KILLER UNDER THE BED: DTMWaGL #39

Hello friends! First of all, thank you so much if you supported our fundraiser for Just the Pill, we raised over $3,000 for abortion care! Incredible! However, I must tell you about a movie. Boy oh boy, I thought the last movie, where a woman we’re meant to sympathize with takes a murderous human man home as a souvenir from her job as a 911 operator, was weird. Then I watched KILLER UNDER THE BED, which is about a teen girl who finds a highly motivated voodoo doll in her shed, and also some of the hottest controversies in dentistry. Also there’s feet. (Content warnings for discussion of self-harm, institutionalization, parental death, a creepy teacher, a frequently alluded to but never dramatized fatal car crash, and an absolutely 100% unexamined “voodoo doll” manipulated entirely by white people.)

We’re introduced to the doll as it terrorizes a teen girl, who runs out of her gigantic suburban house and into a little shed, frantically searching for something while an unseen hand bangs on the shed. “Why won’t you leave me alone!” she shrieks, but to no avail, as the only thing coming to save her is the title screen.

ONE YEAR LATER: the gigantic suburban house has been purchased by a new family, consisting of original Buffy the Vampire Slayer Kristy Swanson, here named Sarah Yeager, and her two blonde teen daughters, Kilee and Chrissy. The sisters bicker about who gets the better bedroom and if it’s weird that Kilee wears their dad’s jean jacket every day. They’re doing the kind of moving in that people do on TV, where they already have art on the walls and decorative branches in big vases scattered around, and Kilee already has a box she wants to put in “the extra storage.” This house is easily 3000 square feet, and “the extra storage” is a 6x6 shed in the yard. But, as we know, no one in California has a basement. The shed no longer has the teen girl from the first scene in it, but it does have a shitload of cobwebs and also, a creepy white straitjacketed doll hanging from a noose. Because Kilee is a little alternative (she wears clunky boots and tattoo chokers), she takes the doll inside with her. Examining it in her bedroom, she finds a bunch of pins stuck in it, a necklace draped around it, and a little printed label that says “voodoo baby doll.” Well, show don’t tell, I guess. She googles (or “giggosearches”) this phrase and up pops a website with a photo of her exact doll as the background and an explanation of how to use a voodoo doll, because the movie thinks you might need this explained to you. Curiosity satisfied, Kilee closes her laptop and chucks the doll under the bed. Kilee no! That’s where the killer is!

Wasting no time, it’s Kilee and Chrissy’s first day at their new school, where Chrissy will apparently lead a powerhouse lacrosse team through a new era. Chrissy’s only personality trait is “plays lacrosse.” She kind of gets some other ones very late in the narrative. Kilee is immediately greeted by a popular girl named Tina who’s supposed to be showing her around school but instead immediately demands $100 to not tell everyone in school that Kilee has an STD. Also, when Kilee arrives at her first class, history with Mr. McCabe, a blandly handsome youngish teacher, Tina announces that Kilee totally has a crush on the teacher. Thank you, Tina. Your efforts at orientation are appreciated.

It’s not going much better for Sarah at her new job. She’s a dentist, apparently, and she’s reuniting with an old colleague, Dr. Abbot, and meeting a new one, Dr. Ryder, introduced as a “profit machine.” Dentistry is such a fucking scam, I swear to god. Dr. Ryder is a real weirdo about calling Sarah “Dr. Yeager” instead of “Sarah,” and as soon as the two of them are alone together, she also insults Sarah’s very normal dress and accuses her of trying to steal the practice from her. Sarah is bewildered by the whole thing, but honestly? That’s dentistry, baby.

After school, Tina (trailed by a friend named Barbie who does not speak but merely smiles menacingly) approaches Kilee, who’s waiting for her sister to finish lacrosse practice, and declares that she’s changed her mind. She doesn’t want money, she wants Kilee’s jacket, the one that belonged to her late father. Tina will collect the jacket tomorrow, byeeeeee!

At home, Kilee reams out Chrissy for not protecting her from Tina, and Chrissy informs her that Tina’s dad donates a lot of money to the school, and when a girl reported Tina for bullying her last year, the school took Tina’s side and kicked this other girl off the lacrosse team. So Chrissy’s hands are tied, you see. Kilee’s argument progresses from “Tina is a jerk and you are a jerk for not sticking up for me” to “it is your fault that our dad died, because he was hurrying to your lacrosse game,” and then they both cry. Another family torn apart by lacrosse, how many times have you seen this. Kilee furiously paces in her room, and then remembers she has a voodoo doll under her bed. Things are looking up! The Baby Voodoo Doll website said she needs something personal from Chrissy, so Kilee grabs a bit of an award ribbon from her room and pins it to the doll’s knee, intoning “since she won’t stick up for me, I hope this stick causes her pain.” The doll is like “sure.”

