Here at Senseless Cinema we have been a bit remiss in highlighting modern classics, so it is obviously time to review Believe Me or Not (2024), a new film about high school students dealing with the important issues of our day (i.e., a murderous haunted doll).
Because the film is so recent, I have found no mistaken negative reviews of Believe Me or Not. Therefore, please read the following appreciation of this classic film before your views are biased by unreliable "critics"...
The film begins with beautiful drone shots of a lake by a forest before introducing a while-haired old woman rocking a doll in her arms and crying. Moments later, a group of high school students looking for plant specimens walk down a trail toward the old woman. Most of the students want to party in the forest, while a few of them want to get the assignment done. When they see the old woman, however, they stare at her with curiosity and contempt. Tori, a particularly aggressive girl, asks the woman what is in her bag.
"Nothing you children should be concerned with," the woman replies. "Just a bunch of old things, that's all."
Tori grabs a bag and takes it from the woman. She pulls out a small can of lighter fluid. "Whoa!" Tori says, perhaps jumping to conclusions. "Were you planning on starting a forest fire?"
"That's not cool," says Labron, one of the two boys on the trip.
"Whoa," says Liz, somewhat oddly. "We just saved the day."
The old woman protests, "I wasn't gonna start no fire."
Then Tori pulls the woman's doll out of her bag. The woman grabs at Tori's arm and Labron tells Tori to give the doll back, but Tori is recalcitrant. "Well, since I just saved us from burning in a forest fire, I get to keep it." Tori walks away with the doll.
The kids return to the nearby parking lot, leaving the woman by the lake. Kimmy, a studious young woman, says she needs to get home and asks someone to drive her.
"Well, you'll be walking then because we're having too much fun," Tori says. (The fun involves a few bottles of beer and sitting in the dirt next to the parking lot.) Tori then, in order to kick up the fun, laughingly tells Kayleigh to kiss the doll. Kayleigh does so, but her mouth begins to bleed and she falls to the ground, apparently dead.
A boy named Cody attempts to take charge, "Look, this looks weird. We all need to be on the same page, all right?"
Liz replies awkwardly, "What does that supposed to mean?"
Cody continues, trying to make sure everyone's story is straight so they're not blamed for killing their friend. "We went down that path and when we came back and we found her here. Got it?"
Kimmy protests. "We've gotta call someone." Unfortunately, nobody has cell phone service.
Perhaps unwisely, the kids wrap Kayleigh's body in a blanket, presumably to dispose of it. (Perhaps some of these young people have experience with accidentally or otherwise dealing with dead bodies.)
Unfortunately for the students, the old woman finds a composition notebook left behind in the confusion. She reads Kimmy's address: "Kim Peters, 1409 8th Street."
At night, Kimmy is dropped off at her house, where her friends Brock and Iris (who were not on the fateful trip to the forest) are waiting for her. Kimmy sends her friends away, and she also throws a package into the garbage. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the package wraps the old woman's doll. Even more unfortunately for everyone involved, Kimmy's little sister Julie immediately finds the doll and takes it out of the garbage. Moments later, she is having a party with her stuffed animals, and she discovers from writing on the doll that its name is Lynn.
Kimmy discovers that Julie has taken the doll, but when she tries to grab the doll her arm is suddenly bleeding.
"Ooh, why are you bleeding?" asks Julie.
Perhaps unwisely, Kimmy leaves the room, telling her sister to get rid of the doll. Once Kimmy is gone, Julie looks at the doll. A demonic voice says, "Kill her."
"What did you say?" Julie asks the doll.
The doll repeats, quite clearly, "Kill her."
Meanwhile, the old woman returns to her nice suburban house, where her son, a large man, works on some dolls at the kitchen table. "Where's Lynn?" he asks her.
"I don't know," the old woman replies. "She must be where you put her last. Maybe she's down in the basement."
"They told me you wanted her gone. Is that true, Mama? Would you take Lynn away from me?"
She explains that the teenagers at the lake took Lynn. Her son, who is fantastically named Hawk, is furious. She shows him Kimmy's notebook with her address.
The next morning, at Kimmy's house, after much discussion about what each family member will be doing, Kimmy and her mother leave Julie alone at home. Julie, perhaps predictably, has not disposed of the doll, so she goes to her room to play with her. Immediately, its demonic voice says, "You don't obey. You will be punished."
Meanwhile, outside, Hawk attempts to break into Kimmy's house with a screwdriver. He is interrupted by a man doing gardening work nearby. "Excuse me, do you know the family?" the helpful gardener asks.
"What business is that of yours?" the dollmaker asks.
"You tried to break open the door," the gardener says, not unreasonably.
"Oh no, it's the opposite. I was just delivering something and wanted to make sure I locked up securely."
Of course, the gardener is convinced of the man's sincerity. "Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to...uh...I thought you were trying to break open the door."
"I totally understand. You're doing your job. Well, not exactly, since you're not the cops, but no problem. Just delivering a lovely doll to the little girl here."
