![]() ![]() One day a large package arrives mysteriously, and inside is (SPOILER) a Good Guy doll. The story takes place in a big old house where a young paraplegic woman named Nica (Fiona Dourif – yes, Brad Dourif’s daughter) has come to stay with her troubled artist mother (Chantal Quesnelle) after dropping out of college. It’s got some good uses of classical tension building techniques but just when you worry they’re classing it up too much there will be an imaginatively gruesome bodily mutilation (at least in the unrated version – modified from its original version, contained here for the first time on the same disc). It even got my reflexes to involuntarily jump a little bit at one part. It’s stripped down, not jokey like the last two, but full of clever setups and twists, surprisingly involving character drama and actual suspense. So I’m happy to report that all of my fears were unfounded and that this movie is great. And it’s obvious that Mancini loves expanding his ridiculous Chuckiverse, so I worried that he was “going back to the roots” because he thought that was what horror fans wanted and not because he really thought that was the right direction to go. You don’t see that done well too often (CANDYMAN being the biggest exception). One thing I love about CHILD’S PLAY is how it finds gothic atmosphere in an urban setting. The old scary house didn’t look all that atmospheric and seemed like a generic horror location. ![]() From the trailer it looked like a rehash of the original but on a lower budget. The word “reboot” was even used in some write ups since for a while they were planning it as a straightup remake instead of sequel.Īs excited as I was to see my boy Chucky back on the (small) screen, I gotta admit I had low expectations for this one. He’s always trying to keep the doll alive so here he is 9 years later doing what he has to do to make a part 6: do it for $5 million dollars, straight-to-video, returning to the roots of it being a serious horror movie about one scary doll instead of a preposterous comedy with a whole family of puppets. The constant through all these movies has been Don Mancini, credited with story and co-screenplay on CHILD’S PLAY, sole writer on every single sequel and director of SEED and now CURSE OF CHUCKY. But in ’98 the series was ingeniously reborn as absurdist horror-comedy with BRIDE OF CHUCKY, directed by Ronny Yu, and in 2004 we got the severely more ridiculous SEED OF CHUCKY, which was a great time at the movies for me and 25 other people around the world. It’s been a while since I’ve watched parts 2 (1989) and 3 (1991), but I remember the second is a pretty solid (if unnecessary) continuation and the 3rd one is, you know, terrible. Of course it all started in ’88 with CHILD’S PLAY, a genuinely effective creepfest that put a drop of contemporary into a classic horror premise. ![]()
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