Horror Review: Robert (2015)

It’s time for more bad horror on Netflix. Today, it’s Robert (2015), an evil doll movie directed by Andrew Jones (yes, the same one who directed The Last House on Cemetery Lane, which I also reviewed). I know I said I wasn’t going to watch more of his movies because it would be a waste of my time, but since this one featured a doll and dolls are always scary, I thought it might be good. I was wrong. To be fair, it’s quite possible that Robert was really intended as a comedy. Either way, it’s bad. Warning: SPOILERS.

The movie begins with a tormented couple in a dark, candle-lit spooky room (because what better place to be when you believe your house is haunted) telling their scary-looking housekeeper, Agatha, about the weird stuff that’s been happening in their house. Agatha reveals that it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s the doll. The camera then slowly pans to SUCH AN OBVIOUSLY EVIL CURSED CREEPY-LOOKING DOLL THAT ANYONE WOULD WANT TO BURN IT ON SIGHT (and which for some reason, is in the same room, sitting in a chair), which then slowly turns its head confirming what anyone would know just by looking at its CLEARLY DEMONIC FACE.

Six years later, the now increasingly forgetful Agatha is working for another couple, the Ottos – mentally fragile artist Jen and lawyer Paul, who have a young son, Gene. When Jen fires her because she can’t do her job anymore, Agatha gives Gene the doll, Robert, as revenge. For some reason, the boy keeps that HORRIBLE THING in his room, even as it begins to cause him trouble when Jen blames him for things Robert did. Paul doesn’t like that his son is still playing with dolls and Jen jokes that he’s worried Gene might become a sissy. This makes no sense for several reasons, the obvious one being that the only thing that could result from playing with Robert is Gene becoming SATAN’S MINION. Seriously, look at that thing!

Robert starts small, making a mess in the kitchen and ruining one of Jen’s paintings, and suddenly graduates to (hilariously shot) murder when the Ottos’ new housekeeper meanly remarks on his unconventional appearance. What follows is predictably stupid. The housekeeper knows she’s alone in the house and suddenly a KILLER DOLL which she had previously seen sitting in her employers’ son’s room shows up behind her, and she just puts it back? WTF?! Even if she doesn’t believe in the supernatural, shouldn’t she be worried that there was an intruder? Of course, after she closes the door, it slowly creaks open again. And of course, she just stands there, waiting for Robert to… er… pat her on the back? Which somehow sends her flying down the stairs. By the way, when she lands, there’s not even a small wound on her forehead or on her hand. When Jen finds her, there’s some blood on both her face and on her hand. Later, Jen describes having found her in a pool of blood. (Hmm, Jones knows this is all happening in the same movie, just a few minutes apart, right?) The housekeeper tells Jen it was the doll, but Paul starts to think both his wife and their son are suffering from an unspecified psychiatric condition that used to make Jen hear voices.

Now that Robert has tasted blood, he’s not going to stop. After attacking the housekeeper, he kills Gene’s babysitter. A killing we see in a choppily edited flashback after Jen and Paul return home and find the door open and the girl gone. So, let me get this straight: Jen calls the girl’s house and is told by the police that she was attacked and stabbed to death; Paul notices the sofa has been cut with a sharp object; and they both saw the front door open as if someone had left in a hurry. Yet, not only do neither of these morons think that someone might have broken into the house, but it also doesn’t occur to either of them that that murderous someone might have come back and is inside their house RIGHT NOW! And why is the killing shown like that? We already know Robert is EVIL, we’ve known that from the start, FFS.

Even though Gene warns her that it’ll make Robert angry, Jen takes the doll away and locks it in the shed. With all the sharp gardening tools. That seems… unwise. Why is she even doing that? If Jen is starting to believe the doll is possessed or something, why not just BURN THE DAMNED THING LIKE ANY SANE PERSON WOULD’VE DONE AFTER TAKING ONE LOOK AT IT?

By the time Jen decides to go ask Agatha about the doll ANYONE WOULD KNOW IS EVIL JUST BY LOOKING AT IT, she’s dead. Thankfully, Agatha’s randomly American neighbour lets Jen into her house, where she finds information on her previous employers, aka the couple from the beginning of the movie. Jen goes to talk to them, and we finally get Robert’s backstory, delivered in the least scary way possible. Oh, did I forget to mention the acting is bad? Well, it is. So, Robert the doll used to belong to Robert the boy, who was murdered by his own father and then found in the river, holding the doll. The boy’s cousin kept it and named it after him. Agatha used to work for that family, which was how she got it. And she was also into black magic and performed a ritual to give more power to Robert’s spirit, who hates adults because of how he died. Wait, what? Agatha was a witch and she still had to work as a housekeeper? Seriously? And if she gave Robert to the Ottos for revenge, what did this other couple do to her? Did Agatha just go around with her MURDER DOLL, tormenting unsuspecting families? Anyway, that’s all the explanation we get. Jen is shocked to learn dolls can be haunted (though you wouldn’t be able to tell it from the acting) because she’s apparently never heard of Chucky or any of the several other movies with killer dolls. It’s in this scene that someone finally says the obvious: ROBERT MUST BE DESTROYED. I can’t believe it took this long. Jen is also told that evil is contagious.

