Directed by Scott Chambers
There have been some glimmers of hope in Public Domain Week, so I took a chance on a movie that, frankly, gave me some warning signs. I had no clue how you could adapt the story of humpty Dumpty into a horror movie in any way, but I had heard some rumblings on the internet that this movie was better than it appeared, so it’s now time for Humpty Dumpty!
It’s a rough time for the heroes of The Curse of Humpty Dumpty. Wendy has been diagnosed with early onset dementia and she’s a danger to herself, while her dutiful daughter Liz and her bitch daughter Hazel are torn in how to take care of Wendy during this stressful time. After the trio returns to the old family estate (because moving people with dementia away from the place they’ve been living for years always goes well), they’re soon roped into a real estate dispute involving Wendy’s sister-in-law, and Wendy’s estranged husband who vanished years earlier. Oh, and there’s also a doll that may or may not be magic and may or may not be evil. It’s pretty unclear.
Time to talk about the elephant in the room, dementia. Dementia, and other memory based cognitive decline conditions, is inherently soul crushing. Seeing a loved one go through the struggles of this condition is one of the hardest things many of us have had to do, myself included, and there have been some great movies made that feature cognitive decline, such as The Father (which is so intense that I consider it a horror movie) and The Taking of Deborah Logan. These movies illustrate how difficult it can be to respectfully handle a topic like this without feeling manipulative, which is exactly how The Curse of Humpty Dumpty feels. Manipulative. And yes, I know all art is manipulating you to feel certain emotions, so let me get into exactly what I mean.
The Curse of Humpty Dumpty doesn’t have characters, it doesn’t have a story, it doesn’t have any way of explaining the plot happening in it. What it does have is dementia. Every single character relationship, plot point, explanation, all of it boils down to ‘dementia explains this’, in a way that it feels like none of these characters existed prior to the dementia diagnosis and the entire plot hinges on dementia to handle huge gaps in the narrative without addressing them. It’s the equivalent of someone walking into your living room and saying, “Stop thinking about how this movie makes no sense. Just be sad because dementia.”
The introduction of the Humpty Dumpty doll is an important plot point, I assume for the sequels as well, which this movie inexplicably has, but once the story wraps up, you start to realize that the plot points never connect into a coherent narrative. I guess you can just use evil doll magic to explain everything but that feels like such a lazy copout considering the heavy handed themes we’re dealing with here. I can’t be too surprised that there isn’t much resolution though because 90% of the sequences are “Mom can’t remember something. A person shows up to confirm this or take advantage of her. This all takes place in the same house.” The killer doll looks creepy, but we only see it attack someone twice, which is not nearly enough for a feature of this style.
There’s nothing really wrong with having cognitive decline be a focal point of the movie, but there is something wrong with having a plot that exists only as gaps. Things happened before the movie and those things matter but we don’t know any of those things and there isn’t any way to figure them out or any substantial foreshadowing to show you what they could be. You’re told there’s a story, you’re told that these characters have relationships, you’re told about all this stuff but you don’t see any of it. It’s “show don’t tell,” not the other way around! This movie is so obsessed with telling that when the characters go to an antiques store, they can’t show you any actual antiques (or even antique adjacent items), there’s just a paper sign on the door facing the audience telling us that it is an antique store.
The Curse of Humpty Dumpty isn’t the worst movie of Spooktober so far but I think it annoyed me the most. These characters are extremely flat, the plot is convoluted and the twists make the movie less interesting than the mystery, and even though the Humpty Dumpty doll looks kind of neat in action, you only see it kill two people, which is disappointing. What’s really shocking for me is that this is the first movie in a trilogy of Humpty Dumpty horror movies, and if this one pissed me off so much, then I shudder to think what the sequels would do to me.
