Dollman

You will have a campy good time watching Dollman. It's about a guy from another planet who comes to earth, but due to earth's gravity, he is about the size of a GI Joe Doll. He is chasing down a criminal (or just the head) from his home world and the criminal is also small. What makes this a classic B film is that over acting of the main character. The lines are cheesy, the plot is stupid, the concept is ridiculous and it all works gloriously together in one insanely stupid and laughable film. This is the type of film you get together with buddies and do your own version of Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentaries. So I give the film a 5 in my book.

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.

Despite some gruesome and bloody scenes, this movie keeps your interest due to Thomerson's tongue-in-cheek humor and his almost Eastwood-like presence. This is a strange and unique science fiction that keeps you giggling just enough to keep you watching.

I love this kind of movie.

It's one of those things you either love or hate, and a lot of the venom getting tossed at it isn't needed. It's just a movie folks.

Innocent fun.

It's about this alien cop who winds up crashed on earth only to find out he's the size of a ken doll, here.

Lucky he's got his "Ruger," the most powerful handgun in the universe (don't ask). This little thing blasts holes in his foes as if it was a .357 magnum (and, as i recall, it literally blew people apart on his home planet).

It's not Citizen Kane, but it's clever and tongue in cheek. I can actually see a silver age comic book like this.

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!).