"Oh, no kidding. I have a baby girl myself."
"My mother actually makes the most beautiful, real life looking dolls and the girl here just happened to want one."
"Oh, do you have a card?"
"Actually, I'm not that fancy yet, but I do have a few samples in my car parked down the street if you want to take a look."
The gardener follows Hawk to his car. The gardener reaches into the trunk, but the dollmaker murders him with the screwdriver!
Meanwhile, inside the house, the doll disturbingly asks Julie to open the window and jump out from the second story (surely a fatal jump). Julie complies, and the filmmakers expertly cut before she jumps to Kimmy and her classmates discussing the death of their friend and trying to figure out what happened.
Tori says, awkwardly, "It's got something to do with that old woman. I know she did."
Angry, Kimmy storms out of the house. Her mother picks her up and they return home, only to find that Julie has indeed jumped out of the window, though the fall has proved not to be fatal -- instead, the doctors tell them Julie is in a coma with a broken leg.
Meanwhile, Hawk, who works as a car mechanic, kills his boss when he is fired from his job by stabbing something cylindrical into the boss's neck.
Hawk returns home and confronts his mother (and also, helpfully, explains more backstory). "You want me to say what's on my mind? You do?"
His mother replies, "I do, Son."
"So now it's 'Son'? Not honey, not baby, but son? I'm no more your son than you are a loving mother!"
"I was the best mother you could have ever had. I picked you up out of that filthy sewer and I fed you and I raised you as my own. And what thanks do you ever give me?"
"From one sewer to another." Hawk grimaces. "Yeah, you provided all one child could ever need. You took me from my family!"
"You had no family! Nothing! Your father and I raised you as our own. We fed you and we kept you alive."
After some more heated discussion, Hawk provides more helpful (if awkwardly expressed) information. "You had Lynn, which you loved, because she was yours. Your little girl. Who was I, Mom?"
"I loved you too, but you were so jealous of your sister."
"She wasn't my sister! And you ain't my mother!"
He picks up two sharp knives and tells his mother that she's next. "You get Lynn back, or you pay the price."
Elsewhere, Kimmy phones her friend Brock, who was not at the lake for the first dollar attack, and asks him to find the bag with the doll in it and dispose of it. He walks away from her house with the bag and attempts to burn it in a garbage can, but before he can do anything the doll psychically slashes his throat. He dies while thrashing around for a minute or two among the garbage bins, a true tour de force of acting.
At night, the various students involved in the fateful lake trip (except Kimmy) sit in a living room drinking from red Solo cups. One of them says about the deceased Kayleigh, "I kind of liked her. She was in my Spanish class." He adds somewhat awkwardly, "I heard she was killed with a stab wound. And she was with you guys, so..."
Liz gets angry. "What is that supposed to mean? Nothing stabbed her, and no one either."
"Cool, cool."
"No one knows anything. Freak accident!"
Elsewhere, in what might be considered an unusual hospital room, Kimmy and her mother watch over Julie in her coma. Fortunately, she simply lies in a bed with bandages on her head; she is not connected to any monitoring equipment, so her coma must not be too severe.
Kimmy steps outside of the room to get some coffee and recognizes the woman cleaning the corridor as the old woman with the doll. "It's you!"
"Don't be scared," the old woman says.
However, Kimmy is scared. "Somehow this is all your fault," she says, then takes out her phone to call the police. Inexplicably, she doesn't make the call, instead listening to the old woman.
"Your friend, she took the doll," the woman explains. "The doll is evil. I've got to get her back. I've got to get her back. He wants her back. Otherwise, he's gonna kill me." She writes something on a Post-It note and gives it to Kimmy.
The next day, Kimmy gets ready to go to school, having not acted on the information the old woman gave her. One of the other teens, Cody, calls her and asks her to meet up with him after school; in fact, he wants the entire group of people involved in the lakeside incident to get together with Kimmy for unknown reasons. When Kimmy attempts to leave for school, she gets into a dramatic confrontation with her mother. "I'm going to school. I'm getting too far behind and after school I'm meeting up with this guy," Kimmy explains.
"Kimmy, I don't understand. There's been no change with Julie whatsoever. And now, what? You're going to school and a date?" She adds, "Do you really feel this is the appropriate time for going out?"
"We're just meeting up, Mom. And tell me, when is the appropriate time? Like you said, there's been no change."
"Okay, so that means you should go out on a date, and what? Laugh it up, have a good time, don't have a care in the world? What is going on with you?" Kimmy's mother gets angry. "You know, ever since this happened, I haven't seen you shed one single tear. It's like you feel nothing."
"I feel...nothing? Exactly how do you know that? Just because I don't go around crying doesn't mean I don't feel anything! What do you want me to do? Curl up in a ball and shut the world out?"
