British producer Richard Gordon found great success with his brother Alex producing, importing, and 
distributing European fare based out of their U.S. office, ranging from Boris Karloff spook shows like The Haunted Strangler to Norman J. Warren's Inseminoid. Several Gordon films have become part of the Criterion Collection over the years, and especially since the DVD era, virtually everything they handled has had a healthy home video release in various formats. Two of his British horror films with then-new director Lindsay Shonteff collected in a 2025 Blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome, Devil Doll and Curse of the Voodoo, were DVD staples in the '00s for a while but fell out of availability for a long time. Here they've been revived with startling 4K scans from the 35mm camera negatives via Vinegar Syndrome on Blu-ray, looking substantially better than ever before with new extras offering more context to appreciate these very different programmers exploiting people's fears of creepy ventriloquist dummies and sinister magic curses. 
performer's past that points to great danger for everyone involved. 
rhythms and heavily reliance on close-ups for the entire running time. Despite the title, the film reveals early on that the dummy itself isn't the source of evil but rather Vorelli himself, with Haliday giving a weird, woozy performance complete with a facial hair appliance that just makes him seem even stranger. Though mostly dismissed as a routine programmer at the time, the film built up steady word of mouth over the years once it hit VHS from Gorgon Video including an enthusiastic appraisal from Chas Balun back in the day. On the downside, the film's reputation took an undeserved hit in 1997 when it was aired as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, adding it to the roster of solid genre films whose IMDb ratings plummeted after getting ribbed on the show. A rehabilitation came along though with the DVD from Image Entertainment in 2002 as part of a string of releases with Richard Gordon. During the process of prepping the disc, he uncovered the Continental version of the film primarily intended for French release featuring some extended and alternate topless shots. Both were included on the DVD, with the standard U.K. cut also getting an audio commentary with Gordon and Tom Weaver covering the entire process of mounting the film from its origins as a short story through Furie's involvement to the recruiting of the green Shonteff. The Vinegar Syndrome edition is quite the improvement across the board with better sound quality and significant tweaks in image quality including more detail, a great deal of extra image info mainly at the bottom, and the correct proportions compared to the earlier transfer which was visibly squished. The main viewing option is the Continental version here, actually running a bit longer, presented with the Gordon-Weaver commentary (which is filled with movie audio during the extra bits) and a new commentary by Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw who have fun pointing out the finer points of the city locations including the main theater, the background of the script development from a rather different short story, and the impact of Gordon as a horror fan on the genre as a producer as well as ties to the director and cast. Also included are the alternate clothed scenes (2m39s) and the featurette "Casting a Spell" (25m24s) with Jonathan Rigby covering the film's more eccentric and fascinating 
points including its loose portrayal of London geography and the background involving Gordon, Furie, and 
Shonteff which remains a bit nebulous even to this day.
strongest attributes is the chance to the see the striking singer-actress Beryl Cunningham (who later turned up in lots of fun Italian exploitation 
films including Dorian Gray and The Black Decameron) doing a couple of frenzied dance numbers that should have been expanded into a full-fledged character role. Weirdly, this was one of the earliest titles released by Elite Entertainment when the label shifted to DVD in the format's infancy in 1999; the transfer was no great shakes even at the time, but it got repackaged into a couple of their combo packs without generating a lot of fan chatter. DEVIL DOLL: Vinegar Syndrome (Blu-ray)
DEVIL DOLL: Image Entertainment (DVD)
