How to Make a Doll (1968)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis (as Sheldon Seymour) and Bert Ray

Cast: Robert Wood as Percy Corley; Bobbi West as Agnes Turnbull / Dream Girl; Jim Vance as Dr. Hamilcar West; Elizabeth Davis as Mrs. Corley; Brett Jason Merriman as Mr. Turnbull; Geraldine Young as Mrs. Turnbull; Margie Lester as Dr. West's Dream Girl

An Abstract List Candidate

 

 I never take a hammer in the tub. It rusts you know.

Written by Herschell Gordon Lewis under a pseudonym, as "Sheldon Seymour", (who also did the "Special Computer Sound Effects"), How to Make a Doll is a very obscure film from him and an incredibly weird one to boot. It is a sex comedy from in the late sixties, with no nudity even compared to his early sixties output, and a very peculiar premise that has not aged well. One you could yet imagine Jerry Lewis reimagining at this period, but instead by the director if Blood Feast (1963) with imaginable curious results.

We introduce Professor Percy Corley (Robert Wood), our protagonist, his world one where at a university campus students are necking and heavy petting even in his class, to a rapturous crowd of peers ignoring his teacher writing at the board lecturing. Even he does not notice himself until he trips over the couple on the floor, a very clumsy man with a bad habit of catching his tie in his own front door, not even bothering to re-open the door afterwards but having scissors always on him to cut himself free. Percy is also someone able to succeed in his knowledge about X and Y, but not of "Gs and Bs", and love in general ("Could it be girls are better than text books?"). He is the sole single person on the campus, where he even finds a couple making out in his own three wheeled red pod of a car.

A 32 year old virgin living with his mother, thankfully Percy is more self loathing than an angry white man, instead Herschell doing a film with no gore, post the likes of The Nutty Professor (1963) on a low budget. I was always here for his eccentricities and odd characters, so I am the target viewer for this film even if it was a disaster, but his film of building a supercomputer just to create women is strange, particularly as the humour is odd, with a lot of peculiar dialogue strung together like stream-of-consciousness ("cucumber pie"?), and is a film not of plot, but a lot of prolonged and protracted scenes. Making women with a computer is sexist, and with one unfortunate gay joke, when the first attempt at a higher life form is a man, and one voice from the computer clearly meant to be "Asian", this is a film from an obsolete era. But this predates Weird Science (1985) too, so Herschell was ahead of his time.

What this also shows was that, when presented with little, he will goof about as, from the moment we get to the pop art and multi-colour science laboratory where the computer is found, he both has the theme (decades before) of downloading one's consciousness into machinery, whilst also providing the noises of said computer, including gibbering, laughing and almost sounding like a mule, creating effectively a farce that in not meant to be taken serious. Or that, to simulate sex, screws and plugs (in stop motion) demonstrate it in the most blatant of ways. This, like Something Weird (1967) shows Lewis could be creative but also bizarre.

Unlike Something Weird, How To Make a Doll is a film entirely of padding, tangents and repetition, which makes this arguably one of the most difficult films to recommend from him unless you are a hardcore fan or like true cinematic oddities to watch. By the halfway mark, nothing actually progresses once the computer is introduced. Plot wise, this technically does have an event transpire, that Percy is forced into nearly being sexed to death (or wooed to boredom) on the whims of the computer, wishing to have him be a lady's mind so the experiences can be downloaded into the machine's mind. It repeats for so long however that it enters negative time when this happens, where the film progresses through its neither run time nor feels long, just drifting off into a cinematic fugue that might appeal to some, may not appeal to others.

Far weirder is that the film's main plot ends, only for an extended epilogue to take place of Percy meeting and dating a woman which takes up a considerable chunk of the film. One with an extended joke of him having broken glasses, and a lengthy piece of meeting the parents, all lasting a long time and entirely for a final joke involving a bunny swimming costume, breaking the reality and causing one to wonder what was real originally. The resulting film is beguiling in being a mass of random, disconnected pieces, pieces of Percy being obsessed with bunny rabbits from never having pets as a child to the homemade machine that can materialise anything. That the professor behind the machine, who becomes one with it, has an extended gag of him trying to explain his work, only to go on tangents which lasts a considerable time and has enough strange dialogue within it meant to be funn.y It is fittingly part of Lewis' career, as his career once you dig through it is full of films you would never get in the modern day like this. It is however, even if finding it entertaining, a peculiar creation that, surprisingly, managed to get on the list of the 2016 Arrow Video blu ray restorations of Lewis' work. Bless them for this as this is usually the kind of weirdo production that will baffle people.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalistic/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None