Cursed dolls and hip-hop cartoons
When did the silly season become so stupid and last so long? Halloween, once a day, or night, set aside for kids, costumes and candy, has become a monthlong entertainment industry slog, a time for jamming supernatural balderdash into every aspect of programming and even journalism. My local daily newspaper recently ran a story wondering if a local courthouse was “haunted.” And it’s still September!
Not content to wait until even the first of October, Discovery+ streams the documentary — no, make it a “Shock Doc” — called “The Curse of Robert the Doll.”
Blending interview footage with historical reenactments, “Curse” recalls a Victorian boy given a doll by a servant. Before long, the toy appeared to gain power over the young lad. It was so powerful that the boy gave the stuffed creature his own name, Robert, and assumed a new one, Eugene, much to the chagrin of his confused mother. Needless to say, things don’t end well.
Robert the Doll is now encased, or perhaps entombed, in a class container in the basement of a Florida museum. Visitors are advised, or rather warned, that Robert has rules. You have to say hello to him and bid him goodbye. And don’t dare take his picture without his permission! A woman who visited Robert to take pictures of his “aura” broke Robert’s rules of order and has lived to rue the day.
She’s just one of the mediums and spectral specialists to arrive and discuss Robert the Doll with cultlike fear and trembling. All of them say the name “Robert the Doll” with the same catatonic affect, and they utter it so often and so humorlessly that the film takes on the air of an extended comic spoof.
If this were done as a five-minute sketch it might be hilarious, and as a 90-minute horror movie, it has possibilities. The scariest thing about “Robert the Doll” is that people lap it up as a Discovery “documentary.” Help yourself.
› Prime Video streams all six episodes of the U.K. series “Jungle,” featuring first-person stories narrated and performed by British rappers. The emphasis is on self-discovery — and self-importance.
› Hulu streams all 10 episodes of the third season of “Ramy,” starring Ramy Youssef, an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning comedy exploring the world of a Muslim-American through the prism of pop culture.
› Conceived by Kid Cudi, the animated melodrama “Entergalactic,” streaming on Netflix, follows the intertwined lives of two artists in New York’s art and party scenes.
Cudi has released an album by the same name that can be heard during this cartoon soap opera.
› Bohemians and artists (Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March) form a platonic menage in the loose 1933 adaptation of Noel Coward’s stage comedy “Design for Living” (8 p.m., TCM, TV-G). Look for Edward Everett Horton, one of the great second bananas of the 1930s, in a supporting role.