"Miss Leslie's Dolls" follows a young female professor and three of her students who seek shelter at the home of a reclusive, strange woman named Leslie during a torrential storm. Unfortunately, Leslie is an outspoken occultist who collects female corpses with the hopes of transferring her soul into them--and her four guests are in grave danger.
This highly-obscure quasi-slasher flick is one of the weirder offerings of the early 1970s, and has remained largely buried (I believe it was for a time thought to be a lost film). For fans of garish horror, "Miss Leslie's Dolls" certainly delivers; it feels like a low-rent take on a Mario Bava film, chock full of awkwardly dubbed, rambling explanatory dialogue from the gender-bending protagonist/antihero, extended single shot takes, and stilted performances.
While there are many amateurish streaks here, the film does have its pluses: It is at times colorful and nightmarish, and there are a handful of truly creepy sequences involving Leslie's "dolls," which again recall the bright, floral color tones of films like "Blood and Black Lace." At its dreariest, the film looks drab and depressing (probably intentionally so), especially with the dull interior sets of Leslie's home. Midway through, the film nearly becomes a sexploitation flick with attempted threesomes and a lesbian tryst, before going into full-blown axe slasher mode. The finale is ridiculous and the final girl is unexpected, but the conclusion of it all is weirdly fitting given how outlandish everything else is.
All in all, "Miss Leslie's Dolls" is a strange offering; a mix of proto-slasher with late-'60s occult hangover. It's silly by and large, but it does have some interesting visual elements and an atmosphere that is indelibly bizarre. If nothing else, I've never seen anything quite like it. 6/10.