In the morning, Chrissy limps into the gigantic kitchen, asking for ibuprofen. Kilee is elated, because her lacrosse-playing sister having an knee injury is proof that voodoo works. Explain that, science. Just to make sure, Kilee returns to her bedroom and takes the pin out of its knee. Just like that, Chrissy’s knee feels better! Either she had a cramp, or a cloth effigy Kilee found in a shed has evil magic powers. But the movie’s not called CRAMP UNDER THE BED, so. Kilee tosses the doll in her backpack along with the extra pins, and heads to school. If it were me, I’d put those pins in a little pouch, it seems practical for the witchcraft-doer on the go. But she just hucks these big ol pins in her backpack.

At school, Tina corners Kilee in the bathroom. She’s come to collect Kilee’s jacket, by ripping it off her body. The arm rips, and it is at this point that I realize her friend, lurking and smirking silently in this scene as in so many others, is also the best friend from INSTAKILLER, where she had more lines. Now that the jacket is ripped, Tina doesn’t want it anymore, because what’s the point of taking someone’s most treasured possession if it’s slightly damaged? She stalks off, and Kilee grabs the tissue Tina used to blot her lipstick. “I wish the world would see Tina as she truly is: an ugly duckling,” she says, as she pins the tissue to her voodoo baby (????) doll’s mouth. Okay but the ugly duckling was a nice, if depressed, bird? The ugly duckling was the victim of bullying, not the perpetrator of it? The other ducks were the bullies? And then the duckling becomes beautiful and flies away with his swan brethren? What? Regardless of my objections (also, ducks are beautiful! have you ever SEEN a king eider? have you??), in the very next scene, Tina’s mouth swells up into a big beefsteak tomato in the middle of Mr. McCabe’s history class. “That’s a real duck face, quack quack quack,” says some guy, and everyone laughs while Tina runs out of the room. No one who participated in this movie has ever seen a duck. It’s so easy to see a duck!

Kilee has decided to speedrun the voodoo doll thing, and she has her sights set on the apparently dreamy history teacher. He’s the only teacher we ever see. This is not a good school. Kilee sneaks into Mr. McCabe’s classroom and finds a paper of hers that he graded (this is her second day in this school) so she can have a sample of his handwriting. When Mr. McCabe catches her, she flees to the dramatically lit auditorium, where she can say “I wish Mr. McCabe keeps liking me” and stab a pin into a doll’s heart in peace. She’s already putting less effort into her curses. Again, this Spencer’s Gifts product yields immediate and quantifiable results, as Mr. McCabe seeks out Kilee as she does her homework in the library and asks her what she’s doing after school. Oh, yucko! Stop gazing at your student like this, Mr. McCabe!

After school, Kilee goes to her mom’s office to get her teeth cleaned, and then Sarah picks a fight with Dr. Ryder about the amalgam she ordered for the office. They then loudly argue about current controversies in dental research and out-of pocket expenses for the patient vs. insurance coverage. “This feels like something the screenwriter has very passionate opinions about,” I say to myself, and look up the writer, only to learn that it’s the same damn guy who wrote THE STRANGER SHE BROUGHT HOME, the last movie I wrote about. This guy! Is really weird! And we’re not even going to discuss his name. As the dueling dentists are dragged into the boss’s office to continue yelling at each other about whether it’s okay to put dental implants in the mouth of a 10-year-old girl whose mother puts her in beauty pageants (it’s not!!! holy shit!!!!), Kilee realizes she has the solution to this problem. She has the solution to all problems. She has a voodoo baby doll, and she can swipe some hair off a brush Dr. Ryder left on her desk. “I wish that Dr. Ryder would realize that Mom is the greatest dentist in the world,” she declares, pinning the hair to the doll’s head. Okay. Settle down. I googled “best dentist in the world” and didn’t come up with anything though, so maybe she is. The boss dentist concedes that he and Dr. Ryder are sometimes too cavalier in their recommendations to patients, and Dr. Ryder suddenly cheerfully agrees with him. She does put profit over people sometimes! Things are gonna be different from now on! Thanks, Sarah! She glides out of the office, leaving Dr. Abbot and Sarah wondering what the fuck that was. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Sarah. Or maybe do, because you’re a dentist? But for humans, not horses. Unclear about gift-horse mouth-looking.

