Spaced Out

Year: 1997

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon 

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An Alien sequel penned by sardonic geek icon Joss Whedon and helmed by the director of Amélie! What could possibly go wrong? Answer: not as much as Alien 3, but Alien: Resurrection (the fourth entry in a franchise that had already long overstayed its welcome and has continued to do so for two more decades) trades idiosyncratic misery for completely generic fluff. But at least it’s remotely tolerable.

I’m not sure I have a thick enough carapace to survive this marathon.

In Alien: Resurrection, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is, well, resurrected. You can’t very well have an Alien movie without her so Hollywood an experimental medical facility paid her an assload of money cloned the DNA of her centuries-old corpse, and here she is. Once again, the movie fails to give half a crap about what the culture shock of waking up 200 years in the future must be like, only this time it also fails to give half a crap about Ripley’s DNA being merged with the Xenomorph’s, converting her from an avenging angel to a maternal figure with acid blood.

You couldn’t pay me to sit down and parse out the depths to how wrong this science is.

Anyway, Ripley is back and so is the Xenomorph, because this movie ain’t gonna be about her buying a timeshare on Pluto. The greedy General Perez (Dan Hedaya) has bred a baker’s dozen of the monsters for reasons nobody really cares to explain, and when things go predictably awry, the specimens escape from the custody of one Dr. Gediman (Brad Dourif, slumming it, and yes this counts as slumming it from the star of Child’s Play 3). Thus a ragtag band of space mercenaries (?) (pirates? I don’t know, they have guns) – including the morally superior (read: irritating) Call Winona Ryder) and the macho alpha dog Johner (Ron Perlman) – must reluctantly team up with Ripley to escape the ship and destroy the Xenomorphs before they reach Earth.

What a s*h*thole.

There are a dozen and a half sins that Alien: Resurrection is guilty of committing, but the largest are the atrocities performed on Ripley’s character. Their forced explanation of her return from the dead (spoilers I guess, but who really cares at this point?) robs her of any sort of personality, making her a clone with stunted feelings. If you’re paying Sigourney Weaver a truly grotesque amount of money, why script her into an emotional iron maiden? Just have her be struck by space lightning and get on with it. This is the third sequel, nobody cares.

Of course, this is a movie that displays Ripley’s newfound alien powers by having her make sweet dunks on a basketball court, so maybe character depth is a little too much to ask.

Unfortunately, there’s nobody to step up up and fill Ripley’s shoes, as hard as they’re trying to make Winona Ryder a thing. She fails as a Ripley surrogate and as a hard-edged warrior, and the only thing her character contributes is a delightfully inexplicable scene where she attempts to drink from a mug while wearing boxing gloves. The sad thing is, every other member of this overstuffed ensemble contributes even less.

This is no fault of the casting director. Ron Perlman and Brad Dourif are fabulous character actors filling the exact spaces they need to, but the script scrounges around to find anything for them to do, let alone the 35 faceless goons that are flanking them.

And love Joss Whedon though I do, this script just isn’t working. The way he tells it, his humorous dialogue was steamrolled by an overserious tone, but 1) did anybody really want Ripley trading Avengers-style quips with Hellboy? And 2) that still doesn’t excuse the ten-car pileup of syntax that attempts to pass itself off as wit.

It’s just not fun. The plot is a shambles and the action is poundingly repetitive (if I never see a squad of gun-toting astronauts tip-toeing down a metal passageway again I’ll be a happy man). It’s straight boring is what it is.

Something a film about a man-eating alien with acid blood should never be.

However, as much of a slog as it was to sit through, it has two strengths that buoy it at least above the dismal Alien 3. First, it’s surprisingly gory, resurrecting the grindhouse flair that made the original film so viscerally compelling. Second, the world-building of the franchise hits its peak here. The Alien movies have never particularly cared about exploring the technological developments that litter the world of the future, but Resurrection is full of fun little flourishes (like freeze-dried whiskey or a security door that identities people by their breath) that indicate subtle ways life has changed over the centuries.

Even if the characters are made of tissue paper, at least that paper is filled with blood and exists in a world I can find a foothold in. There’s still no justifiable reason for this film to exist, but I daresay I’ve seen far worse.

