There’s a new low-budget horror film in theaters right now that’s main mission is to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of 70s horror classics like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That statement has been more or less constantly true since at least as far back as when Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses hit theaters two decades ago; there’s always a new horror film in theaters that aims to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as surely as the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Even so, the new film Dolly is grimier than most, torturing its audience with the squirmiest discomforts any Texas Chainsaw knockoff has delivered in a long while. Our Leatherface figure in this instance is the titular Dolly, a childlike behemoth who wears a porcelain babydoll mask and collects victims to play house with her in the woods of Tennessee. Like 1973’s The Baby, it toddles across the fine line between shock-value horror and age-regression fetish content, having its towering killer spank, bottle-feed, burp, and diaper her victims in-between her gory kills. It has its contemporaries in that particular mode of discomfort (most notably Zach Cregger’s Barbarian and the straight-to-Tubi stunner Match), but it decides to frame its fucked up found-family horror story within an older grindhouse tradition by shooting on 16mm film, instantly adding a layer of grime on top of its forced-dollification imagery. That choice elevates Dolly‘s sense of mise-en-scène, especially in sequences set outdoors in a woodland babydoll art-instillation piece reminiscent of Georgia’s Doll’s Head Trail. It’s also a somewhat safe, expected choice, though, since it excuses some of its budgetary shortcomings by hiding them behind a faux-vintage appeal instead of fully embracing the modernity of the ABDL horror story it tells.

Dolly‘s distribution rights were purchased by the online streaming service Shudder, so its accompanying theatrical release has been relatively small. In New Orleans, that means it is exclusively playing at the AMC multiplexes of the suburbs, since those venues tend to have more screens to fill than the smaller, choosier independent theaters in the city proper. Specifically, I saw Dolly at the AMC Palace 20 in Elmwood, which regularly offers the city’s widest selection of new-release titles . . . in the shittiest presentation imaginable. Outside its two “premium” (i.e., price-gouging) Dolby & IMAX screens, the other 18 theaters at the Elmwood Palace have been allowed to steadily decline into disrepair. The projector bulbs are all well past end-of-life, so that every movie is blurred behind a dark, purplish bruise hue that your eyes never fully adjust to. The bathroom floors are eternally gummy with piss, and every time you touch a handle with your bare hands it feels like you’re risking a life-threatening skin infection. I’m used to all of this, and I occasionally put up with it because of the unmatched breadth of the venue’s marquee offerings, ranging from woodland slasher throwbacks to niche-interest anime to Indian action epics to the latest Dinesh D’Souza doc about how Hilary Clinton is the antichrist; they have everything. My trip out there to see Dolly hit a new all-time low, though, in pure technical terms. Not only was the projection as darkly bruised as ever, but now the sound was equally muddled. Either the mixing in my theater was way out of balance or multiple sound channels were fully switched off, so that all dialogue was clearly legible but the accompanying music and foley effects were so muffled it sounded as if they were playing in another room. That’s a big deal for a horror film, since the genre relies heavily on music for tension and loud sound-effect stingers for jump scares. It’s a credit to the novelty of Dolly‘s costume & production design that I found anything to enjoy about the experience, since the theater stripped away everything else it had to offer.

Oddly enough, that abysmal theatrical presentation was historically authentic to the retro grindhouse experience modern horrors like Dolly aim to evoke. Grindhouses were a quantity-over-quality business, running exploitation films with shortened runtimes at a breakneck pace with little regard to the building collapsing around the projector. Anyone who’s ever waxed nostalgic about catching some vintage slasher or porno relic at a grindhouse cinema on 42nd Street always includes some anecdote about how the film was interrupted by rats crawling across their feet, or a public blowjob, or a projectionist who nodded off mid-film and had to be woken up to change the reels. The only thing that’s changed is that these used to be decidedly urban experiences, often adjacent to strip clubs & brothels in the center of a morally & physically decaying city. Now, that geographic dynamic has flipped. I get grindhouse-quality projections out in the decaying AMC Palaces of the suburbs, who could not give less of a shit about what they’re screening or how it looks & sounds, as long as they can grind through as many titles as possible. Meanwhile, the urban cinemas of New Orleans proper have been putting much more thoughtful care into their programming & presentation. The same week I saw Dolly in theaters I also attended a repertory screening of Sam Raimi’s 1987 splatstick classic Evil Dead II at The Broad, programmed by ScreamFest NOLA. In some ways, the original Evil Dead movies are the exact kind of high-style, low-budget woodland horrors Dolly attempts to emulate, with the major exception that Sam Raimi moves his camera like no other horror schlockteur before or since. In Evil Dead II, he escalates the cartoonish violence of his calling-card indie debut to a bigger, slicker production scale—beating Hollywood studios to the punch in effectively remaking his own film—but it’s still the kind of low-brow screen filler that used to be left to the drive-ins and grindhouses of old and is now lovingly presented in crisp, clean quality in urban cultural epicenters like The Broad, restored & reclaimed.

Even New Orleans’s dive bars are putting more thought & effort into their movie screenings than the AMCs of the suburbs, even though they’re not technically in the theatrical exhibition business. Siberia is primarily a music venue but has recently experimented with screening vintage genre classics with live music accompaniment. Typically, this means projecting the nu-metal relic Queen of the Damned behind unrelated live performances from local metal bands, but last week it meant presenting Mamoru Oshii’s surreal anime classic Angel’s Egg with an all-new, feature-length live score. Angel’s Egg is already the kind of inscrutable arthouse experience that offers gorgeous, evocative images that its audience can’t fully make sense of but continuously pulls emotional reactions out of us anyway. Rewatching it with live accompaniment from spooky, droning synths helped physicalize that emotional response, vibrating the audience’s bodies with crushing waves of sound while confusing our minds with haunting, post-apocalyptic imagery. The projection itself admittedly did not look especially great, to the point where half the audience were craning their necks at painful angles to read the more legible subtitles off the TV hanging over the bar (despite that dialogue doing very little to clear up what’s actually happening on screen). The sound was phenomenal, though, with a lot of care paid to matching each action onscreen to appropriate musical cues. Those communal screenings of Angel’s Egg and Evil Dead II felt extremely passionate & personal for the people who programmed them. In contrast, the AMC theaters just outside the city offer outright hostile moviegoing experiences, punishing their audiences with headache-inducing ad packages and the shittiest projection quality ever suffered by the human eye. When the AMC Palaces opened here in the 1990s, they put local independent cinemas out of business by crushing them under corporate-sponsored grandeur. They’re now a callous quantity-over-quantity business, the new American grindhouse. I can’t say I’m exactly grateful to have seen Dolly in that modern grindhouse context, but it was at least textually appropriate.

-Brandon Ledet