If Psycho, Mannequin, and your weird uncle’s VHS collection had an unholy baby and left it in a rain-soaked cardboard box behind a funeral home, Miss Leslie’s Dolls would crawl out of it wearing a prosthetic face, holding a pendulum, and whispering, “I’m a woman now.”
This movie isn’t just bad—it’s the cinematic equivalent of finding a doll’s head in your soup.
🧠 Plot: Taxidermy, Trans Possession, and Teacher-Student Trauma
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a deranged individual named Leslie Lamont, a person with an ambiguous gender identity who collects corpses like Beanie Babies and wants to transfer her soul into a young coed’s body using pendulum hypnosis and light dinner drugs. Naturally.
When a quartet of rain-drenched intellectuals (and I use that word generously) take refuge in her home, things go downhill faster than a hearse in a snowstorm. There’s a corpse altar, a mid-dinner séance, drugged wine, a lesbian love scene that’s somehow both exploitative and deeply bored, and enough red herrings to start a seafood market.
By the time Leslie’s rubber mask peels off and reveals a scarred man with the spiritual persistence of a haunted lava lamp, you’re either too confused or too numb to care.
👥 Characters: You’ll Be Screaming for Them to Die Faster
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Leslie Lamont: Think Norman Bates after taking a correspondence course in necromancy. A character study in mental illness filtered through every problematic ‘70s horror trope imaginable.
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Alma Frost: The world’s worst professor. Repressed, drugged, predatory, and somehow the final girl?
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Lily, Martha, and Roy: The students are a mix of sex-starved paper dolls with less self-preservation than a horror movie squirrel. Roy in particular deserves his cage for the crime of just existing.
Honestly, if your movie’s most emotionally relatable character is a corpse, you’re in trouble.
🕯️ Production Values: Bargain Bin Gothic with a Budget of “Shrug”
The set looks like they filmed in the back of a taxidermist’s garage during off-hours, and the lighting feels like it was done by candlelight and spite. The sound mix makes it difficult to tell if people are talking, whispering, or gargling embalming fluid.
There’s a moment where the mannequins in the basement appear to come to life, and it’s somehow the least scary thing in the entire movie. These aren’t dolls of terror—they’re auditioning for a department store Halloween clearance bin.
🎭 Acting: The Dolls Might Actually Be Better
Salvador Ugarte’s performance as Leslie is… committed, in the sense that someone should’ve been committed for greenlighting this. He delivers his lines like he’s reading a ransom note to a corpse he’s in love with. The supporting cast seem either confused about the script or actively avoiding making eye contact with it.
The sexual tension between Alma and her student Lily is so awkward, it makes The Room look like Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Every character’s choices feel like the result of a bet to see who could get themselves killed the fastest.
🪦 Legacy: Resurrected from the Trash Bin of History
After years of blissful obscurity, Miss Leslie’s Dolls was unearthed and given a 2018 Blu-ray release—because apparently someone out there felt the world needed this back. That person is probably on a watchlist.
It is truly remarkable that a movie so disturbing, so deeply weird, and so dull, could also be so forgettable. It’s not scary. It’s not sexy. It’s just a 90-minute meditation on poor decisions and synthetic wigs.
💀 Final Verdict: One Doll Short of a Horror Show
★☆☆☆☆ — One star for ambition, and for the courage it takes to end your film with a haunted man disintegrating in a graveyard while trying to spirit-swipe a woman’s body, and then using that body to seduce a dude locked in a cage.
If Miss Leslie’s Dolls were an actual doll, it would be missing an eye, smell like formaldehyde, and whisper incoherently in the night about soul transference and sandwich platters.
You’ve been warned.