TL;DR: Alien: Resurrection is a mildly diverting but still dull and muddled sequel.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 874
Reviews In This Series
Alien (Scott, 1979)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

The Night HE Came Home

Year: 2009

Director: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Trick or treat, mother f**kers! It may have taken a year longer than it was supposed to, but my All Hallow’s Eve present for you all is the final entry in our Halloween marathon! To be completely honest, I would have gotten to it sooner, but I’ve seen Rob Zombie’s Halloween II before and knew better than to approach it unarmed. It took me so long to psychologically prepare that it was almost the next October, so I decided to save it up to use as an endcap to my all-too brief Exorcist marathon.

[EN: For the record, this review is of the Director’s Cut, which seems to be the version that’s most readily available these days.]

So, Halloween II. Back in the days when a remake could actually get a theatrical sequel, not that it happened much anyway. The only one I can recall is the prequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and then a handful of DTV follow-ups to Fright Night and I Spit On Your Grave for some reason. I can see why Rob Zombie’s Halloween was one of the lucky few. As shrill and mean-spirited as it is, it struck a chord with the edgier youth demographic. It’s popular with a small but rabid group, and it’s the prerogative of the Akkad family to keep pumping these films out as long as there are wallets to receive them. But boy do I wish they hadn’t made Halloween II, because that story had nowhere to go and it does exactly that.

At least there’s no Ken Foree diarrhea scene.

In Halloween II, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is living with the only other survivor of the Michal Myers (Tyler Mane) rampage two years ago – Annie (Danielle Harris) – and her dad, Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif). Still dealing with the trauma of that fateful Halloween night and newly reeling from the revelation in fame-hungry Dr. Loomis’ (Malcolm McDowell) tell-all book that she’s Michael Myers’ sister, Laurie goes through life vaulting between the equally pleasant poles of Nasal Shouting and Complete Emotional Breakdown. 

She’s plagued by nightmares, and of course Michael picks this moment to show up again, emerging from the backwoods looking beardy, filthy, and uncannily like Rob Zombie himself. He wreaks havoc by killing her new friends whose names I didn’t bother to learn, as well as some amusingly random townsfolk. So yeah, Michael is haunted by visions of his mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), who’s convincing him to kill people, kidnap his sister, and also hang with a dream horse, because hey- Rob Zombie had to fit his wife in there somewhere, I guess.

And she needed an excuse to dress like she was going to a Fleetwood Mac concert.

One thing I will say about Halloween II is that it improves greatly upon its predecessor, though that bar is so low you could crawl over it. But in attempting to craft his twisted new mythology for the Myers siblings, Zombie finally lets go of the alit vestiges of John Carpenter’s property, freeing himself from slavishly copying the original film, only with more Annoying. The unsettlingly brutal kills are toned down, as is the lewd clowning of every single character. In fact, everything is toned down, because Halloween II is barely a movie.

Once you get through the 25-minute dream sequence that opens the movie (it’s supposed to be jarring, but it’s mostly just an excuse to replace exposition with chase sequences and give Octavia Spencer one of her final sassy Black Coworker roles before she starred in The Help – this scene is so obviously not trying that her character is actually named “Octavia”), you’re stuck on a rockabilly merry-go-round for an hour, cycling endlessly between any of these three scenes:

1) Dr. Loomis is a giant, throbbing asshole to his publicist while on tour for his book, simultaneously adding nothing to the narrative and demolishing his character from the ground up.

2) Laurie Strode shrieks/cries/vomits at/on her friends/therapist/self.

3) Somebody around town does vulgar, despicable things for 2 ½ minutes, then Michael Myers teleports in and murders them.

The actual plot, insofar as this shattered pile of unfathomable motivations can be called a “plot,” doesn’t kick in until the final 20 minutes. It’s actually pretty reminiscent of the dire Halloween 5, down to the detail that the characters go to a pointless barn dance in the beginning of Act 3, only to lazily drift over to the true location of the finale. And then it’s just… over.

I guess I should thank it for not sticking around.

Although Halloween II is less grating overall than Halloween 2007, that doesn’t mean Zombie’s not up to his usual “Tobe Hooper turned up to 11” tricks. Every single cluttered, dingy set either looks like a punk club’s bathroom or an episode of Atlanta Trailer Park Hoarders. And every single character is an unlikeable fountain of vitriol, whether they’re facing a serial killer or eating pizza at the kitchen table. People in Halloween II don’t talk. They either shout or they whine or they die. There’s no in between, no calm before the storm. Everything is just storm.