After school, at a restaurant, Kimmy asks Cody why he wanted to talk to her. After some small talk, Kimmy admits she still has the doll and she spoke with the old woman, so Kimmy goes back to one of the teens' houses to speak with the larger group of guilty teens, all of whom seem to be together all the time. They excitedly decide to return the doll to the old woman tonight, though Liz, for unknown reasons, does not want to go with them.
Kimmy ends up in Cody's car, and they argue about whether Kimmy is going to say something to the police. After much heated argument, they decide (again) to get the doll and return it to the old woman. Kimmy goes to her house and retrieves the doll, telling it, "You're going home, bitch!" However, uncharacteristically, the doll says nothing.
After a (frankly confusing) driving scene in which Cody talks to Kimmy and takes a phone call (all while Kimmy is clearly not in the car), Cody and Kimmy arrive at the old lady's house with the other teens.
"Well," Liz says of the house, "it doesn't look bad to me."
The teens barge into the house but the old woman wants them to leave. Meanwhile, Hawk is admiring his doll making work, which involves various jars full of human scalps and blood and hair, as I assume is typical of doll manufacturing.
Cody and Labron sneak into the basement of the house, for unknown reasons, and Labron is killed by Hawk in the dark. Then all the other teens ignore the old woman and find an entrance to the basement. They quickly find Labron's body and, sensibly, decide they need to leave the house. However, the basement is quite dark, so they have trouble finding an exit. In fact, they separate themselves, and Liz stumbles off into the dark by herself, where Hawk stabs her, laughing.
Elsewhere in the massive basement, the others find Cody, who tells them, "You wouldn't believe what's down there." (He is referring, of course, to the bloody jars he and Labron saw earlier.)
The scene switches to the kitchen of the old woman's house, where a detective, through narrative means too complex to include here, has learned the location of the house and believes Kimmy to be inside (though he tells another detective on the phone, rather dismissively in front of the woman, "There's nobody here but an old woman").
Elsewhere, in the basement, Hawk captures Kimmy and ties her to a chair. When she interrupts him, Hawk rambles revealingly, "What happened to manners? One thing my father taught me was manners. He wasn't really my father. I just had to call him Father. 'Hello, Father. How was your day, Father?' My father loved my sister Lynn. You see, she was his actual daughter. Everyone loved Lynn. Every day he would buy her things, especially dolls. She loved dolls, and he loved buying them for her. His special little girl. Lynn, Lynn, Lynn. So pretty, so perfect." He rambles some more, then says, "When I killed George, my father, it was like I didn't have to hear 'Daddy, where's my dolls?' Didn't have to hear him lifting her up in the air and say, rejoicing with his beautiful daughter. When he died, I felt more alive."
"I'm sorry," Kimmy says. "I can't believe a father would make his son feel so lonely."
"He wasn't my father. I took his body to the lake and watched him sink and said bye-bye. No more hearing her, Lynn, cry for dolls. Poor baby. She was like, 'Oh, I want this doll.' I didn't have to hear that anymore. I didn't have to put up with those." After some more rambling, he adds, "You know what? I think Lynn needs a friend. And I think we can name her Kimmy!"
Hawk raises a screwdriver to kill Kimmy, but the detective appears suddenly and shoots Hawk.
In the film's chilling coda, Kimmy sits in the front of the detective's car with the detective. He tells her, "Hey, I noticed you grabbed the bag with the doll in it. It's really breaking the rules, but I figure after what you've been through, why not? What the hell."
"Thank you," Kimmy says. "Her name's Lynn. She's my friend."
The End
Is it too early to declare Believe Me or Not a modern classic? Perhaps. But the film has many of the ingredients of the greatest masterpieces of the horror genre: undifferentiated high school students, a killer who kills people, a lake, a haunted doll. It also features the ambiguity that genre devotees love, asking questions while providing only a handful of answers. For example, is Lynn the doll inhabited by the spirit of Lynn, Hawk's sister? Why is the doll so murderous? For that matter, why is Hawk so murderous? What happened to Tori, Liz, and some of the other non-murdered teens? And was the nameless old woman really trying to start a forest fire?
Despite the razor's edge the film walks in terms of ambiguity, Believe Me or Not is a fine example of the classic type of film that is sometimes, perhaps disparagingly, called an "idiot plot." For those unfamiliar with the term, films with an "idiot plot" are those films where the characters could save themselves a lot of trouble if they behaved sensibly instead of foolishly. As an illustration, Kimmy in Believe Me or Not could have given the doll back to the old woman and her murderous son at any point in the narrative, and this action would presumably have ended the various murders of Kimmy's acquaintances. But viewers who complain about "idiot plots" rarely consider this criticism thoroughly. If Kimmy had returned the doll, the audience would not have seen several murders or heard the doll yell demonically at Julie and Kimmy. Would such a film have served as entertainment? I doubt it. The next time anyone complains about an "idiot plot," Believe Me or Not should serve as the perfect counterexample of a film in which the characters, had they behaved "sensibly," would have provided little to no entertainment for the audience. Think about that, please. Think of the audience.
I have said my piece. Go watch Believe Me or Not. You will thank me.