Playing with Dolls (2015) 
Low budget slasher that uses a reality TV premise of 4 people in an isolated cabin outfitted with cameras, who are all trying to win a competition to star in their own slasher flick. The last one standing who hasn’t been picked off by the killer is the winner. Unsurprisingly it’s all a set up and the killer is in fact real and not an actor who has been purposefully let loose in the wilderness by some mysterious rich voyeur who sits in a darkened room supping fine claret whilst watching the killings unfold on screen. The ludicrous TV show set-up isn’t enough for our carnage happy pervert though, as he subsidises the body count with some other random women that he’s managed to lure to his lair.
There’s no suspense here. At all. Everything is set-up for you before the annoying contestants reach their cabin. Plus, although the killer looks the business, he seems rather restrained in some respects and a far cry from the ‘insane released mental patient’ caricature as stipulated and you come to expect from these z-grade gore-fests. Maybe he knows he’s got a good deal going on here though… all the flesh he can dissect provided to him on a silver platter. Almost robotic-like he enters the cabin on a few occasions only to lurk at windows, in doorways or in the back of the shot where our quartet of cookie-cutter cardboard thin stereotypes are none the wiser… just to eat up some of the screen time – after all, the killer’s look is pretty much the only thing the film has going for it so why not exploit that fact as much as you can. The attacks/kills are lazy with a lot of them occurring off-screen and which are also very poorly set-up. Instead you are treated to extreme close-ups of blood filled latex limb lopping post-attack, which although look fairly gooey are pretty much the main pivot for the whole film, such as it is, to balance on. We have the classic ‘let’s make a cool killer mutilate people’ trope, but everything else is secondary to that and is therefore disposable making this already flawed mess even more so.
For what is essentially a fairly short film, I was expecting something a little tauter and less drawn out, unfortunately this all becomes clear at the end as the film-makers literally leave you hanging as the killer, survivors, and Mr. Voyeur are out on open ground in some kind of suspense-less face-off when the film just ends… a way of trying to force you to watch the sequel, but I don’t think I’ll be losing any sleep wondering what happens to any of these poor attempts at people.