Im going to keep this review short and sweet really; there are 10 good minutes in this film. take away the 8 minutes of titles and credits and your left essentially, with an hour of the drabbest padding i’ve seen in a long LONG time.

The plots straightforward, we open with the death of an old lady who owns a mansion, in her dying arms she clutches a clown doll. Her nearest relative is contacted who is a business man, and him and his pregnant wife Annie move into the house with aspirations to make it a new start for their family. Unfortunately, Annie finds the clown doll, and it turns out, its a murderous clown doll…who muders her!

Luckily they manage to save the baby, and the kid grows a tremendous fondness for the clown doll who becomes his new best friend. Meanwhile, the father, still mourning the loss of his wife, winds up dating his secretary, things begin to warm up pretty fast, when she TOO finds out about the killer doll, and a VERY brief cat and mouse game begins in which the new mrs tries to get rid of the doll, while the doll tries to stealthily kill her. All this leads to a very dissapointing finale that isnt anything you havent seen before.

Its been compared to the ‘Childs Play’ films and was essentially heavily inspired by the franchise. But theres just…NOTHING here.

The script is literally 60 minutes of people wandering around or idley chatting about their lives, with 10 minutes of, admittedly quite surreally enjoyable slow murder sequences happen. the pacing is glacial, the cast are SUPER overdramatic, but not in a fun way…Hell, the killer doll doesnt even start killing till just shy of the halfway point in the movie. A note to future killer doll film makers, if your going to promote your film as having a killer doll in it, DO NOT spend more than a quarter of your movie doing the whole ‘BUT IS HE A KILLER DOLL THO?!?!’ schtick…we all know it IS a killer doll, and if it ISNT a killer doll, we’re all going to be very dissapointed.

Character writing is slim to non, just one note archtypes floating around for the full runtime, the dialogues pretty rough. The tone is inconsistent and lacks any kind of refinement, the act structurings lumpy. this is a rough ROUGH script with not a lot going for it.

Same goes for the direction, barring a couple of the kill sequences, theres just nothing here, directing by numbers 101 for 99% of the runtime, with only the more surreal flickers found within the broader scenes being anything of interest. Same for the cine, its all ultra basic, nothing particularly notable, and the edit. Which, if anything is actually kind of poor.

In honesty? you could watch the last 15 minutes of this film, and get pretty much everything good about this film in one fell swoop. there are a handful of other weird/entertaining bits scattered in the other 63 minutes, but honestly? It’s not worth your time. One i’ll keep on file for my reference. But one im VERY likely to watch again unless its for channel fodder.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/diabolical-inheritance/