It certainly doesn’t help that the ensemble has less of a grip on the material this time around. Harris and Taylor-Compton can’t find the shreds of humanity they clung to in their roles last time, because there aren’t any. And Malcolm McDowell is completely wasted in a role that violates continuity to resurrect him, only to have him do nothing useful at all (to be fair, that’s  pretty much what they did with Donald Pleasance the last three times). Then there’s Sheri Moon Zombie, who talks to her onscreen son like he’s a girlfriend she ran into a Starbucks. Even the infallible Brad Dourif can’t find his footing and serves up a huge tray of ham during a supposedly heartfelt moment.

While I could go on and on about the obvious metaphors, the mask that makes Myers look like Sideshow Bob, or the ultimate violation of the character by having him speak, and any number of vicious complaints, let’s end the review on an uncharacteristically positive note, shall we? Rob Zombie really does know how to shoot moonlit streets at night, and Halloween II is chock full of beautiful suburban imagery with pristine, almost elegant lighting. So that’s nice, I guess. It certainly helps in making this sequel much more bearable It’s undoubtedly a bad movie, but its bisected narrative helps it fly by and the jagged tonal edges are at least sanded down a little bit. ¡Viva Halloween II!

Killer: Michael Myers (Tyler Mane)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)

Best Kill: Michael Myers dies, meaning we won’t have to deal with this incarnation of him anymore.

Sign of the Times: The fact that this remake sequel even exists is a pretty clear sign it’s the 2000’s.

Scariest Moment: After a car crash, a paramedic spits blood from his mouth and shouts the F word for approximately five minutes, and you realize this is how the movie is gonna be the whole time.

Weirdest Moment: Weird Al Yankovic has a cameo in this movie

Champion Dialogue: “Bad taste is the petrol that drives the American dream.”

Body Count: 19

1. Coroner Hooks dies in a car crash.
2. Gary Scott is decapitated with a glass shard.
3. Nurse Octavia is stabbed to death.
4. Nurse has her eyes gouged out offscreen.
5. Buddy is axed in the back.
6. Floyd is impaled on antlers.
7. Sherman is stabbed to death.
8. Jazlean is stabbed to death. 
9. Howard has his face stamped in.
10. Lou has his head smashed into a wall.
11. Misty Dawn is repeatedly mashed into a glass case.
12. Wolfie is stabbed in the back.
13. Harley is strangled.
14. Deputy Neale has his neck snapped.
15. Annie is stabbed to death.
16. Mya is stabbed in the stomach.
17. Becks is thrown through a windshield.
18. Dr. Loomis is stabbed in the gut.
19. Michael Myers is shot to death.

TL;DR: Halloween II is boring, vulgar, and mishandled, but at least it's better than the last one.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1366
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

The Devil Can Cite Blatty For His Own Purposes

Year: 1990

Director: William Peter Blatty

Cast: George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Brad Dourif

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The telling thing about The Exorcist III is that even though it’s creatively compromised, it’s also a course correction for the franchise. That’s how much Exorcist II: The Heretic was a massive supernova disaster. Directed by original Exorcist author William Peter Blatty and adapted from his novel Legion, The Exorcist III has run the gamut between being unfairly ignored and inappositely exalted. Now that we’ve arrived at this stop on our tour through the franchise, it’s time for ol’ Brennan to set the record straight.

No movie is as good or as bad as anybody thinks it is. You can take that to the bank.

The Exorcist III follows to aged characters from the original film: Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott), the detective who investigated Regan’s murder of a film director in 1973 – Spoilers? I guess. Look, you made it this far. – and Father Dyer (Ed Flanders, hi diddly ho), who was a close friend of young exorcist Father Karras (Jason Miller). The pair are now longtime friends, but Kinderman is being troubled by a rash of ritualistic killings that have broken out, imitating the exact M. O. of the Gemini Killer, who was executed 15 years ago.

Kinderman’s investigation leads him to a hospital where Dyer has recently been bedridden. As more people begin dying, his suspicion grows for a mysterious patient in the isolation ward (Brad Dourif), who seems to him to be the very spitting image of Father Karras…

At least in the theatrical cut.