At home, Kilee is sewing the rip in her dad’s jacket when she gets a text. It’s Mr. McCabe! “Heyyyyy girl, what u up to?” Kilee’s teacher asks. “Wanna vidchat?” Yikesarooni, ugh, yick. Kilee declines this invitation but agrees to a lunch date tomorrow. While Kilee is being propositioned by her teacher, her sister goes in her backpack looking for a highlighter and finds the voodoo doll instead. “Oh, my,” says Chrissy, and asks Kilee what in the world is up here, is she a Wiccan now? Kilee reels off her list of accomplishments with the doll, and shows her sister the exchange with Mr. McCabe. “That’s…gross,” replies Chrissy, as though her skin is trying to crawl off her body. “You cursed him to be a creep?” “I wished for him to like me,” Kilee replies, deflated. Chrissy takes the doll outside to the garbage can, because this is all super weird and Kilee’s gotten everything she could ever want anyway. As she walks away, the garbage can rattles. Either the doll is gaining power, or there’s a possum in there.

When Kilee wakes up the next morning, the doll is in her bed and Chrissy is screaming with renewed pain in her leg. “If this is you, make it stop,” Kilee pleads with the doll, who can use his floppy little legs to trundle around now. She assures him that Chrissy is sorry she threw him in the garbage, and we get a reaction shot from the doll, like “oh okay, you got me.” Chrissy’s leg is fine! Everything is fine. The doll secretly zips itself into Kilee’s backpack before she goes to school, but basically? Everything, is, fine.

On Kilee and Chrissy’s third day at their new school, they’re greeted by Mr. McCabe, who is a turbocreep to Kilee. She unleashed his passion! It can’t be tamed! Kilee goes to the library and fake-googles “voodoo baby doll” again but the doll is too powerful and it has now wiped its existence from the internet like some kind of European. Kilee has to use a book. Disgusting. I don’t know what system this school library uses, but the book named Occult (MDS 133.4ish) is on the shelf next to one about evolution (MDS 575). As Kilee flips through Occult, Tina suddenly grabs it out of her hands. She’s here to deliver some exposition about how the girl who used to live in Kilee’s house is in a mental ward now, because she was a freak who couldn’t handle her mom dying. Y—yeah! What a freak! Kilee and Tina scuffle a little bit, and Kilee’s voodoo doll pops out of her backpack. Tina grabs the doll, and finally the librarian (an old man in a bow tie) shushes them because they are being so loud in the library! I am not one for shushing, but inside voices for your threats and backstory, please. He also snaps at Kilee to clean up this mess, which is literally just her backpack and the occult book on the floor. I’m not sure this librarian is meant for a school environment.

Oh god, we’re back at the dentist. Dr. Ryder is late today, and when she arrives she is disheveled and furious. When Sarah offers to take some of her patients, she sneers, “oh you’d love that, Miss Perfect,” and then screams at Dr. Abbot that Sarah is trying to DESTROY HER, and she’s GOTTEN TO YOU TOO. Dr. Abbot calls security (does this dentists’ office have its own security guard? are dentists cops? hm) and they drag Dr. Ryder away as she screams about how she’ll get Sarah and her girls too, spitting on her and screaming, “JUDAS! JUUUUDAAAAASSSSSS.” I cannot emphasize enough: this is a conflict about the future control of a dental practice in suburban California.

Back at school, Tina decides to ditch class and have a little unsupervised fun with her new pal, the voodoo doll. It bites her, which is new. It’s good to keep developing skills. Tina slings the doll into the passenger seat of her pink Mustang convertible, and it scoots itself into the backseat. So enterprising! Meanwhile, Kilee is in Mr. McCabe’s class. They’re having quiet study time so Mr. McCabe can poorly photoshop his and Kilee’s faces onto some stock wedding photos. Except they’re not normal stock wedding photos, they’re stock wedding photos where you can see the bride’s dirty-soled feet and it feels like a fetish thing? This movie really feels like an extremely specific custom porno, minus the porno parts. Anyway, Tina’s mostly mute friend Barbie leaves class to join Tina for some class-cutting escapades. Unfortunately, the voodoo doll has embarked on some Tina-cutting escapades: it has procured her nail file from her purse and set upon her. The doll is so little! The nail file, so small! But Tina is helpless to stop this attack. By the time Barbie shows up, Tina is covered in a lot of tiny cuts inflicted by a teensy little file wielded by a wee voodoo doll, and Barbie calls for an ambulance. So she can talk.

