around a puppet with an afro.
The romantic montage soon gives way to a sexual one which recalls the sex
scene in Team America: World Police, except that it pictures puppet-human sex
rather than puppet-puppet.
After about a half hour of running time, Mr. Black Devil Doll hasn't done anything
more malicious than getting laid. He will soon rectify that oversight. After
having won the heart of his lady-love, BDD persuades her to invite over four
of her friends for a hen party, during which she will have to leave. He claims
that he just needs some "strange," but he has more than poontang on his mind.
He is, after all, a killer of white women, and he needs to keep his skills
sharp. The rest of the movie consists of BDD raping and killing women (and one
man who gets in his way) until Ouija Girl comes home and realizes how she has
been deceived. By the way, the raping and killing do not necessarily happen in
that order, so the film adds both heterosexual and homosexual necrophilia to
its checklist of perversions.
Filmed in the magic of "Negroscope," Black Devil Doll was made just for
laughs. Mind you, the laughs are dark, raunchy and scatological, so they may
not be to many tastes, but they are there. Most people will hate this movie,
but those who love it will love it a lot. It's the kind of film that is
scored either 1 or 10 at IMDb, essentially a genre lover's delight, if the
genre films you love are generally released by Troma. If Troma had a
blacksploitation division, this film would be its flagship. I have to conclude
that it is very successful at pleasing its target audience, because I read
every single review at IMDb, and there was hardly a negative vibe to be found.
Each of the reviewers, while not unmindful of the film's limitations,
enjoyed it. Those who watched it in theaters said that the audiences loved it
as well, although most of those reports were careful to point out that the
members of those audiences may have required some chemical assistance to
obtain a full appreciation of the film's merits.
One reviewer summed up the film as follows:
"BLACK DEVIL DOLL is a relentless, abusive, and uproarious onslaught of
rape, misogyny, mutilation, mayonnaise, mass murder, toilet humor and racially
charged puppet high-jinks...this movie delivers the total package to your
door...and says "FUCK YOU!" when you sign for it."
As with the Troma catalog, you have to be prepared for silly splatter effects,
bad acting, and jokes designed to offend everyone. If you relish
the thought of that, this is the kind of movie you share with your dearest and
most twisted friends.
