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Disambiguation: For the 1936 film directed by Tod Browning, see The Devil-Doll
Devil Doll is a 1964 suspense film about an evil ventriloquist, "The Great Vorelli," and his dummy Hugo. Decades after its initial release, it was featured on a 1997 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The Devil-Doll is a B&W 1936 horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring a cross-dressing Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O'Sullivan as "Malita".
The main thrust of the plot of this little-known B-movie classic (a fantastic "bad movie") where Barrymore plays a mad scientist who is trying to create a formula to reduce the size of people to 1/10th of their original size, with the idea of making the resources needed for survival: clean water, food, energy, etc. which are limited on the Earth last longer for an ever-growing population.
While unavoidably a camp film, there is a serious message underlying the entire plot: that of the concern of over-population, and that the resources on Earth are by nature limited, and that at some point if population growth is not controlled and limited, these resources will be too limited to allow mankind to survive. This is fairly forward-looking for a film penned in 1934.
Vorelli is a ventriloquist & hypnotist, with an amazing dummy, Hugo. Vorelli meets and pursues a beautiful heiress (Marianne); he mesmerizes her, and induces a baffling coma. His buxom mistress (Magda) fears he'll dump her for the younger woman, and threatens to expose him. Vorelli tricks Hugo into killing Magda while he's safely elsewhere. Marianne's boyfriend Mark investigates. He discovers another killing in Vorelli's past, of a man called Hugo. The girl wakes from her coma, and announces she will marry the hypnotist. When the triumphant Vorelli tells Hugo his plans for Marianne and a new, female dummy, a final confrontation yields surprising results. Written by Mike Rogers
Paul Lavond was a respected banker in Paris when he was framed for robbery and murder by crooked associates and sent to Devil's Island. Years later, he escapes with a friend, a scientist who was working on a method to reduce humans to a height of mere inches (all for the good of humanity, of course). Lavond however is consumed with hatred for the men who betrayed him, and takes the scientist's methods back to Paris to exact painful revenge. Written by Ken Yousten