As Tina is loaded into an ambulance, students mutter about how she probably tried to kill herself. Kilee decides that enough is enough, she has had it with this dang ol voodoo doll, which has conveniently placed itself in her gym locker. This little dude is so busy! Kilee takes the doll and leaves school on foot, because her occult book informs her that she has to bury the doll in the woods. Before she can properly get to the woods, Mr. McCabe pulls up beside her. Why has she been ignoring him! Get in the car! Kilee does not want to get in the car, no thank you, and she makes a break for it through the classic Lifetime movie terrain of “scrubby California woods, lots of sand, not enough loam, really easy to fall down in.” Mr. McCabe catches up to her and tells her that he’s always loved her, and you know what? He’s just a boy, standing in front of etc etc etc you know how it goes. Kilee correctly responds that no, he’s a teacher, chasing a student through the woods, and also, here’s the voodoo doll I used to make you like me. She tells her teacher that she’s going to take his pin out and bury the doll, and he does not take it well. Kilee knees him in the junk (good girl), and while he’s moaning about the pain in his delicate and poorly designed genitals, she digs a hole for the doll. Because she was raised right, she takes the time to thank it for all it’s done for her, but also asks it to release everyone from their spells, or whatever. Even Tina, who sucks. She manages to walk home without Mr. McCabe tracking her, which is nice.

That night, Chrissy asks her dirty and tired sister what the hell is going on, and Kilee fills her in on the recent activities of the voodoo doll. Chrissy scoffs that actually, Tina is just fucked up, Mr. McCabe is a creep, and their mom’s coworker had a psychotic break. Everyone has had a rough few days! It’s not the doll! Pretty skeptical for someone who threw a doll in a garbage can, only to have it reappear inside the house and then stab a girl, but this is the constitution you need to have to succeed at lacrosse.

Meanwhile, in the woods, the doll punches its little doll way out of the grave. Every Lifetime movie should be like this.

Day…four? at her new school, Kilee runs into Mr. McCabe in the library. He seems fine! She cautiously asks him if he remembers what happened yesterday and he’s like, “oh yeah, the Tina thing, crazy, huh?” Kilee allows herself to feel okay about things for about three seconds, until her history (??) teacher grabs her by the wrist and hisses that she can’t bury her feelings for him. Kilee screams at him to get away from her, and as always, yelling in the library gets results. She runs away and finds her sister, but when Kilee confesses to using the doll on Chrissy’s leg, Chrissy decides that she won’t help her actually. You put one curse on your sister and she won’t do you a favor? Okay. I see how it is. Kilee calls her mom at work to tell her Dr. Ryder is going to hurt her, and Sarah is skeptical right up until the moment she sees the receptionist unconscious and tied up. The next moment doesn’t go great for her either: the next moment, Dr. Ryder tases her.

Kilee has given up on receiving an education from this hell school and has returned to the woods, where she finds the doll’s grave empty. Oh, Kilee, I wish you could have seen it climb out of its little hole! It was so good! She decides the next logical step is to go visit the girl who lived in her house before her.

While Kilee figures that out, her mom wakes up zip tied to a dental chair. Dr. Ryder reflects that her dad always said she’d be a better eye doctor than a dentist (classic father daughter chat) and starts to lower the dental drill toward Sarah’s eyeball. Ahh! Ahhhhh!!! Luckily for Sarah and for me, the receptionist wakes up just before the drill touches down, and Dr. Ryder has to go check on her. Sarah manages to free herself, and clocks Dr. Ryder in the face when she returns. Dr. Ryder holds Sarah against the wall by her throat screaming about how she’s going to BURY HER IN THE DIRT AND MAKE HER DAUGHTERS BEG FOR MERCY, good lord, but Sarah manages to dig her thumbs into her work rival’s eyeballs and grab the taser. It’s just a dentist office! No need to make anyone beg for mercy! Take a minute and breathe!

Kilee has no trouble getting herself to the hospital to see Mandy, which, sure. Kilee introduces herself to her traumatized counterpart and tells her she found the doll. Mandy, who has a cool white streak in her hair, says some stuff about the devil. Okay. That’s not what we’re doing here, Mandy, can you focus? Mandy advises Kilee that she has to hang the doll with its six pins, which will put it to sleep but not kill it. Good enough! As Kilee leaves, we see that Tina is in the same room, huddled in her hoodie and shaking. She’s received all the medical attention she needs and has been fully transferred to long-term inpatient psychiatric care, since yesterday. Time moves fast inside KILLER UNDER THE BED, you gotta keep up.

