I won’t lie – I pretty much wrote this franchise off when it
started switching to comedy. I’ve never
made it all the way through Bride and
I’ve not seen Seed at all. You may well imagine the eye-rolling on my
part when I heard that yet another sequel, this time entitled Curse of Chucky was headed straight to
DVD. Who wants another dumb, comedic
Chucky movie anyway? But then a strange
thing happened – I started reading interviews with series creator and writer
Don Mancini in which he talked about his desire to return to the roots of the series
with a serious, frightening vision of
the character. My interest was piqued.
Curse of Chucky begins
with a simple set-up: A paraplegic woman named Nica and her mother Sarah live
alone in a huge, isolated house. One day
a package containing a Good Guy doll is delivered to Sarah. By the next morning Sarah is dead, the victim
of what appears to be a gruesome accident.
Soon Nica’s sister Barb and her largely dysfunctional family descend on
the house to settle Sarah’s affairs. It soon becomes apparent that Barb is up
to no good, hoping to talk Nica into selling her share of the estate and
pressuring her to move into a supported living facility. In the meantime Sarah’s daughter Alice has
latched onto the Good Guy –Chucky, of course - which is still floating around
in the house. As the night goes on,
Chucky begins killing his way through the household as the truth behind his
vendetta against this particular family is slowly revealed.
I don’t want to talk too extensively about the plot here,
because there are actually some fun twists that I wouldn’t want to spoil. I’ll say that the kills are generally well
done, if not extraordinarily inventive.
The exception to that is a dinner sequence at the beginning of the film
in which Chucky has managed to spike just a single bowl of chili out of a table
setting of six with rat poison. That scene, with its Russian roulette feel, is
a lot of fun. I also like the choice to have a
wheelchair-bound protagonist, as it adds an extra element of physical danger
from Chucky. After all, an adult who is
actually aware of Chucky should
basically be able to kick a field goal with him and be done with it. By having Nica in a wheelchair, it makes
Chucky nearly her physical equal and really ups the tension of their
encounters.
Special effects-wise, there’s a lot more puppet and
prosthetic work than I’ve come to expect out of a modern film and it all looks
great. Even during the scenes in which
Chucky is CGI, he moves right – which is to say “wrong” I suppose, because
puppet Chucky has always had a distinctive gait. These effects look far better than I would’ve expected from a straight-to-video movie. There’s perhaps not as much gore as I would’ve
expected, but I guess the Child’s Play
movies have never focused too much on actual blood and guts. I also admire the decision to play it slow
with revealing Chucky – sure, the audience knows what’s up, but you don’t see
Chucky speak in his own voice or move full-body on camera until pretty deep
into the film. It’s especially easy to
rush the pacing in horror sequels, but they did a good job here. When you finally see Chucky speak to Alice in Brad Dourif’s voice for the first time
it’ll give you the willies, even though there’s been a quarter century of
Chucky films before this.
Acting-wise…this is a horror movie. Brad Dourif, of course, returns as the iconic
voice of Chucky and is great as always.
That said, I watched Child’s Play
2 scant hours before watching this one and his voice has noticeably changed
through the years. It’s unavoidable, but
you can certainly hear it. Nica is played competently by Brad Dourif’s
daughter Fiona. Nica's paraplegia gives
her a unique feel for a horror heroine, but unfortunately she doesn’t get very
much character development through most of the film. Summer Howell portrays Alice, the young
child, and she does a good job, though the director has made what I feel is the
right choice by largely keeping Alice off-camera throughout the film’s final
act. Pretty much every other character
comes across as a terrible douche, so it’s hard to judge the actors on their
performances there.
If this movie has a serious flaw, it’s the ending…or rather,
the endings. It feels a little like Mancini had a “maybe”
pile of several potential endings and then decided “what the hell, I’ll just use
them all.” Pretty much any one of them would’ve been okay, but taken together they actually
kind of don’t make sense, especially the (otherwise fun) after-the-credits scene.
The ending notwithstanding, Curse of Chucky is not only one of the better Child’s Play films, it’s one of the better slasher movies to come
out in the last decade. It’s refreshing
that they opted to do a true sequel instead of a reboot like so many other
venerated horror franchises and that they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel by
adding tons of extra mythology to the character. It’s a Child’s
Play movie –a recognizable, good
Child’s Play movie- that feels right
at home with the first three films in the series. While Curse
of Chucky may not be groundbreaking, it’s an unexpected return to form for
a series I’d given up for dead. It was a
lot of fun and I recommend checking it out.
__________
1.) Well, maybe not, but it sure seemed like it.
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