Rent Dollman (1991)

Small Potatoes - Dollman review by Count Otto Black

The most famous fictional character called Dollman is an obscure 1940s superhero with the amazing power of having the strength of an ordinary man despite being only one foot tall. So, like Ant-Man but less useful. And he rides around on a dog. The second most famous Dollman turns out to be a diminutive but otherwise human-looking extraterrestrial inexplicably named after that other guy you haven't heard of either, and his superpower is having a handgun so powerful relative to himself that it does lethal damage to full-sized folks. Since the special effects budget runs to only a handful of giant-sized props, and barely any of the kind of expensive pre-CGI effects required for tiny characters to convincingly interact with the rest of the cast, our hero's diminutive size has very little bearing on the plot. So this is effectively a film about an ordinary cop who shoots bad guys with an ordinary gun.

It's true that there's an alien bad guy, in the form of a hovering head the size of a cherry tomato, but for similar reasons his contribution to the action is minimal, and his Super Space Disintegrator Bomb with an alleged blast radius of 3 parsecs - blimey, that's almost 10 light-years!! - turns out to be roughly as devastating as a hand-grenade. Sorry about the spoiler, but come on, you didn't seriously think this straight-to-video piece of dreck could afford to blow up the solar system?

After a preamble which clumsily parodies "Blade Runner" and "Dirty Harry" (and features a few model shots which I'm pretty sure I've seen in several other slightly more expensive movies), the main plot has our one-dimensional hero saving some very stereotypical poor-but-honest citizens of the Bronx from a dozen or so even more stereotypical gang-bangers who hang out on a vacant lot waving guns and swearing until they're eventually put out of their misery. Meanwhile, irrelevant characters played by lousy actors pad the running-time by talking about things that don't matter and goggling in wonder at the mighty munchkin, perhaps admiring his amazing ability to almost never be in the same shot as anyone else.

At 72 minutes (plus 6 minutes of end-credits I didn't bother to sit through), this film feels much too long. If you think otherwise, you'll be pleased to hear that it somehow did well enough to spawn a franchise, one of which is a crossover with the equally popular and critically acclaimed Demonic Toys movies. But since sequels seldom reach the artistic heights of the original, I don't think I'll bother.

Oh Dear!! - Dollman review by jw

So bad, I'm 17 minutes into the film, and I can't even tell who's the leading man . All the actors are so bad, it's so cheap and hammy. I can only liken it to a children's TV Sci Fi except for all the swearing I can't remember when I last saw such a bad film and I see plenty films, now in to 'my mature years'.