I think I'm going to make my posts more incoherent! I got 7 really entertaining replies overnight. It's actually copied and pasted from my website
http://www.cinemainsomnia.com...where it is a bit easier to read...But here it is double spaced. Of course now it easier to read it won't get any reaction at all...
Things You Never Knew About Devil Doll (1964)
by Mr. Lobo
* There are many differences between the European cut and the American cut of the film:
1. The original has a starring credit for Bryant Haliday as "The Great Vorelli," but the American credits Tab Hunter above Bryant Halliday... which is strange because he is not in the film.
2. The production company credit was orginally "Anglo-Amalgamated" - and on the American print it's listed as "Crackers Gone Wild".
3. A scene where Haliday and Sandra Dorne leave her dressing room and go into a side room to have sex was cut from the American print. Instead, we are treated to six minutes of kittens playing with a ball of yarn.
4. In the European version there is a scene on stage where Haliday hypnotizes a woman from the audience into performing a striptease which ends with her topless. In the American version a raccoon in the corner at the nightclub gets his head caught in a cookie jar and fumbles around under patrons' legs.
5. Also in the European version, Dorne turns in her sleep to reveal a breast - but in the American version she sits up in a baby-doll nightgown and makes sure her Bible and gun are under her pillow.
6. As Hugo creeps into the bedroom to stab Dorne in the European print, we again see her exposed breast... but the murder is off camera. In the American version the dummy rips off Dorne's head and dances in a fountain of her blood - but luckily the breast is covered.
7. Sylvester calls his pudgy middle-aged colleage at a Berlin hotel, who is accompanied in bed by a young girl playing with her hair. In the American print she is wearing a bra and a see-through negligee... while in European print HE is wearing a bra and a see-through negligee.
8. The Original title for the Europen release of the film was Devil Dog, but a lawsuit brought by the Little Debbie manufacturers - who had a popular snack cake with that name - forced them to change the name for American audiences.
* The British Version cut the sequence featuring the forbidden dance... The Twist.
* Devil Doll was in fact based on a short story written by Shari Lewis.
* The Great Vorelli (Bryant Haliday) mastered the art of transferring souls into inanimate objects. Unfortuately he was unable to accomplish this for the film's cast.
* Vorelli runs into rich, beautiful Marianne Horn (Yvonne Romain) and seeks to hypnotize her into believing she is in a good movie.
* William Sylvester plays the reporter (and boyfriend) of Romain who's writing a travel piece about smoking and talking across Europe.
* It was a longstanding rule that all foreign made films that were to be imported to the US were required to have an American journalist character that does absolutely nothing to advance the story.
* This was the first live action English Horror Film shot in "Supermarionation."
* Ventriloquist dummies used in the film were displayed at the premiere screening - but they got up and left 15 minutes into the film.
* William Sylvester employs an acting style called "the amnesia technique" that allows him to go from Gorgo to Devil Doll to 2001: A Space Odyssey and not be remembered from one film to the next.
* The Horseshoe Crab has eyes in its tail.
* Unfortunately the horror of Devil Doll has been overshadowed by the classic "Ventriloquist's Dummy" episode of Family Matters (1989) in which they made a dummy of Urkel. (shudder)
* The false beard in this film allowed actor Bryant Haliday to be cast two years later as the globe-trotting single father on Johnny Quest.
* Devil Doll's story of an evil ventriloquist controlling the mind of a dummy has inspired many other films, TV shows, and presidential administrations.
* Oddly enough, "Tickle Me Hugo" was the suprise must-have Christmas gift of 1964.
* Before Yvonne Romain falls under the hypnotist's spell, she claims she doesn't know how to dance - and under trance she proves it by doing The Twist!
* Devil Doll was filmed in England, which is the reason the Beatles came to America.
* Yvonne Romaine's character went through many name changes in earlier drafts of the script, such as Yvonne Iceberg, Yvonne Web's Wonder, and Yvonne Butter-Lettuce.
* Bryant Halliday, who was the Devil Doll's dominator Vorelli, later became co-founder of Janus Films, 'home owner' of The Criterion Collection - which made millions of dummies by Laserdiscs.
* This film has many tight shots showing the actors in close-up so that it would play for television... just as stale and boring as it did for the cinema.
* Because of budget limitations, all of the puppets in Devil Doll were made from Bisquick.
* Director David Lynch saw this movie and found it odd.
* It took six of Europe's finest sausage packers to get Vorelli's blonde assistant into her showgirl leotard.
* The Great Vorelli hypnotises a man form the audience into believing he is held hostage with a loaded gun to his head. He begs, prays, sweats, weeps and eventually cries out as he is forced to imagine a finger pulling the trigger and to anticipate the bullet crashing through his skull. Subsequently, the nightclub stocked spare pairs of underwear for patrons who participate in the stage shows.
* It's hard for us to imagine how a creepy ventriloquist who has the demeaning and dark act performs in front of sold-out crowds in Britain... since humiliating dummies and audience members would not become as popular in America until 30 years later, when The Jerry Springer Show premiered.
* Devil Doll is really slow and tedious and has no sense of direction, and it's really slow and has no sense of - Wait, I already said that. Uh, hold on. Did I say it was slow?
* To make Hugo the dummy truly horrifying, special effects wizards modeled his face on the unholy spawn of Larry Storch and Ernest Borgnine.
* To punish Hugo, now trapped in a doll's body, the evil Vorelli denys him ham, Christmas presants and shiksas.
* Most famously associated with the final segment of Dead Of Night, killer dummies have also popped up in films as diverse as Magic, Dollman vs. the Demonic Toys, Rambo, Red Heat, Cold as Ice, and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.
* Devil Doll won the coveted Oscar for most absurd eyebrows in a motion picture.
* To save money on false eyelashes, fat fuzzy caterpillars dipped in tar were used.
* A production grant was given to the film Devil Doll by the Milkfed German Prostitute Preservation Board.
* Vorelli's delivery in Devil Doll is so monotone that portions of his dialogue are allowed to be played as an alternative to the Emergency Broadcast System test signal.
* You could fill the crankcase of a Volkswagen ten times with the amount of oil produced from Vorelli's face in this film.
* In Seattle, it's now illegal to air Devil Doll - the result of an incident in 1997 when it allegedly pushed 11,000 more of their depressed and rain-weary citizens to commit suicide.
* Director Tod Browning' was so angry at the confusion between his film The Devil-Doll (1945) and Devil Doll that he shrunk the entire cast and crew into tiny slaves to do his bidding.
* This movie was followed by the sequels Devil Dolls Are Go!, The Devil Dolls take Manhattan! and Beyond the Valley of the Devil Dolls.