You may have noticed (or probably didn’t, because you have better things to think about) that The Exorcist III is actually a direct sequel to the NOVEL The Exorcist rather than the movie itself, continuing a relationship between Kinderman and Dyer that was in no way established in Friedkin’s film. This is one of many ways Blatty attempts to reassert his vision of the franchise, an impulse that would see him butting heads with the studio at every turn. His novel Legion is vastly different from the story of the MacNeils, and the studio pressure to link the two films is an oppressive presence over the film.

The fact that Exorcist III intermittently succeeds speaks to the strength of his core ideas, because the flick is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Not only was the studio being its usual bullheaded self, the truth is that Blatty really isn’t a very good filmmaker. He manages to craft some reasonably iconic scares here, but he frequently mistakes silence for tension. The most famous sequence in the movie comes at the tail end of a seven minute static shot that allegedly crates a rising sense of dread, but is so poorly framed and sedately performed that the boredom muffles the horror.

And the man has never been able to adapt his own novels. As we saw in the screenplay he wrote for The Exorcist, he has a tendency to abandon important details from the source material, resuting in a stunted narrative arc that leaves the audience behind in the proverbial dust. This problem gets even worse here, because his delightfully loony idea is that The Exorcist III is a theological murder mystery. More police procedural than horror film for the bulk of its runtime, this movie would be a fascinating turn for the franchise if it weren’t for one thing: most of the clues Kinderman uses to solve the crime aren’t actually in the script. That would be like Sherlock Holmes revealing that he knew the whole time that the killer had a key to the room but never mentioned it until the end.

Or if Twin Peaks waited five episodes to even tell you that Laura Palmer was dead.

But in spite of all this, The Exorcist III has an unusual amount of power for a third film in a franchise. The nightmare imagery at play here is so disjointed (one dream sequence features a young Samuel L. Jackson and a cameo by Fabio – how’s that for eerie?) and the offscreen killings so viciously macabre, the film musters enough tingle to keep the spine occupied.

Plus, the movie has a secret weapon. Although the film brags about the return of Jason Miller (a late addition in reshoots, added to increase the link to the original film and play with Kinderman’s perception of the incarcerated killer), his role is only occasionally plastered over the man’s true face. That true face belongs to Brad Dourif, best known for playing the psycho doll Chucky. But here he displays not one drop of the acid sense of humor of the Child’s Play franchise. 

No, Dourif’s Gemini killer is a literal demon walking the earth in human form- possession be damned. He is so downright terrifying in this role, with his callous voice slaloming through an unpredictable flurry of rage and calm, that I’m surprised he wasn’t considered for the next year’s Silence of the Lambs. He makes the entire movie without ever getting up from his cot! I’m almost certain that Heath Ledger had this film on a loop while he was preparing for the role of The Joker. It’s a tour de force of horror movie performance, one that argues against the Oscars ignoring the genre every year.

A dude from The Godfather Part III was nominated for Best Supporting Actor that year. You’re telling me we couldn’t have slipped a little Dourif in there?

With Dourif on board, this film could never be considered bad, and I suppose it helps that the dialogue is actually clever and engaging. The ending does devolve into a goody, studio-mandated exorcism that’s so shoehorned in, it requires a character who has no connection with the plot to suddenly teleport into the hospital with no provocation. There’s literally no way he could have known what was happening, unless he had Jean Grey psychic powers.

He doesn’t even go here!

After a bit of lovely deus ex machina (and, to be fair, isn’t that quite literally how all exorcism movies end?), the film quietly expires, blowing away like dust in the wind. It’s no classic sequel, but it’s good enough to till be in the conversation all these years later, even if the best thing about it is that it’s not Exorcist II.

TL;DR: The Exorcist III is a decent horror/crime-thriller, even if it highlights William Peter Blatty's weaknesses as a filmmaker.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1091

Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

Completion Anxiety

Year: 2013

Director: Don Mancini

Cast: Chantal Quesnelle, Fiona Dourif, Jordan Gavaris

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you may or may not have noticed, I have several features up and running that are unfinished. My blog is like a spider web of loose ends that I’m scrambling to pick up between two jobs, an attempt at a normal human life, and my incessant, unquenchable need to consume as much content as humanly possible. Rest assured, I’m working diligently to create these final posts for your reading convenience.

