Mandy, she does know I’m here, right?
Main Cast: Phoebe Torrance, Amy Burrows
Director: Jamie Weston
Amber has just been released from prison and picked up by her sister Carly, and Carly’s boyfriend Neil. Before they even get back to “the hideout”, they tell Amber of a new score.
Amber doesn’t want to go back to jail, but Neil insists she doesn’t have to do ANYTHING. It’s a babysitting job he’s set up for her, he tells her. All she has to do is go over there, wait an hour, then call Neil and Carly who will come over and divest the home of its valuables. She’ll call the mother and say something came up, and the three of them are out of there!
The only problem is, Amber didn’t know the “child” she’s meant to babysit is Mandy, a haunted doll that’s said to be possessed by the spirit of a girl who was killed in a church several decades earlier. Mandy doesn’t like being left alone, but even more than that, she doesn’t like it when people try to steal things from her home.
MANDY THE DOLL (aka MANDY THE HAUNTED DOLL) was just the kind of fun garbage I was looking for.
Only running an hour and 14 minutes, it’s got a prologue and an epilogue, neither of which have anything to do with the story of Amber, and only serve to fill the run time so it qualifies as a movie. Technically Mandy is present in both, but, again, both of these scenes are like they were cut and pasted from entirely different movies—and not good ones, either.
Released in 2018, MANDY THE DOLL looks and feels like it was shot in 1990 on a Sony Handycam by three friends who one day said, “I’m bored, let’s make a movie,” and then spent the next few weekends doing just that, learning as they went and definitely making it all up along the way.
There’s no way THIS movie had a script and a crew behind the scenes.
IMDB says it was written by Shannon Holiday and directed by Jamie Weston, but I’ve seen MANDY THE DOLL and I don’t believe either of those people or positions on the crew to be real.
Phoebe Torrance plays Amber and she seems to think she’s in a real movie. Unfortunately, the lines she’s given to say, and the feeling she puts behind those lines belie that claim. But she gives it more than Amy Burrows or Manny Jai Montana (who play Carly and Neil respectively) give it, so it’s a good thing Torrance is the main character and gets the most screentime.
Overall, MANDY THE DOLL is a lazy mess. The plot is by-the-numbers, the effects are laughable, and the scares are nonexistent. And in a horror movie, you really need to have at least one of those things.
And for all that, believe it or not, the movie wasn’t even the worst part of it. I saw this on Filmrise Horror, which has commercials, so every so often the movie would go away, and I’d be subjected to the same two commercials over and over for 3 ½ minutes: some poker betting app or BET MGM with Jon Hamm. On a loop. An alternating loop!
Holy crap, take me back to the terrible movie, PLEASE!
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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