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 Malice@Doll roams the "empty streets for men" with the rest of the prostitute robots. A run in with a "grotesque tentacled creature" changes her into a human being. She attempts to transfer this "gift" through a "loving kiss." You can look at Artsmagic's press release here. 2000, 80 minutes, DVD
When I'm not watching movies about how the world ends because of killer plants, zombies, meteors, snowstorms, nuclear blasts, plagues, and the occasional invasion of oversized bugs, I like to stretch my horizons a bit and dip my toe into a different genre. That genre would of course be movies about what happens after the world ends. It turns out that what happens after the Big Man Upstairs is done giving us a receipt for the high old time we were having down here with all our vices (sex outside of marriage and/or not for procreative purposes, 2nd Amendment infringing laws, liberal media bias, violent video games, not supporting the troops in whatever third world country we're currently laying waste to - that sort of thing) all sorts of crazy crap happens that makes you think maybe you should've been going off to church Sunday morning instead of tailgating at Lambeau Field. This is where you get worlds where apes are running the show. Or some fascist military regime has taken over (called "the U.N." in our reality). I even remember one movie where giant rats took over. Then you had a majority of films where it seemed as if the people who took over mainly consisted of badly dubbed Italian bikers. Robots, cyborgs, terminators, androids, and replicants are also fairly well represented. The absurdly named Malice@Doll (am I supposed to read that as "Malice At Doll?") though treads all sorts of new ground.
As I studied the back of the DVD Artsmagic kindly furnished me and read the phrase "prostitute robot dolls" I slapped my head in one of those "of course! Why didn't I think of that?"moments. Then I remembered it was because I had been brought up by my six sets of foster parents and three stints in Juvie to be a better person than that. I think it's safe to say that my Straight Edge Christian lifestyle would force me to come down squarely against the idea of these "prostitute robot dolls." Why, if such a thing was allowed, do you know how many soiled women in our country would be immediately out of a job? And what about their pimps? Who speaks for them? I guess that's why they always say "pimping ain't easy." Or am I thinking of that other saying, "pimps up, hos down?" Regardless, these hookerbots are most likely in the Bible as one of the Seven Signs or something (I can't say for sure because I haven't that Demi Moore movie in years).
But I know that the vast majority of my readers aren't made of the stern, traditionally Puritan stuff that I am and are thus not so demanding when it comes to protecting the integrity of one of the world's finest professions (or do I mean oldest - I can never remember). In fact, I'd wager that fully half of you quit reading as soon as the phrase "prostitute robot dolls" came up and ran out and bought the DVD while the other half of you are only continue to read to find out if the movie is dirty enough to buy or is merely a rental. I'll save you all some time and give this one my official "barely dirty" rating. I guess there's some moments in the movie that qualified as "adult themes." At least if there's anything adult about watching a computer generated robot doll "suffering ravishment" as the back of the DVD so charitably puts it. (In the real world, we'd probably just call it rape or something.) But in the great tradition of other prostitute robot doll movies like Pinocchio, the "ravishment" leads Whorebot to become a real live woman!
Uh oh! Sounds like someone is trying to trick us into watching a movie with some sort of message about the nature of what it is to be human and to have our deepest dreams and desires be fulfilled and the unexpected prices we have to pay for that. Shoot! I just signed on to see a bunch of cyborgs bump sprockets! At the very most, I thought maybe one of them might have a heart of gold and help out our hero when he gets himself into a jam or maybe helps the new girl get out of the biz or something. Instead, it looks like a bunch of robots dealing with their feelings once attaining some form of humanity. If it sounds like we're in for one of those movies that wants to pretend that it's about something important, despite the fact that the story pivots on an unexplained scene of the star doll getting raped by some strange tentacled creature, well, all I can say is that this is one of those movies with lots of close ups on people's eyes. And we all know what that means.
The movie drops us into this post-apocalyptic world without any explanation, but really, what explanation is going to serve to explain why computer generated sexbots are the only things left on Earth? (Although, I'm sure they were built to survive quite a bit of abuse.) Sure, there are some other machines as well such as Joe Admin, the thing in charge, as well as another machine that acts as some sort of guard, though I was never too sure what it would be guarding anything from (or for that matter, why it would be bothering to guard these robot hoochies). One of the dolls is named Malice and she is among a handful of these dolls that have continued to function after the end of the world and now just spends their days walking the streets trying to hump fire hydrants and mailboxes or whatever else is still out there. 