Which brings us to Curse of Chucky, the sixth and, as of this writing, final film in the Child’s Play franchise. Scooting in just under a decade after Seed of Chucky, this direct-to-video sequel comes after the longest gap in franchise history. Not only that, but it’s directed by longitime screenwriter Don Mancini, who also helmed Seed of Chucky, which despite its charms is indubitably the worst of the series. This is a tried and true Julia Childs recipe for cinematic disaster, and yet it turned out to be one of the best sequels in a fascinatingly strong franchise. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Thank you for waiting. You’ve been a real doll.

In Curse of Chucky, horror is back at the forefront for the first time in at least three entries. Nica (Fiona Dourif) is a wheelchair-bound young woman living under the thumb of her overprotective mother in a sumptuous gothic house that would give Guillermo del Toro chills. One day, a Good Guy doll is mysteriously shipped to their front door. Not long afterward, Nica’s mother is found lying in a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs, an apparent suicide.

Two guesses as to what really happened. As Nica’s extended family – her toxic sister Barb (Danielle Bisutti) who wants to sell the house, Barb’s disgruntled hubby Ian (Brennan Elliott), their “sex on two toothpicks” au pair Jill (Maitland McConnell), and their young daughter Alice (Summer H. Howell) – come to stay, mysterious happenings begin, well… happening. Alice befriends the talking doll, Chucky (Brad Dourif), and the residents of the house begin to die one by one whenever he’s around.

You’d think people would have issued a recall on these at some point.

Curse has a lot of what Seed lacked, and curiously I don’t mean money. Despite having less than half the budget of his already shortchanged previous entry, Mancini brings his A-game. Lord knows what he’d been doing since 2004, but whatever drugs he took certainly expanded his visual vocabulary something fierce. To put it simply, Curse of Chucky is downright stunning, tossing Seed’s overlit sitcom aesthetic into a woodchipper and pulling a shadow-drenched gothic dreamscape out of thin air.

The camera pirouettes gracefully over the action, highlighting the aggressively baroque production design, and damn is it ever apparent that this movie is directed rather than merely dumped into a camera. It’s a gorgeous-looking piece, especially in a flashback that allows bold yellow flowers to assert themselves over a crisp black and white frame. This environment provides the perfect atmosphere for Chucky to return to his horror roots, and in fact this is the scariest he’s ever been since his eerie tour de force in Child’s Play 2.

Actually, scratch that. Chucky himself is still very rarely a credible menace (his adorably chubby, bootie-clad legs still fail to strike fear into my heart, incredibly). It’s the movie around him and the situations he creates that provide the true spine-crawling power. The fear is subtle, frequently character-based, and returns the franchise to a very classical horror style. In fact, the single best scene in the movie is straight out of the Hitchcock camp of suspense – one of the bowls of soup at the dinner table has been poisoned, but we don’t know which. It’s playful, chilling, and doesn’t require massive budget expenditure.

Kind of like a date with Yours Truly.

Also despite its budget, Curse of Chucky’s gore is pretty wet and wild. Necessarily, some of the kills aren’t quite so outré, but a solid handful are grotty, glistening pearls. Never say Mancini doesn’t know what people who stuck around a slasher franchise for six entries are looking for.

OK, now that we’ve been as sweet as punch for the longest sustained period Popcorn Culture ahs ever seen, it’s time to get down and dirty. Curse of Chucky is a direct-to-DVD film. An unnecessarily fantastic example of the form, yes, but it is nevertheless beholden to a certain standard of quality. It just can’t match the expressionistic celebration of cinema that was Bride of Chucky, and there are sinewy hunks of filler that stick in your throat on he way down, especially any scene featuring a pre-doll Charles Lee Ray in de-aging makeup that makes him look uncannily like Tommy Wiseau on a hot day.

It ain’t perfect, though it is a perfect vehicle for the lovely and talented Fiona Dourif, who got the part through her dad, but kept it through sheer charisma and skill. At the end of the day, Curse of Chucky isn’t the best Child’s Play sequel, but the fact that a sixth entry in a franchise could be in the top 50 percent in terms of quality is pretty damn remarkable.

Body Count: 7

1. Nica’s Mom is stabbed in the chest with scissors offscreen.
2. Father Frank is decapitated in a car wreck.
3. Jill is electrocuted.
4. Barbie is stabbed in the eye.
5. Ian is axed in the mouth.
6. Cop has his throat slit.
7. Grandma is smothered with a plastic bag.

