BJD owners are really fucking creepy.

[modernwizard]

This is what I have learned from watching the first fifteen minutes of The Doll Master, a 2004 South Korean horror film featuring hordes of BJDs by Customhouse. As demonstrated by Young-ha, a BJD-owning character, they're all sulky, introverted weirdos with no social skills and a tendency to treat their dolls as independent equals, rather than toys.

I've wanted to watch this movie ever since I learned of it, partly because my first BJD was a Customhouse Jun [Zephque], partly because the BJD community refers to Doll Master as the equivalent of BJD: The Movie. Further comments when I'm done.

If you're so inclined to watch a horror movie about dolls, you can find the entire Doll Master film on Youtube with subtitles.

P.S. You know what actually is really fucking creepy? That life-size doll hanging from the ceiling as a lamp holder in the weirdo BJD owner's room. It looks like it's being tortured. :( Won't someone please think of the mannequins? :p

Comments

[modernwizard]

Wow, cool, someone else who has seen the movie! I'll be interested to hear what comments you have about my reactions below...

Overall I was disappointed with the film because the character development and backstory revelations only occurred in the last half an hour, at which point it was far too late to give a shit about any of the characters. A little more upfront development, especially about each character's interest in this OBVIOUSLY creepy art museum in an OBVIOUSLY ominous area, would have helped a whole lot.

And you're right...the plotline with Young-ha and Damian [BJD] went nowhere fast. I was waiting for something to happen between them...for Damian to be Young-ha's dead sibling or boyfriend or something and for his and Young-ha's relationship to contrast with the murderous vengeful relationship between the original murdered dude and his doll. Of course, this never happened.

I also want to know how Hae-mi's doll Mina got together with Mrs. Im the evil artist/doll. Since Mina says to Hae-mi, "She promised that you would be spared!" it seems that Mrs. Im may have corrupted Mina and brought her under her power. In that case, Mina is a tragic pawn whose virtuous love for Hae-mi was twisted by Mrs. Im because she needed a henchdoll in her quest for vengeance.

I think that's what happened. But that doesn't answer the question of how Mina and Mrs. Im met in the first place, especially as dolls with souls appear geographically bound to the locations of their trauma, and Hae-mi's traumatic motorcycle accident did not occur on the grounds of the OBVIOUSLY creepy art museum.

Incidentally, most of my sympathies lay with Mina. Her quiet demeanor and her few short lines, often repetitive, gave her a simple characterization, unlike Mrs. Im, with her sophisticated schemes. Mina reminded me of a companion animal, an uncomplicated character with transparent, direct desires. She was abandoned by her owner and then made an arduous trek, motivated by devotion, to return to her beloved owner, only to discover that her owner was repulsed by her. She didn't seem to understand Hae-mi's revulsion; she only had room in her uncomplicated mind for one emotion: love for Hae-mi. She did have one moment of rage in which she started to do violence to Hae-mi, but her devotion to Hae-mi overcame her hurt and anger, and she sacrificed her life defending Hae-mi from Mrs. Im.

The portrayal of Mina as less like an unhinged person unhealthily fixated on revenge and more as a pet-like character with a limited understanding and a heart full of devotion made sense to me. It also made her more sympathetic because, if you've spent any time with companion animals [as you have!], you know how quickly they can start loving you and how direct and persistent they are in their love, how they may want to follow you around the house and sleep on top of you just so they can be near you, how they're distressed when you're separated from them, but how they often instantly forgive you when you return and bestow enthusiastic affection upon you. They don't understand why you go away sometimes; they just know that they miss you and that you bring them joy [and food], which is why they will attach themselves to your side for the rest of their lives.

The freakiest/most disturbing moments of the film for me were as follows: First, that life-size doll as light fixture looked like a sculpture from a torture chamber.

Second, when Hae-mi was running around panicking at some point in the last half-hour, she came across some life-size dolls kind of stuck in the walls. We never got a good look at them, but they appeared to be trapped there. My private interpretation is that, just as Mrs. Im was able to develop a soul and get into a human body, so she acquired the sort of reverse power to trap humans in dolls. Therefore all the tortured-looking mannequins that we see used to be people [somehow tangentially related to Mrs. Im's vengeance] that she killed by freezing them into dolls whose agonized postures represent their last moments of struggle.

