Like so many cheesy horror films, Miss Leslie's Dolls opens with a group of youngsters - Roy, Martha and Lily (Charles Pitts, Kitty Lewis and Marcelle Bichette) - and their uptight teacher, Miss Frost (Terri Juston), experiencing car trouble during a storm and, after setting off on foot, chancing upon an old farmhouse where the owner, Miss Leslie (Salvador Ugarte), invites them to stay until the bad weather subsides. Unperturbed by the fact that their host is clearly a man in a dress (lip-synching badly to a woman's voice), and that 'she' obviously has a few screws loose, the guests remain for the night. The discovery of a strange room housing an altar with several scarily realistic life-size figures (so realistic that they sway gently from side to side) doesn't seem to concern them. Not even the blatantly obvious dead body under a sheet has them running scared. Basically, they deserve everything that happens to them for being so dumb.
During the night, Roy and Martha hook up to have sex, and their teacher shows that she's Frost by name but not by nature by seducing Lily (and who can blame her? Bichette is a babe!). Lily then hops into bed with Martha and Roy, who decides that he would rather have a whisky than a threesome. Meanwhile, Miss Leslie provides some awkward but much-needed exposition by talking to the skull of her dead mother in the basement: turns out that the crazy woman killed her mother and sister by causing a fire in their toy factory, and now intends to use an occult ritual to reincarnate herself in the nubile body of young Martha, who is the exact double of her dead sister.
When Roy arrives in the kitchen for his drink (that had better be a damn fine whisky!), he is attacked by Miss Leslie, who chokes him to death with the handle of an axe. Lily comes a cropper when she investigates, receiving an axe blow to the face. Somehow, Martha also dies (I can't remember how). Miss Frost wakes from a trippy dream to find everyone missing and searches the house, finding Lily's bloody body (we get to see the girl's messy axe wound - the one in her face!). Miss Leslie attacks Miss Frost, and in the struggle the teacher discovers what we all knew from the outset: that Miss Leslie is a man (like the 5 'o'clock shadow and burly frame weren't a dead giveaway). Miss Leslie decides that, with Martha dead, she'll have to possess Miss Frost instead...
Up until the final act, I wasn't very impressed with Miss Leslie's Dolls, the odd spot of nudity failing to compensate for a rather plodding pace and the clumsy dialogue. It also wasn't anywhere near as bizarre or original as I had been led to believe (the film's trans-killer clearly inspired by Psycho). However, the ending is a doozy. I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's worth hanging in there.
4/10, plus an extra point for the stunning Marcelle Bichette, and for Miss Frost's final act of vengeance.