When Kilee arrives home, the house is empty but she’s not alone: the doll has followed her, of course. She grabs the doll noose (you know, the doll noose) out of the shed and takes it inside, hunting for the pins, while a tiny lil guy scrabbles around the dark house in a very Trilogy of Terror way. As Kilee steels herself to look under the bed for the doll, she hears a noise, and wait hang on a second, what is the title of this movie? KILLER UNDER THE BED? The doll was under the bed for three seconds of screen time. This is HE’S OUT TO GET YOU all over again. Sorry, yes, the noise is from Mr. McCabe, who is here now, and who has lit a fire in the fireplace. He grabs Kilee but she hits him in the face with a door to knock him out. Mr. McCabe is very fragile. Much more fragile than the actual doll in this movie, who spends a moment giving big “heyyyyy” energy standing in the living room before taking a flying leap at Kilee. She locks herself in a closet, she’s fine.

Chrissy and Sarah walk into their home of five (?) days to find Kilee terrified and her history teacher lying on the floor. “Is he dead?” asks Chrissy. Chrissy. No. He just took a door to the face. And anyway, “the doll is literally alive!” yells Kilee. Sarah tells her daughter to stop believing such ridiculous things, until she looks just slightly to her right and sees the doll standing there making little teensy threatening gestures. 90% of the plot of most Lifetime movies would be obliterated if people would look slightly to their periphery, and if there were no black hoodies. And 90% of the plot of this movie would be obliterated if Kilee’s next move worked: she grabs her sister’s lacrosse stick and whacks the doll into the fire. “That was easy,” she says. It was!

But somehow, please do not ask me how, the doll controls Chrissy now. “You made it mad,” Chrissy says as she picks up a poker from the fireplace. “You made us mad,” she adds, as the doll drags itself out of the fire. Kilee and Sarah run upstairs into Kilee’s bedroom, followed by Chrissy, who is crawling, because it’s creepier than running. She bangs on the door, yelling about how they can’t just THROW HER IN THE FIRE, after everything WE DID FOR YOU, and Sarah and Kilee are like, “yes, sure, everything, really good, thanks,” and let her in the room so they can lock her in a little closet. Chrissy bangs on this door too. This girl cannot get enough of screaming and banging on doors! That and lacrosse. Mother and non-possessed daughter run back to the living room to recapture the doll and its pins, but Mr. McCabe just cannot let them have this, he’s such a diva, yelling about “oh you think you can kill me? STRONGER MEN THAN YOU HAVE TRIED.” Sarah kicks him in the face and yells, “LEAVE IT TO THE STRONGER WOMEN THEN, ASSHOLE.” It’s a pretty good line, but the line reading falls a little heavily on “stronger” and “asshole” when she should have hit “women.” You can really picture the director asking Kristy Swanson to scream this line over and over and her never quite getting it right. Still, she kicked that guy in the face. You can’t take that away from her.

With Mr. McCabe subdued, Sarah and Kilee creep around the dark house looking for the doll and its pins while the doll scurries around and Chrissy works on breaking through the closet door. As Kilee finds the fifth pin, Chrissy attacks her and then the doll jumps on Sarah’s head. She fights it off and then whacks it with the lacrosse stick and wraps the rope around it. It’s really fortunate that Chrissy played lacrosse; not all sports give you weapons like that. Kilee finally finds the last pin and stabs it into the doll, and Chrissy lies still for just a moment while the tied-up (not horny) doll keeps flailing. Finally Kilee remembers the “something personal” aspect of stopping the doll, and she rips the nametag off her dad’s jacket and pins it to the doll. “I wish for you to leave me and my family alone forever,” she says. The doll goes, “hrrrrr” and lies still. Sarah tosses the doll over the rafters to hang it up, and I guess the threat is over! Not with a bang but a “hrrrrr.” Chrissy is fine. Mr. McCabe wakes up and asks where he is, how did he get here, and also what is that thing dangling from the rafters? Ha ha, oh, Mr. McCabe, it’s been a long day. Sarah takes her daughters out of this house, with the fire still going and Mr. McCabe still just….there? He can find his own way home, I guess? Maybe they’re trying to burn the house down with him inside, to tie up all the loose ends? Well, here’s one last loose end: Tina breaks into the house after everyone leaves, and she takes the doll down. “Hello, old friend,” she says to the voodoo baby doll, and the movie ends. That’s it, that’s all the loose ends, that’s the movie, we all learned nothing about voodoo and a lot about dentistry, see you next time!