Childs Play

I recently watched all the 'Childs Play'/Chucky movies. At the same time last year I watched all the 'Saw' movies in one weekend but have since forgotten a lot of how I felt about them so I figured I’d write down my thoughts on these while it was still fresh.

*spoilers*

1 - Childs Play

Where does he come from?

He was a serial killer who used voodoo to put his soul into a doll.

I liked this one a lot. It kinda reminded me of 'The Babadook' while watching it as it’s about a single mom taking care of a kid and the kid keeps talking about a weird supernatural thing and for a while you don’t really know if it’s real or not. Except Chucky is really well known now and has been in a bunch of movies so we all know he’s real. I guess if they ever make 5 sequels to 'The Babadook' people looking back at the first film will say the same thing.

This one works for the simple fact that it has good old fashioned tension. Even if you do know that Chucky is alive there’s a lot of scenes where you don’t know if and when he’ll do something. Once he gets really active and starts talking though I liked it a lot less. He screams *a lot* and runs his mouth off and says bitch a lot (I also watched through the nightmare on elm street movies so i’m really hearing bitch a lot these days).

Anyways he gets burned and decapitated and dismembered and shot and is killed. Apparently the director wanted to make sure Chucky was as dead as possible to make sure there’d be no way for him to come back for a sequel but when he showed the movie to someone they were like “it’s smart how you left it open for a sequel”. Oh dear!

2 - Childs Play 2

How does he come back?

The original doll is rebuilt in order to find out if it had any bugs. Then there’s electricity or something and he’s alive again

This one is the opposite of the first in that the first half is not so good but the end is fantastic. For the first half it’s more of the same with Chucky once again trying to get into the body of Andy (the kid from the first one).

Where this really comes alive though is when they go into the factory where they make all the good guy dolls. Chucky gets maimed and gets a bunch of acid (i think) poured on him. I don’t like Chucky too much so I loved seeing him get hurt so much.

3 - Childs Play 3

How does he come back?

The parts of the doll get thrown in to a vat and melted down to make more dolls. A bunch of his blood gets mixed in and one of the new dolls ends up with his soul in it again. I think that’s what it is anyway, it’s actually kinda confusing

This one is not so good but watching it made me realise what my idea of a perfect Chucky movie is. He spends too much of these movies either yelling a bunch (not scary) or having the upper hand. He’s a doll but he still manages to kill people pretty easily. He also seems to spend a lot of time pointing a gun or knife at people and getting them to just carry him around. What I want is more inconveniencing. There’s a great bit in this one where he gets thrown into a garbage truck and yells out ‘SHIT’ in the same way he yells everything and it was hilarious! If he’s going to be so loud and angry all the time he should be spending the whole movie having shit go wrong for him and getting more and more frustrated.

That bit with the garbage truck is one of the only things I liked in this one. There’s also a great bit where a guy randomly jumps on a grenade and blows up. It’s fantastic.

Continuity-wise it also follows Andy but this time he’s played by a different actor. Chucky gets half his face sliced off and then dropped into a fan.

4 - Bride of Chucky

My favourite one! Just as I was getting sick of how much he had the upper hand his ex-girlfriend comes along and locks him in a cage! Yay!

How does he come back?

His ex, Tiffany, pays off a guard to bring her the remains of the doll from the last movie. She stitches it back up and uses voodoo to bring him back to life. He now has scars and stuff on his face.

I loved this one, it takes a turn into comedy and pulls it off really well. Not everything is done so well, the stuff with the human people isn’t as good. They set up this idea that a couple each think the other is responsible for all the killings but not enough is done with it and just when it gets really interesting it stops. I also like how at the end Chucky flat out says it doesn’t matter if he dies at the end since he always comes back anyway.

5 - Seed of Chucky

The worst. This is really bad. They slide even more into comedy but also in a way that isn’t funny.

How does he come back?

A Chucky and Tiffany doll have been made for a movie (or maybe the old dolls have been rebuilt into these animatronics?). Their son uses a voodoo amulet to bring them to life.

I don’t have a whole lot else to say about this one. It’s garbage. The worst part is when he kills a Britney Spears look-alike and says “oops I did it again”. I’m sure that was real hilarious in 2003 but it’s 2015 now and we expect our comedy to be a bit more sophisticated.

For the purposes of talking about the next one though it’s worth talking about how it ends. The whole series Chucky (and later Tiffany too) has been trying to get back into a human body. In this they are ready to do it but Chucky decides he refers being a doll now. Tiffany and the kid get put back into human form and Chucky is killed off, waiting to return later.

6 - Curse of Chucky

How does he come back?

He just arrives in the mail

I really liked this one a lot. They forget all the comedy and go back to basics. This is a lot like the first one where for a long time it’s just a kid with a doll and the doll barely does anything. It also repeats something I really like from the first movie where the kid is talking to Chucky and holding  the doll up to her ears as if he’s whispering to her. We don’t hear anything Chucky says so we don’t know if he’s actually talking to her all the time or if it’s just typical kid acting like their doll is alive stuff. There’s also a great scene where Chucky puts rat poison in one persons food and we have a long scene where everyone is sitting around eating but we don’t know where the poison is.

At one point I got really worried because it turned out someone but a nanny-cam in Chucky and I was worried it would turn into a found footage movie but it doesn’t! Crises averted.

This movie is super interesting in how it goes back to being like the original movie after the series had been shifted towards comedy. There’s often the idea that once you start steering something in one direction that you can’t steer it back. Part of it is to do with audience expectations, if more people like funny Chucky maybe they’ll be disappointed with scary Chucky. Plus there’s the fact that if you start doing comedy and making fun of a character then people won’t take them seriously when you want them too. I’m currently almost done watching the elm street movies (stay tuned) and they have a similar thing. Freddy even more so because he was even more disturbing originally than Chucky was and got even more famous. Kids dress up as Freddy for halloween now (more so than Chucky) so can you even make him scary any more? (the elm street movies actually make this part of the text at one point. Again, stay tuned). In this case it worked really well. Turns out all you need is good old fashioned good filmmaking.

What made this series interesting as a whole is the sense of continuity. They were all written by the same guy (Don Mancini) and he directed the last two. The continuity stays pretty tight and brings back a lot of the same actors (apart from 'Childs Play 3' which recast Andy). The rigid continuity is one of the things I really liked about the 'Saw' movies (and they stick to it so much it’s almost impossible to just casually watch most of the later 'Saw' movies).

With curse it goes back to basics so much you can’t even tell if it’s a remake or not for a while. It turns out it’s not a remake though and it made me so happy to see that. One thing that bothered me though is that the version I watched was the regular version and the unrated version has an extra scene after the credits. The scene has nothing in it that would need to be cut and I had to watch it on youtube. It’s a shame because it’s kind of the perfect ending to a marathon of these movies.