Cult of Chucky (2017)

October 29, 2018 6:54 AM

Chucky returns to terrorize his human victim, Nica. Meanwhile, the killer doll has some scores to settle with his old enemies, with the help of his former wife.
posted by DirtyOldTown (7 comments total)

The fan service era of pop culture is truly weird in that it allows relatively slight entertainments that manage to survive to pick up a kind of iconic heft and history.

The funny thing about where the Child's Play movies are now is that, with the last two films, they have managed to leverage this history, replacing the primal fear of an evil toy that drove the series initially with the iconographic horror imagery of Chucky himself. The result is that somehow, thirty years in, the movies have slid back from self-parody into something more like their original comedic horror tone.

I'm not going to argue that this makes them good films. But they're fairly comparable in quality to the original and that is such a profoundly unlikely achievement at this point, that I have to tip my hat to the shabby little horror franchise that could.

It's basically a much loved, carefully tended family business at this point. Original writer Don Mancini is at the helm, still bringing along Alex Vincent as Andy, the role he has played since childhood, Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky, but now also with Brad's daughter Fiona as the human hero Nica. Nica is, incidentally, paraplegic.

Anyway, this is not a good movie exactly, but if you enjoyed the original films as a youth, it will likely shock you to see that the law of diminishing returns seems to have scarcely laid a finger on this franchise in three decades.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:48 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

That sure was a lot of text overanalyzing my decision to watch Child's Play 6, huh?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:55 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also, Brad Dourif's daughter Fiona looks exactly like what you pictured in your head when you heard the words "Brad Dourif's daughter." She's lovely, actually, but she looks so much like her dad that if you didn't know she was his daughter, it might still be the first thing you noticed about her.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:57 AM on October 30, 2018

Somewhat amazing: 83% fresh on RT.

Streaming in the US on Netflix.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:04 PM on October 30, 2018

Don Mancini wrote/directed this after his stint writing on Hannibal and uuuuh there's a lot of Hannibal influence in the stark exteriors and shadows and such

Also it's very darkly funny as a B-movie trifle.
posted by The Whelk at 10:36 PM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Just re-watched this and it's even more enjoyable in sequence.

Also, two bonuses in the credits: an extra scene that brings back Kyle, Andy's foster sister from 2, and--hand to Gawd--if you watch the credits carefully there is a production assistant named "Harry P. Ness."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:15 AM on March 26, 2022

I didn't realize Don Mancini was a writer on Hannibal! That explains a lot, not least being Chucky saying that he can't believe Hannibal was canceled. The evil shrink feels a lot like someone Hannibal would have killed, probably in a much more elegant way.

Having shotgunned the last four movies of this series in a couple of days, without ever seeing them before, I have to express a preference for Bride and Seed; the "Where Y'All Sittin'?" Horror Movie Version meme from a few years ago had one lunchroom table that was like Evil Dead, Re-Animator and maybe Dead/Alive?, and that is absolutely my table. But I love the last two as well!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:52 PM on August 15, 2024