While Jen is finding out what’s wrong with Robert, Paul is at home with their increasingly weird son, who in lieu of Good Night, tells him Goodbye. (Hey, remember how the other tormented wife told Jen that evil is contagious? Yeah, you should definitely keep that in mind) Of course Robert is no longer in the shed and he’s back in the house, armed with a… baseball bat? Really? Of all the deadly instruments he could’ve picked, he chose a baseball bat? He uses it to tap Paul on the back of the head, which knocks him unconscious. Jen comes back to find her husband lying on the floor (which is shot in a weird way that leaves Paul off-frame), and their son locked in his room. When she sees Robert slowly walking towards her holding the bat, weepy Jen backs up against the wall and slowly slides to the floor. So that she and the EVIL KILLER DOLL ABOUT TO MURDER HER can be at eye level? This reminded me of that Astronomy Club (also on Netflix) sketch about the guy being hailed as a hero for killing Chucky. Just KICK THAT DEMONIC THING, FFS! Or pull the bat out of its EVIL TINY HANDS! Thankfully for Jen, her not dead husband has some mad knife throwing skills and Robert is stopped. Wait, that’s it? All it took to kill the MAGICAL HAUNTED EVIL DOLL was a knife to the chest? Also, was neither of Gene’s parents worried about his freakish behaviour? It’s clear he was willing to follow his new friend Robert’s instructions and just wait in his room while they were murdered. That's not normal!

It's a few months later and all is well in the Otto household… but not really, or the movie would’ve already ended. Paul is upstairs in the bathroom, while Jen is downstairs in the kitchen. We see someone sneaking up on Paul, just as Jen notices a knife is missing. Okay, what follows is just weird. It looks like Jen has bloody hands and she seems surprised at her reflection in the mirror. The obvious answer was that Gene had gone evil, but when I saw that scene, I wondered if Jen was going to turn out to be possessed and had unknowingly killed her family. Nope, it’s Gene, who appears at the top of the stairs, holding a bloody knife and wearing Robert’s buttoned up shirt. Where the hell did he even get that? Well, we’ll never know, because this is when the movie ends.

Like The Last House on Cemetery Lane, Robert is mercifully short. In addition to the bad acting, we get a few weird shots, and some failed attempts at serious drama with a handful of scenes of clichéd arguments between Jen and Paul. The soundtrack overdoes the sinister chords and somehow manages to make the always naturally creepy nursery music decidedly uncreepy. Robert is the first in a five-movie series (yes, really) consisting of one sequel and three prequels that, judging from their synopses, fuck up the continuity established in this movie.

Now, in the beginning, we’re told this is based in a true story, so I did some research (yes, reviewing this ridiculous movie required research). I watched the Lore episode Unboxed on Amazon Prime that focused on haunted dolls, including the real Robert the doll, which nowadays is kept in a museum in Florida. The real story is that a lonely boy was sent a not particularly cute sailor doll (though still substantially less horrifying than the movie version) from Germany by his aunt. He became too attached to it, blamed it for destroying his other toys, and claimed that it was more powerful than his parents thought. The father locked the doll in a box in the attic, but the next day, the aunt, who had come to visit, was found dead of a stroke and Robert was out of the box. The boy was sent away and the father died, leaving the mother alone with the doll, who was back in the attic. However, the mother became convinced that it was running around the house, waiting for its friend to return.

The son did return, with a wife, and the newlyweds moved into the family home after the mother died. Robert was a constant presence, the now adult son went back to treating him like a real person, and his wife became convinced the doll was evil. One night, she tried to burn it, but the next day, Robert was back, unharmed. The neighbours reported often seeing Robert looking out the attic window. After the son died, the house, with evil doll included, was sold to another family, who apparently also had some problems with Robert and gave it to the museum. I don't know where the account of the burning (which is the only event I'd consider impossible to explain in a rational way) came from or how accurate it is. Apart from that, the haunting seemed to have been mainly caused by people believing in it rather than some outside force. The power of suggestion is a scary thing. According to Wikipedia, with time, Robert’s legend grew, exaggerating the strange events, and another version replaced the aunt with a disgruntled former employee out to get revenge on her former bosses.

Robert, the movie, is clearly a mix of the original story and the later version with the vengeful employee to which Jones added the standard possessed by a vengeful spirit backstory. He also kept the names Robert, Gene, and Otto. After watching Unboxed, I wonder if he also took some inspiration from the Isla de las Muñecas and the dead girl found in the river still holding her doll. It seems like too much of a coincidence how much it matches Robert’s death. The original podcast episode was released after the movie, but that story must be well known. Frankly, I found the island creepier than Robert the doll (and the Reborn dolls mentioned in Unboxed are even creepier).

What makes me wonder if this was supposed to be a comedy and no one got it, is the fact that Jones made the doll so hideous as opposed to just vaguely unsettling like the real thing. But even if you see it as a comedy, this is still a bad movie. Thumbs down, Netflix. Again.

By Danforth