Valley of the Lame Doll

What's love got to do with it? Nerdy technical writer Kenneth (Desmond Harrington) buys Nikki, a hyper-realistic $10,000 sex doll, purely out of lust. But Kenneth's impulsive -- and potentially bankrupting -- purchase arrives at the same time he's developing a crush on a flesh-and-blood co-worker, Lisa (Melissa Sagemiller). In fact, Kenneth's growing fondness for Lisa, who returns his interest, makes his purchase of Nikki seem ill-timed at best. But then plausibility is not among the strengths of writer-director Robert Parigi's low-budget movie, which is full of distractingly unpersuasive details.

In fact, "Love Object" is the sort of clumsy undertaking that trips up everyone and everything in it. Even veteran actors Rip Torn (who plays Kenneth's self-serving boss) and Udo Kier (as Kenneth's creepy playboy neighbor) look like amateurs in this context. Sagemiller, whose assignment is merely to appear pretty and nice, emerges largely unscathed (unlike her character).

But Harrington fails utterly to make Kenneth and his obsessions compelling. That's not really the actor's fault. For Kenneth to make the transitions that Parigi's thin, unconvincing script requires, Harrington would have to supply the bulk of the characterization himself. That's no small responsibility, especially considering that he plays many of his scenes either alone or in the company of a mute plastic doll. Only a master of atmosphere could overcome the silliness of the plot, an Internet-age update of the '50s sci-fi staple in which it turns out that simulations of people are just not human, darn it.

When Kenneth starts taking calls from Nikki, viewers are more likely to think of Bob Newhart's telephone routines than such chilling Hitchcockian crack-ups as Anthony Perkins's in "Psycho." And the nasty final twist, which might have proved amusing in a better-made film, here proves about as satisfying as, well, an affair with a mannequin.

LOVE OBJECT (Unrated, 91 minutes) --Contains sex, violence, sexualized captivity and off-camera dismemberment. At Visions Bar Noir.