Band takes one of his infrequent turns behind the director’s chair, something that has often happened with variable results, ranging from the great Meridian/Kiss of the Beast/Phantoms (1990) – to mostly hackwork – Parasite (1982), Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) and Dollman Vs. the Demonic Toys (1993). Blood Dolls is a totally gonzo film. The opening moments make you wonder what on Earth you have sat down to watch – people are invited to a house where they are greeted with a butler with a white-painted face, a dwarf who keeps forcing a girl rock group to play by electrifying the cage they are kept in, the villain with a Southern accent who hides his face behind a rubber mask then reveals he has a tiny doll-size head on a normal-size pair of shoulders, the two sinister dolls scuttling about, then the male visitor (Jason Pace) being pinned into his chair like some Bond villain trap where he is then gutted with a scorpion drill-bit, while the Asian girl visitor (Naomi McClure) is reduced to a doll in the villain’s electrical device. The rest of the film maintains a similar level of bizarre nuttiness. Jack Maturin gives a strangely intense performance – he has a speech parodying Shakespeare, perfectly balanced between the touching and the whacko, which sums up the bizarreness of the exercise: “I alone of all creatures can permit myself no illusion of a soul. It is from emptiness that I came and that emptiness awaits me at the end. And what awaits between but a mad, pointless puppet show signifying nothing.” Debra Mayer has a fascinating presence as a woman who treats her husband as a slave in a BDSM relationship. In the latter half of the film she steps up to center stage and the relationship between her and Maturin takes on some fascinating tensions of sexual power games. The film also features the bizarre novelty of offering up two alternate endings, dependent on whether she accepts or rejects him.