Marronnier Movie Review

Imagine Team America: World Police as a horror movie, and you'll get a sense of the bizarre and wholly non-scary Marronnier, a Japanese puppet terror flick the likes of which we'll probably not see again.

One of Japan's odder fetishes concerns dolls, especially female ones with oversized heads and eyes. Our antagonist in Marronnier has just such a fetish, and he makes dolls himself. Unfortunately, he also makes them using real women for parts. Into his creepy lair our heroine stumbles, and with her pals (offed one by one), it's up to her to try to get out before she's turned into a living doll herself. Never mind that, somehow, all the dolls and their unattached parts have come to life.

Marronnier is kind of fun for its last 20 minutes, where it has a fun-house quality while the girl tries to escape from a pair of rampaging legs and a hallway of groping, detached arms. But Marronnier is so badly made (dimly lit, out of focus, grainy) and inexplicably written (the hour that precedes the finale is just a long excuse to reach an 80-minute running time to merit a "feature film" release) that it is impossible to recommend it.

Unless, of course, you've got a fetish of your own that needs a good workout.