TL;DR: Curse of Chucky is an astoundingly good fifth sequel, with a gothic aesthetic that far outpaces its direct-to-DVD limitations.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 955
Reviews In This Series
Child's Play (Holland, 1988)
Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)
Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)
Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)
Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)
Curse of Chucky (Mancini, 2013)

Boy Toy

Year: 2004

Director: Don Mancini

Cast: Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hey, remember when I was reviewing Chucky movies? I must confess, I’ve been consuming media far faster than I’ve been able to produce reviews. Especially with the 12 extra commitments provided by my Halloween retrospective and Cardboard Science crossover, writing this blog has been a little like trying to knock down Mount Everest with a hair dryer.

Luckily, now that Halloween is behind us, my rampage shall slow slightly and I’ll have a chance to catch up with the embarrassing number of flicks that are rolling around in my backlog like cheerios in the bottom of a mom’s purse. Of course, we’re barreling full tilt into the Christmas and end-of-year wrap-up season, so this reprieve is but a brief one. Let’s get started,

Seed of Chucky, the follow-up to the spectacularly successful Bride of Chucky, is the first Chucky flick to actually be directed by longtime series screenwriter Don Mancini. It’s also his first film ever, as you can certainly tell. But while it might have the vibe (and budget) of a TV movie, it’s one of the wettest and wildest Chucky entries yet.

The franchise just hit its 16th year, so puberty is kicking in.

The film opens on Sh*tface (Billy Boyd), the bastard offspring of Chucky (Brad Dourif) and Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly). A living doll that looks more like a Tim Burton reject, he’s been making money as the world’s best ventriloquist dummy. But when he sees a promo for a film detailing the exploits of Chucky and Tiffany, he mistakenly thinks the animatronic recreations are his real parents. He heads to Hollywood and, using the same over-the-top voodoo curse that Dourif probably mumbles in his sleep after all these years, restores their souls into these new bodies.

Thus begins another hunt for human hosts. Tiffany sets her sights on the film’s star, Jennifer Tilly (Jennifer Tilly) while Chucky goes after Redman (Redman), a rapper-cum-director that Tilly is sleeping with in order to get the role of the Virgin Mary in his new Bible epic. By now you already have a grotesquely thorough preview of the film’s sense of humor and have likely already decided whether or not it is for you. Oh, and they try to impregnate Jennifer with doll sperm in order to provide a host body for Sh*tface, whom they have named Glen or Glenda, depending on who you ask. His groinal area is totally Ken doll smooth, so nobody knows what gender to assign him.

As far as I know, this is cinema’s first nonbinary character. In a Chucky movie. This is why I love horror.

Obviously, this gender issue is hardly treated with respect and tenderness in Seed, the film where Chucky jerks off to a Fangoria magazine. But it is approached as a valid decision for Glen/Glenda to make, which is fascinating territory for a slasher film to mine. Of course, as driven by psychosexual penetration as the genre is, there’s nary a shred of doubt that Glen will end up as a boy. But the fact that the discussion is even being entertained is one of the most unique elements I’ve ever seen in a fifth franchise entry.

Of course, the entirety of the film is utterly unique, and not always for the better. Here, the post-Scream self-referential humor of Bride of Chucky is pushed to the braking point. There are some undoubtedly clever moments, including any time Jennifer Tilly and Tiffany interact (to their mutual pleasure), but the whole thing takes on the quality of a zany cartoon. It’s enormously difficult to take Seed seriously as a feature film and not an 11-minute adventure laboriously stretched on the rack to ill 80 minutes.

It’s just downright weird, is what it is. Overlit by what could only be three separate lighting kits, the film’s bright wash renders it flat and stagebound, eliminating any clinging wisp of scariness. But the sheer lengths the movie takes to entertain can’t help but work in spurts and starts. Seed has absolutely no place in the canon of the (admittedly goofy) Chucky movies with its wildly divergent tone, but it stays true to itself and never ceases to be diabolically fascinating. Between a John Waters cameo, Tiffany attempting to become a role model by curbing her urge to commit homicide, and Glen’s assumption of his heritage thanks to a stamp reading “Made in Japan,” Seed is the slasher like you’ve never seen it before. And one gag that calls back to The Shining is the most unexpectedly hilarious moment in perhaps the entire franchise.

You could say that Seed of Chucky is The Shining of… toy films? I got nothing.

