Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers is your basic evil spirit movie. There’s a creepy goth girl doll named (appropriately considering) Lilith that seems to have a significance in the possessive takeover of a child (who befriends it once introduced). Anyone that seems to come in contact with the child (in this case, a restaurant waitress who calls the doll ugly, the girlfriend of the divorcee father, the real estate agent who sold the house to the occupants, the obtrusive, talkative cat lady, a garbage man who happened to be unfortunately driving the truck carrying the doll after mommy threw it away, etc.) is disposed of. Jaime Pressly is the mother of such a child, with a real estate agent who wasn’t forthright in telling her of the history of a house that had the “worry doll” (she has a friend who teaches about Latin American studies) which is behind all the violence and horror that occurs. A family was massacred thanks to the evil of the doll, and that history could very well repeat itself with Pressly and her daughter (and perhaps the divorcee dad, played by Patrick Muldoon). The film shows the little girl, Claire (Kylie Rogers), becoming increasingly hostile and cruel, her innocence evaporating as the evil of the doll progressively takes hold until her mother and father seem unable to possibly save her from its influence. There’s quite a bit of The Bad Seed in this film with echoes of The Zuni Doll story in Dan Curtis’ Trilogy of Terror. Although we don’t see the doll itself commit violent acts, this shadowy figure (kind of a black human silhouette) can be seen in brief glimpses. There’s the wicked smile and facial expression that harbors the evil of the doll. Soon the doll and the girl will “meld” and become one and no destruction of the doll can save her (instead destroying the doll kills the girl). When help for the girl (a psychiatrist who realizes that the abusive mom story told to him by Claire is bogus; the professor and friend of Pressly, who might know how to stop the doll) is removed by the evil presence, and the parents are left to fend for themselves, the daughter might not have salvation from it. A little bit of the demon possession genre also is here as we later see that what the evil is looks like a mist of black smoke with a monstrous face.

Damn the eyes! The silly conclusion has the solution of the disturbance being the doll’s eyes. We even see Claire’s neck twist around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. You’d think the ending says that even though it appears the evil is vanquished, maybe a residue of it remains. The boy possessed by the evil that slaughtered his parents escaped from the asylum (how? I guess he pulled the “tied sheets out the window” escape.) and is seen with this minimalist sinister smile, and Claire hummingly whispers the tune that followed the initial possession as her parents take her back to city to be a family again. These kinds of open-ended conclusions leave me wanting. They detonate the purpose of how evil is vanquished and/or defeated, but horror is known for this. I think there’s this tugging, urging voice that calls for directors/screenplay writers that infiltrates them, whispering, “Include a twist at the end….include a twist at the end…include a twist at the end….” Sometimes they actually work, but so often they fall flat. I think this film falls somewhere in between. Pressly is a marvel comic actress and very good at sexpot roles, but this kind of film just wastes her talent. Muldoon is your garden variety concerned-daddy lead with a career that has included B-movie hero roles. He comes from the soap opera background and syfy uses his type of actor all the time. They fulfill the requirements asked of them. This kind of film doesn’t exactly request extraordinary efforts from the cast…and why would they?