Believe Me or Not (2024) – Film Review

Believe Me or Not is a low-budget indie horror film produced by Dr Ollie Enterprises. It’s about a group of high school students who steal a doll from an old woman they encounter beside a lake, resulting in deadly repercussions.

Dolls can be creepy. When done well, films featuring them can be very good. Unfortunately, Believe Me or Not is not one of the better efforts. There’s a lot wrong with this film. So much so that many viewers may find it hard to stick with it to the end, and those who do may regret their decision to invest 90 minutes of their lives in a film that has few, if any, redeeming features.

The quality of the camerawork during the opening credits, hints of bad things to come. Instead of keeping things dead center, the camera keeps drifting a little to one side or the other. The speed of the footage varies as well. It’s not as bad as that of many shaky-cam films, but is still hard to ignore and somewhat distracting.

The old lady with the doll is introduced in the first scene, followed by the group of students who are walking through the woods that surround the lake.

Linda Leonard plays the old lady, whose odd behavior attracts the student’s attention. Marching towards her, they demand to know what’s in her bag. One of them snatches the bag from the old woman’s hands and begins doing an inventory of the contents. Finding matches and lighter fluid, she believes the woman was going to start a fire. Then, when she fishes out the doll, she decides to keep it as a reward for preventing the woods from going up in flames.

The quality of the acting in this and later scenes is very poor. Everything seems forced and unnatural, and the way the students acquire the doll is not believable. Sure, this kind of thing could happen, but the actors fail to instill any credibility into the scene, which comes across as an overly contrived way to get the doll into the group’s possession, and, predictably, it’s not long before one of them dies. After leaning over to kiss the doll, she bleeds to death from a wound to her throat. Then, instead of calling the emergency services, most of the group decides to stick to the same story—they plant to say the came back and found their friend dead.

Kimi (Allison Pringle) is the only exception and her friends are soon worrying she will throw a spanner into the works by telling the truth. However, the truth is they don’t understand what happened to their friend, and, strangely, none of them initially suspect the doll. Nor does it cross anyone’s mind that the old lady may have been planning on burning the doll instead of starting a forest fire, and probably had good reason to do so.

Most of the subsequent action centers around Kimi, who gains possession of the doll and is the first realize it’s not a normal plaything. Unfortunately, getting rid of it is no easy task.

As the film progresses, there are more doll-related incidents, Kimi’s sister ends up in a coma, and, thanks to a chance meeting at the hospital, she manages to track down the original owner of the doll, who is desperate to get it back because, if she doesn’t, she fears her son, Hawk (Arnov Joshi), will kill her. Earlier scenes showing him murdering people in broad daylight, in public places, suggest this is certainly possible—the guy is a couple of tokens short of a pop-up toaster. However, as with so much in the film, these scenes are impossible to take serioulsy because any killer as reckless as this one would be picked up by the police faster than you can say “one slice, or two.”

One of the worst things about Believe Me or Not is the overall lack of character development. With the exception of Kimi, all the students are throw-away characters that are more part of the backdrop than anything else, making it hard to care if something bad happens to them. The film devotes a little time to trying to help viewers understand want’s going on inside Hawk’s head, and provides a little backstory, but a combination of bad script and poor acting lets things down, and references to his sister only throw extra confusion into the mix—does he believe the doll is his sister, or did he have a real sister he named the doll after? If so, what happened to her? There are a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions.

It’s hard to say what type of viewer may find this film appealing. It’s not bloody enough to interest those who enjoy watching slasher films, but nor is it creepy enough to work for those who prefer paranormal thrillers, and the lack of a decent storyline and likable characters to root for makes Believe Me or Not pretty abysmal viewing. On the plus side, the final scene kind of works, but—God forbid!—also leaves an opening for a sequel.

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