Third, I was most disturbed when Mrs. Im's body swiveled around 360 degrees in her wheelchair, but her head remained backward, staring fixedly at Hae-mi, teeth barred. That was a perfect demonstration of Mrs. Im's inhumanity and her rage. She looked like a combination of a mannequin and a wild animal with rabies. Eeek!

Incidentally, did you know that Customhouse, the company that supplied all the 1:3 scale BJDs [not the life-size ones] for the film, made and sold Damian and Mina BJDs? I haven't seen any Damian BJDs around the message boards, but I've seen quite a few St. Minas [no, I don't know where the "Saint" part came from]. They came with two different head options, a head with a peaceful expression with a small smile and a head with a sad, somber expression. Anyway, both sculpts really captured the essence of Eun-kyeong Lim, who played Mina. Here's a Flickr link where you can see owner photos of mostly the sad version of St. Mina: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=customhouse%20st.%20mina . I prefer the happy version.

P.S. BJD enthusiasts' interpretation of Doll Master as BJD: The Movie just means that Doll Master has lots of cool BJDs in it.

[seventhbard]

Ah okay, well that makes more sense then re: the last line! It did have a lot of great dolls in it, both the larger scare-props and the littler, fancier dolls.

And the twisted love revenge I meant wasn't little-doll Mina, who I interpreted very similarly to you (and I felt quite sad for the poor little thing, honestly) but the large doll from the older story, who is definitely the villain and interestingly, remains unnamed through the narrative. They call her-as-possessed-woman Ms Im but I feel like that's a cover, especially if the victims were all from that town and had the chance, like the photographer, to know the story of the original doll. At the end they pretend to explain how Mina was abandoned by showing baby Hae-mi dropping her out of the window, but as a child who had close relationships with dolls like that, I can tell you that no doll you got badly hurt to protect would be one you could bear to chuck out a window and forget. I still have Patton, my first Cabbage Patch, who saved me from countless lava sharks in his day so of course I'm deeply indebted to him. ;)

It would actually have been pretty easy to turn this into a more seriously scary horror. some of the changes you suggested would have been spot on, though they would have had to pick a direction they were going with the relationship between dolls and people, and whether dolls HAVE souls, TAKE souls, or we GIVE them souls (and if that's the case are they original souls or souls of people... my orig thought was they were going to make dolls of the guests and then put their souls in them and have them locked up in the basement catatonic or something), and depending on which it was, developing the scares along that idea, thus making it an allegory as well which I feel like most good horror is at core anyway.

But what this film very much is and perhaps even what they were aiming for (some studios do it on purpose and others I think... were trying to go somewhere and fell short) is along a specific and very cheesy genre of pulpy horror that I personally have an enormous love for that I'm not even sure I can properly explain. It's why I'm so mad about the Evil Dead modern remake-- doing something serious with it ruins the whole point. Evil Dead was fantastic because it was campy and ridiculous, not because we're actually afraid of it. And the whole reason the infamous "tree rape" scene is bearable is because it's utterly farcical, and I have zero interest in seeing it reproduced to become as horrifying as it would be if it wasn't a bunch of obvious prop vines and grips waving sticks from somewhere behind the camera.

Dollmaster doesn't revel in its "tra la la scary movie tropes whee" the way something like say, Hausu (Japanese scary movie in the same genre, and another amazing ride) does. But I still put it in that camp. I guess for a watcher like me, it's not as much about the story as a feeling of "oh hello there, dear old friend, I remember you, good times!" But even I admit there's times it's frustrating when you loved the concept and would have liked to see it played straight or otherwise really done well and developed, and the only people who took it on did a cheesy one, meanwhile ideas like "aliens come to earth and live among us, mayhem ensues, we're the monsters" have been done so much, and in every flavor from drips-with-cheez to shit-yer-pants, you could publish an encyclopedia of them.