Dollman

The effects are cheesy and the story is ridiculous but this is an entertaining flick nontheless. Tim Thomerson is great as the 13 inch Brick Bardo. (Love that name!) Brick crash lands in the South Bronx after chasing some criminal (actually just a head attached to some sort of board) into an energy field outside his home planet of Arturus. Brick arrives just in time to save a young woman from some hoods who take to calling each other homeboy. These tough punks with mullets to spare, are terrorizing the neighborhood. Leave it to Brick to clean up the mess with the help of his handgun("the most powerful weapon man has ever seen").

The film is filled with some hilarious material. The scene in which Brick jumps through a third floor window and catches onto a moving car below is classic. Needless to say if you go into this film with the right attitude you'll have a good time. Tim Thomerson should get more and better work.

Brick Bardo (Tim Thomerson), a tough cop from the planet Arturus, pursues his evil nemesis Sprug (Frank Collison), a living disembodied head on a flying machine, across the far reaches of space to Earth (the South Bronx, to be precise) where he discovers that, by Earth standards, he is the size of a doll.

But as the saying goes, size doesn't matter, and after Sprug teams up with the local gang who have been terrorising the neighbourhood, Bardo becomes a miniature Dirty Harry crossed with Paul Kersey from Death Wish III, blowing away the scum and punks with his powerful side-arm.

Dollman is so cheap that it lifts special effects shots from the cheesy 70s/80s TV series 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century', but producer Charles Band and director Albert Pyun are no strangers to movie-making on a shoestring and still manage to provide a reasonably diverting time despite the obvious budgetary limitations.

Early scenes feature some neat full-body explosions, Bardo's gun being capable of blowing people completely apart; Thomerson puts in a fun performance, delivering his Eastwood influenced one-liners in a suitably gruff manner; and there are some truly daft moments that are just too ridiculous not to enjoy (Bardo's dive through a window and onto a moving car is hilarious!).

When, upon watching this movie and hearing some of the negative feedback, I'm reminded of that adage that "one man's trash is another man's treasure". "Dollman" may indeed be silly, cheesy, low budget nonsense but it IS fun on that level, damn it. Maybe not as much fun as it could and should have been (It would have been more amusing if everybody else besides star Tim Thomerson hadn't taken themselves quite so seriously.).

The high concept story is a time honoured one, having to do with the idea of seeing a tiny individual interact with giant surroundings. That individual is Dirty Harry type cop Brick Bardo (Thomerson, in fine form), who's from a distant planet rather similar to Earth. After chasing his nemesis Sprug (Frank Collison), a living severed head whose other body parts have been eliminated by Brick, to Earth, Brick realizes that by normal Earth standards he only stands 13 inches tall. Brick befriends a hot young South Bronx resident named Debi (Kamala Lopez) and her son, while Sprug aligns himself with local gang members led by Braxton (Jackie Earle Haley). Sprug has with him a deadly bomb, but Brick's own lethal gun is absolutely nothing to be laughed at.

The director is Albert Pyun, the man behind so many other low budget genre flicks, and the supporting cast features some of his regulars like Vince Klyn (the villain of "Cyborg"), Michael Halsey, and Nicholas Guest. Other actors you'll undoubtedly recognize are Frank Doubleday (a heavy in the John Carpenter favourites "Assault on Precinct 13" and "Escape from New York"), Luis Contreras ("After Midnight"), Eugene Robert Glazer (TV's 'La Femme Nikita'), and Judd Omen ("Pee-Wee's Big Adventure"). Great, grim 'n' ugly urban decay production design, decent pacing (it's NOT deadly slow), amusing music by Anthony Riparetti, entertaining gore, and ENJOYABLY unconvincing visual effects add to the diverting package that is this little B flick. Even at just over 82 minutes, however, one can see some padding, especially in the end credits.

Overall, it's a hoot, and recommended for Thomerson fans.

Seven out of 10.

Only a director like Albert Pyun could handle material like this. The director of many B sci-fi/martial Arts projects (the "Nemesis" series, "Cyborg"), a teen video game adventure, and a post-apocalyptic musical, Mr. Pyun loves to combine genre tropes into stimulating, unique experiences. Pyun asked what many B-filmmakers did in the Tarrantino administration: why bother with new material when it has all been done so well before?

The 90s direct-to-video market thrived simultaneously with this era of genre hybrids; those movies that recycled old genre tropes, archetypes, and approaches into new material. In "Dollman" Pyun makes a tasty salad out of various conventions from "Dirty Harry", "Honey I shrunk the Kids", "Suburban Commando", "Time Cop", various gang films, and the action and sci-fi conventionality of its era.

Tim Thomerson plays recurring Pyun character Brick Bardo who, in this incarnation, is a futuristic bad-cop who is inter-dimensionally displaced via space ship into the Bronx with his his WMD-packing floating head nemesis Armbruiser. During their trip, the two are shrunken into action figure proportions. After Bardo's spaceship is abducted by a young boy, he must struggle against various domestic terrors (the family dog, a cockroach) while Armbruiser shops his WMD to a dangerous local gang headed by the dangerous Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Hayley in a hammy, vicious performance).

Fortunately "Dollman" delivers in every way you want it to. The shrunken person tropes are satisfying and realized; the action scenes are intense; and its science fiction backbone is always present. Pyun juggles these elements well and has fun with the formulas at play.

Although it suffers from Pyun's tendency toward awkward pacing, "Dollman" is one of his strongest and most controlled films.

Tim Thomerson stars as Brick Bardo (No relation to the same Brick Bardo who beat up tons of people in Bloodmatch)an alien cop (Not unlike the cop from Trancers) who follows one of his adversaries to earth only to stumble onto earth where he is only a foot tall, it's here he joins forces with a ghetto woman to protect her from gang violence. Jackie Earle Haley (Before his Oscar nod) is the gang-leader who is Thomerson's main enemy. Believe it or not, Jackie Earle Haley could always act and his Oscar is no fluke, as he delivers a not too shabby performance and Thomerson of course as usual is enjoyable to watch (Of course) this is a perfectly watchable B.movie, with a good sense of humor, some good action sequences and for once Pyun's disjointed and over the top directing is appropriate. So all in all this is one of Pyun's better efforts and a distinctive B.movie.

* *1/2 out of 4-(Pretty good)