As you may have been able to piece together, Seed of Chucky is astoundingly cheap. Double cast actors, low rent rappers, and hellaciously basic lighting plots do not a blockbuster make. This low-fi attitude also unfortunately extends to the puppeteering. Or doll-eteering, I guess. While the Chucky animation effects had been exponentially improving since the original film, Seed oversteps its modest means by attempting to breathe life into three entire plastic creations, forcing the quality to take a quantum leap backwards. Once again, the suspension of disbelief hangs from a gossamer thread, rather than the might iron cables achieved by the Bride crew.

Luckily, we’re not skimped on the gore. Though Chucky and his brood might have the lip elasticity of Tara Reid, the blood is just as gooey and gushy as ever. In fact, there may be more carnage in this flick than ever before. Despite the dolls’ attempts at cutting back on killing, they accomplish a truly impressive array of splatter, including one of the best severed heads I’ve ever seen in a low budget film.

In the finale of Seed, Chucky decides that he doesn’t want to possess a human body. It turns out that he quite likes being Chucky. I think this film has come to that realization as well. Instead of being something it’s not, it flings itself bodily into the cesspool of bawdy, loudmouth humor and zany, drippy murder. It’s far from perfect, but it’s Chucky and Mancini reunited to have a blast and push the envelope. 

This entry is often written off as being the worst of the franchise. Well, that might be true, but in a series as inexplicably consistent as this, that’s not a damning statement. Remove your brain and unbox Seed of Chucky. It might just do you good.

Body Count: 10; the first two occurring in a dream, the third in a movie, and not counting three skeletons hidden in a closet.

1. Richard is stabbed in the chest.
2. Mrs. Richard slips and falls in the shower.
3. Santa has his throat slit.
4. Mechanic is decapitated with wire.
5. Britney Spears dies in a car wreck.
6. Pete gets his head dissolved with acid.
7. Redman is disemboweled.
8. Joan is blasted with aerosol fire and falls down stairs.
9. Stan is stabbed in the chest.
10. Fulvia is beaten to death with a doll.

TL;DR: Seed of Chucky is zany and ridiculous, but a charming diversion.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1200

Reviews In This Series

Child's Play (Holland, 1988)

Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)

Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)

Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)

Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)

Curse of Chucky (Mancini, 2013)

Fetish Dolls

Year: 1998

Director: Ronny Yu

Cast: Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Katherine Heigl

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Child’s Play series has always been kinda funny. Even the straight-faced original film had a couple comic moments, like when Chucky is insulted by an elderly couple on the elevator. And while I hold the fervent belief that a good director can make anything scary (hell, The Ring and The Babadook make videotapes and children’s books terrifying – it can be done), the “killer doll menaces people five times his size” thing is a little tough to take seriously.

So when 1998’s Bride of Chucky made the leap into full-on horror comedy, I accepted it with open arms. By acknowledging and embracing the fact that Chucky as a villain is more than a little campy, the film opened itself up to a world of twisted humor that ended up being even darker than the staunchly horrific entries.

What allowed Chucky to enter this territory (aside from Don Manicini’s slow drift across genre lines), was the release of Scream in 1996. Following the success of that slasher satire, a tidal wave of postmodern self-referential killfests crashed into theaters, including I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Halloween: H20, and the inevitable Scream 2. While Bride of Chucky is a banner-waving member of this crowd, it’s also one of the very best because it largely eschews the temptation to carve up a gaggle of airbrushed teens in favor of a dazzling tragicomic love story.

It’s the Weekend of slashers.

In Bride of Chucky, Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) is a serial killer groupie. Over the past ten years, she has dated a series of quasi-murderous nutcases, but none can hold a séance candle to her ex, the Lakeshore Strangler Charles Lee Ray. Since his death in 1988 (and the Child’s Play franchise’s ignominious death in 1991), she has been searching for the doll into which he transferred his soul. After bribing a cop to steal the doll from an evidence depository (which includes a razor-tipped glove and a hockey mask, because 1998) and killing him, she stitches him back together for a slick, creepy new makeover, and resurrects him. Chucky (Brad Dourif) just got lucky.

They immediately start arguing, of course, because relationships that begin with homicide are not exemplars of calm debate, and Tiffany winds up dead, with her soul transferred into a doll. They decide to find new bodies using an amulet buried in Chucky’s grave (one that could have really come in handy three films ago, no?) and hitch a ride with eloping teens Jade (Katherine Heigl, who likes to pretend this movie doesn’t exist) and Jesse (Nick Stabile, who likes to pretend we know he exists), killing anybody who gets in their way. On the road, they rekindle their romance over a shared love of assaulting people with sharp objects.

