An intriguing and often over-looked slice of melodrama from the 1930s, this film remains neglected alongside its bigger 'brothers' - namely Dracula, FRANKENSTEIN, and THE INVISIBLE MAN. However that doesn't mean that it should be forgotten - it's actually a very good little film that plays more like a standard romance tale than your usual horror flick.THE DEVIL-DOLL cleverly intermingles three plot strands into one and it gels nicely. The first is the standard melodramatic tale of a father loving a daughter who hates him for what he has done. All of the cast involved in this give good performances and it works nicely. Maureen O'Sullivan (star of the Tarzan films of the '30s) is excellent as the daughter who learns to forgive and forget.There is also the routine plot about a man returning to wreak revenge on the men who are responsible for his demise, and this section of the story too is quite interesting and enlivened by some varied, inspired acting. The final section - and the best - is the horrific element of the shrinking process involved in the film. Although made over sixty years ago, the special effects of the shrunken people still hold up even to this day. The special effects are elaborate and it isn't obvious that rear-screen projection was used. They're eye-opening and that's saying something.Unfortunately there is also an over the top performance from the woman playing Malita, who seems to think that opening her eyes wide will evoke terror - however all it evokes is laughter. She may be eye-opening but for all the wrong reasons. Along with that are the standard laboratory clichés - bubbling test tubes of poison, steam, foam, lots of glass tubing and containers. Barrymore carries the film somewhat and is excellent in his role as the tormented criminal with a heart of gold. This is one of those little films that has a bit of everything and it's well worth tracking down.

Silly horror-melodrama is loads of fun, with Tod Browning ably directing a creepy story set in then-modern Paris, and Lionel Barrymore showing rather more range than usual as a wrongfully convicted criminal exacting terrible revenge on the bankers who set him up. Not at all MGM-like in its perversity and macabre-ness, it has escaped convict Barrymore stumbling upon mad scientist Henry Walthall and his even madder wife, Rafaela Ottiano, whose entertaining performance is all eye-popping and screeching and hobbling on a crutch. Both have stumbled on a way to shrink living creatures to one-sixth their size, leading to some excellently executed special effects. The details surrounding the miniaturization is sketchy--what rouses these beings or puts them to sleep, how much if any free will they possess, why they don't talk--but it serves the hoary plot of Barrymore's revenge. He's in drag about half the time, dressing up as a kindly old French madame to fool the authorities, and there's a grafted-on, dreary subplot about his unforgiving daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan, doing her usual thing efficiently) loving an ambitious cabbie (Frank Lawton). It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it wraps up neatly (even if the climax isn't credible--would O'Sullivan really not recognize her own father?), and it entertains every step of the way.

Revenge is sinister for Lionel Barrymore in one of his few horror movies as a banker imprisoned for 17 years, vowing revenge on the men who framed him. The revenge he plots doesn't involve death. That would be too easy. What he wants is for his revenge to leave them mentally sound, trapped inside a body that doesn't work. This involves tiny human beings (shrunk by Barrymore and his female Igor, played by Rafaela Ottiano) being bade to do the evil demanded of them. With "Bride of Frankenstein" hair, Ottiano plays a character that gets loonier and loonier, aware that as soon as Barrymore's revenge is completed, he'll leave her to continue her late husband's legacy alone, and that's where the fun comes in.Maureen O'Sullivan has a top-billed but tiny role as Barrymore's resentful daughter unaware that the kindly old lady who greets her inside the laundromat she works at is indeed her father. She lives with his kindly blind mother (Lucy Beaumont) who is fully aware of Barrymore's scheme and is totally silent about it. The three men are justifiably worried, and as Barrymore enacts his revenge, the result is pure terror for them. The plot copies parts of "The Unholy Three" (with a bit of "Bride of Frankenstein" thrown in-Ottiano's hair; the mini humans), but Barrymore isn't as sinister as Lon Chaney's old lady was. In fact, he's downright civilized as he explains his need for revenge as if he was having a normal conversation.There are some genuinely spooky moments which may not be a surprise considering the director-Tod Browning. While the Universal horror films may be more atmospheric, the relatively few MGM ones (particularly this, "Freaks" and "Mark of the Vampire") are glossier.

MGM's THE DEVIL-DOLL (1936) is a campy sci-fi/horror classic. Perfect for those late-night curiosity viewings. The movie is preposterous, but elevated by impressive 1930s special effects along the lines of those in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935).THE DEVIL-DOLL tells the story of a man bent on revenge who gets mixed up in the outlandish schemes of a mad scientist. Hiding from the police, the man (a prison escapee) uses the mad scientist's strange experiments in his systematic plan to destroy those men who did him wrong.It seems the scientist had developed a technique that would shrink living things to one-sixth their normal size. Once shrunken, however, the subject lay paralyzed until willed to do something by the strong mental power of an outsider. The scientist had hoped to shrink everyone in the world to make the food supply last longer, but having miniature mind-control zombies has its uses, too.Oscar-winner Lionel Barrymore stars and spends much of the film in his disguise as an old woman. (I'm being totally serious.) The wonderful Rafaela Ottiano plays the crazed wife of the scientist, devoted to his twisted vision. Ottiano seemed to know what kind of movie she was making, going all-out in her performance. Maureen O'Sullivan plays Barrymore's daughter, with Frank Lawton as her taxi driver boyfriend. Among the rest of the cast, it's good to see Robert Greig play something other than a butler.The B-level cast does a good job with the B-level material, but the most impressive part of THE DEVIL-DOLL is the special visual effects. Creating the effect of miniaturized people required composite shots with an eye on camera angles and perspective. (Mixed, it seems, with some huge-furniture sequences.) A modern eye can often find the seams, but this kind of stuff is hard to do and I believe they did it as well as anybody could in 1936.The story, with its attempted father-daughter redemption arc, is just ridiculous. Barrymore is hardly a hero in this one. Nor is he even a nice guy. There's no one to root for, really. This is the kind of movie to pop in some late night and just enjoy with a bucket of popcorn and the company of your choice. A campy horror classic for anyone curious to see Lionel Barrymore dress in drag. Not one of the high points of Barrymore's career.