Dollman: 33 cm de Altura... e Atira!

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.

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.

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.

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)