Malice is in need of some repairs so she heads up to the part of the building or city or whatever she was inhabiting to get to the Repairer (catchy, huh?). Everything goes according to plan with the small exception that she ends up in a strange room and gets raped by a strange creature with lots of slimy appendages. Next thing we know, Malice Doll has transformed into Malice, the human woman! I wasn't too sure if this had anything to do with anything, but I feel I should note that Malice periodically sees a ghostly figure, a girl dressed all in white. Malice is as surprised as anyone to find that she has actual flesh and bone and this immediately marks her as an outcast among her former friends, but Malice hasn't just been given human form by this sexual assault. She also got a really cool super power in the bargain - her kiss can now turn other machines into humans as well. Some of her pals are a tad reticent about this, but eventually most everyone gets in on the act, though a lot of them don't turn out as well as Malice did. You see, whereas Malice ended up looking like a regular broad (well, regular in the sense that she looks like what a sexually repressed Japanese guy thinks a regular broad ought to look like), some of her friends look really monstrous, having extra body parts and strange faces and all sorts of icky deformities making you wonder if she was kissing these folks with Thalidomide breath or something.
I think that it's somewhere around this point in what we would loosely call "the story" that Malice thinks all this human transformation stuff isn't maybe all that it's cracked up to be. Somehow or other she wakes up from a dream or she gets taken prisoner by the thing that raped her or maybe both happened which means we're really getting our money's worth, huh? In any event, Malice ends up ditching her human form for a spirit form. Say what you want about Malice, but she's no dummy. She's astute enough to realize at once that being a human being quite simply sucks (no need to detail why - you all know it late at night when the lights are out and everyone thinks you're asleep, but you're sitting there wide awake petrified that life has no meaning, that everyone will discover you're a nothing fraud, and how sweet it would be to go to sleep and never wake up) and she somehow has the ability to transform again, this time to a little glowing white pixie who flies around and gives Joe Admin a final dramatic kiss. See, this movie is just like Pinocchio if that little blockhead would have ended up turning into Tinkerbell!
The best thing you can say about this movie (actually three episodes of a video feature cobbled together) is that the computer generated animation is interesting to look at. Even though the movie itself clocks in at a barely-feature-length 73 minutes or so, that's still way too long to just be staring at a bunch of pretty pictures. The story only made the vaguest sense in that I guess I could at least make out the themes they were attempting to push across (you know, all that wishing to be human and what is reality crap), but none of the details made any sense whatsoever. What was this stupid world we were dumped into? What was that stupid creature that raped Malice. Why was she transformed? And why was she transformed again? Into a fairy? Aside from all that though, why should I even care about a robot without any feelings anyway? What does it matter to me what happens to some crummy robot that doesn't even pretend to have emotions? I don't even think she longed to be human at the beginning like a lot of these types of characters do. I defy anyone to tell me how the audience is supposed to be drawn into any of the events that transpired here.
The DVD from Artsmagic once again outstrips the material it features. There's plenty of features of varying interest. Most notably is an interview with the writer and director. While that could have been informative, it's conducted by the giggly actress who provided the Japanese voice of Malice and the interview itself is shot with a single camera that floats around and induces quite a bit of sea sickness. There's also an inexplicable appearance by a waiter bringing these people coffee and he distracts us for a couple of minutes with his presence. Of more interest is a half hour videotaped lecture by anime expert Jonathan Clements who provides a history of computer generated animation in Japan. He makes some good points about the impact shrinking TV budgets had on animation as well as the influence of outsourcing animation to cheaper countries such as Korea and China has had on the industry. Most tantalizing though were the trailers included for a pair of other animated films. Both Alice and Blue Remains looked great, full of action, and seemed to even include a story you could follow (one of them seemed to be about the North Pole and the other was all about living underwater or something). They looked to be much more ambitious than Malice@Doll and thankfully devoid of Malice's obsession with puppets (those guys go on and on about puppets in the interview as a way to explain the low budget movement of their characters). Artsmagic definitely knows how to put a DVD together, now they just need a film worthy of their efforts. Hopefully, Alice or Blue Remains will be it because it certainly isn't Malice@Doll.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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