On the Doll
On the Doll
R | 12 October 2007 (USA)
On the Doll Trailers

A lurid, dark look into the lives of sex workers, where victims of child abuse deal with the consequences later in life.

Reviews
Evengyny Thanks for the memories!
Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
lazarillo This movie basically tries to expose the "dark side" of the sex industry, but it does so in a decidedly PG-13 and completely (and at times laughably) implausible manner.There are three interweaving stories here. One involves a young adult sex abuse survivor named "Jizz" who works at a print sex magazine because he is trying to buy the freedom of a physically crippled childhood friend who works in a peep show booth. Even assuming there are any peep shows still around, it's pretty hard to believe that in Hollywood--a town full of struggling, adult actresses--they would have to resort to keeping a physically disabled sex slave, who never actually seems to take off her clothes. Anyway, "Jizz" gets together with another prostitute (Brittany Snow), who also never takes off her clothes and doesn't seem to have to do anything more degrading than tie up a john and punch him in the gonads. It's not COMPLETELY unbelievable that some pervert would pay a girl hundreds of dollars to tie him up and punch him in the nuts, but this idiot also happens to be a mob "bag man" who's carrying thousands of dollars with him at the time! Another story involves two "high school" girls who are both implausibly mature-looking and unbelievably naive and stupid. They get preyed upon by a ridiculously evil teacher (if this guy had a moustache he'd be twirling it). A real teacher these days would probably be fired for even having two students in his car, yet we're supposed to believe this guy can drive female students to porn shoots, masturbate in the street while they flash their panties, feed them drugs, and worse, yet they can't tell their parents, the cops, or their fricking school principal because "no one will believe" them. The only halfway believable story involves a young couple trying to save up money for marriage. She's another prostitute who apparently never has to take off her clothes or perform actual sex acts, and he's her pimp/driver. There's nothing wrong with condemning the modern-day sex industry; it's just that nothing in this film remotely resembles the REAL-LIFE modern day sex industry. And I know that having a lot of sex and nudity might have made this film kind of hypocritical given the dim view it takes on the sex trade, but it also might have made it slightly less boring and worthless. The PG-13 content is just one more element that serves to make this movie the steaming crock of laughable bullsh*t that it is.
emdoub Good acting, considering the remarkably puerile script they had to work with. The characters were almost totally unbelievable, the only motivation any of them had to work with was "bizarrely deviant" or "abused as a child", and the sketchy history that brings the characters to the period of the movie is told in such a drawn-out, patchy fashion that it simply becomes annoying, rather than dramatic, as the author seems to have intended.The "unrated" label is a draw for people wanting to see something explicit - but only the language and sexual situations would prevent this from a PG rating.*** Spoilers follow *** The teacher who obviously masturbates watching his students, the students who obviously encourage this by giving him up-skirt shots, then go with him to enlist in producing internet porn, the escort who storms out of a "date" within 90 seconds because the client wants to touch her, the over-the-top fetishes shown all prevent the viewer from being able to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy any part of this movie. As another reviewer pointed out, the acting is pretty good - but that's all there is to see here.
barry levin Heard this was the bad joke of the Austin Film Fest. After reviewing this for myself its more then easy to see why. First off the script comes across as being written by a dirty old man enjoying himself more then the audience would ever as he imagines the lives of low life uncared for teenagers. . The 99% untried actors try to handle the unlikely all over the place creepy fantasy but there are problems to the right and left.They should mention the cheap background sets in the description on the cover of the DVD. One was supposed to be an eatery that was clearly someones house. Most of the rest were pretty terrible. I'm probably going to have to say its the only fun part of the cheap movie to watch. Unless your a deviant who gets off on watching abused children I'd stay away of this. I thought it would be decent quality..i was wrong.
dragons2607 To start off with, I'm habitually bad at objectively rating movies. I know this, my wife knows this, and everyone around me knows this. I'm the kind of guy at the theater that likes a movie but can't explain why. If I like a movie, I like it 100% - and if I hated it, I'll recommend against people watching it."On the Doll" was the first movie I ever actually watched that I felt I could objectively rate and comment on without throwing some over-the-top rating to it. There's a LOT of reference to sex, but virtually no nudity. The theme is based around this post-high school, "grunge" style of direction that seems to be rampant amongst the college generation. In other words, the director tries to set the stage for the film on the backdrop of a sub-culture that many people are unaware of. He does this from three different angles: The Prostitute, The Teenagers, and the Hero.Now, from the premise of the movie - we were supposed to be inundated with life revolving around people who were sexually abused as young kids. Honestly - I found this part of the movie very lacking, and not that I wanted them to explore this verbatim, but I would have liked the back stories to go a bit more in depth. In the end, it left the idea of the movie and the characters stagnant at best. For saying this was the main premise of the movie - you don't really get a look into how they seem to feel about what happened to them. Book after book has been written on the subject from people who have been abused, and I think if you were going to use that as the focal point of a movie - you would, in the least, spend time going over the mental backlash that such atrocities would inflict on young minds.The director spent more time trying to play a catch and grab game with the audience - that in my opinion, failed miserably. There were certain characters you absolutely hate, others that you love and respect, and some you feel indifferent about. The fact is, if this movie could be rated as half-way decent, it's because of the acting.In the end, I think it's safe to say that the movie ended quite abruptly and didn't really seem to accomplish much. The character development was strong, and I feel like each story told a very different tale of life in the "sex lane" - but to elude that this movie in anyway represented victims of abuse is just a tag line to get people to watch it. This was a quaint drama with opposing forces mixed in that didn't really accomplish much of anything.I went into this expecting good things, but was left slightly dissatisfied and felt the presence of good, upcoming young actors was all that saved it from being horrid.4/10