I think these two are gonna make it.

What sets Bride of Chucky apart from the rest of the post-Scream fodder is that it’s actually funny. While its dark, uncouth sense of humor may not be palatable to all viewers, the film is a modern success story of combining big guffaws and gruesome murder in a wholly organic way. The self-referential gags are likewise incisive and not too overbearing, enthusiastically lampooning itself by playing with the idea that, since he went dormant in 1991, the horror genre has left Chucky and his traditional slice ‘n dice antics behind. There’s perhaps a tad too much emphasis on name-dropping the 80’s considering that only one Child’s Play entry was actually released during that decade, but the film knows where it stands in the new wave of horror, and by embracing that it perfectly adapts to the postmodern trend.

It’s perhaps not as beefy in the scare department, but what the film lacks in genuine terror it makes up for with an atmosphere so perilously dark that Christopher Nolan could happily shoot a Batman film in it. Think early Tim Burton: grand gothic silliness that relentlessly retains that elusive creep factor while still allowing you to sleep at night. It’s as if they slapped Dracula’s favorite Instagram filter over everything, turning outsized suburban abodes into imposing cathedrals and seedy motels into Eurosleaze abysses of doom.

Really, it’s the road trip comedy Charles Manson has been waiting for.

Of course, the seven years advanced effects likewise had major influence over the film’s quality. Finally, Chucky’s lips actually have a semblance of orchestrating his dialogue. Praise be to Kevin Yagher Productions! And although the sight of Chucky running in his adorable little booties will never ever scrape up a scream, the enhanced animatronic work prevents the interactions between two dolls that drive the film from looking like a Punch and Judy puppet show. No, these dolls are capable of genuine emotional expression (well, mostly homicidal rage) and personality, and their love story never feels like anything less than two absolutely real people. Maybe with a bit of extensive plastic surgery, but still. They steal the show and they deserve to have it.

It also doesn’t hurt that the overarching story of Bride of Chucky is the most coherent, developed, and emotionally satisfying of the franchise. With the motivation for killing each victim firmly set in a narratively satisfying capacity, this streamlines the obligatory bloody mayhem and allows four-time screenwriter Don Mancini plenty of slack to explore beyond the shallow slasher mold.

Pitting two couples against each other in a showdown for survival, he indicts both distrust within relationships (Jade and Jesses both think that the other is the killer) and the self-deception and blind optimism that allows people to stay with a poisonous partner (à la Tiffany’s lament, “Why can’t I be with one of the real Good Guys?). Both couples become committed (either through marriage or voodoo possession of a plastic object - which is legally binding in several states) over the course of the film, but the one that survives is the one where their love for each other trumps their love for themselves.

I wasn’t kidding when I called Bride of Chucky a romance. Hell, it’s a tighter rom-com than My Best Friend’s Wedding.

Typically the driving force behind these films is the pedal-to-the-metal performance by Brad Dourif. He’s just as good as ever, but he’s met his match in Jennifer Tilly. Her disarming helium voice, her effortless sensuality, and her dippy charm make her perfect for the new direction of the franchise. She utterly inhabits the in-person comedy bits, allowing her amateur murderer side to show cracks beneath her calm, cool exterior. And when her work transfers to voiceover only, she’s equal parts sweet and wicked, making an indelible mark on an already terrific film.

Bride of Chucky is a couple notches short of a masterpiece, especially with the fact that the entire plot centers around a MacGuffin that’s uneasily shoved into the franchise formula. But it’s the magnum opus of a series that was never perfect yet always consistently entertaining. If you only have the stomach for one killer doll picture, I urge you to pick this one. You won’t regret it. And at the very least, you can make Katherine Heigl rom-com jokes the whole time.

Body Count: 12; including the killers because damn does this series not care about mortality.

1. Cop is stabbed through the back of the throat.
2. Damien is smothered with a pillow.
3. Warren is shot in the face with nails and stabbed.
4. Needlenose dies in a car explosion.
5. Alex and
6. Russ are pierced with shards of falling mirror.
7. David is hit by a truck.
8. Motorhome Guy and
9. Motorhome Lady are killed offscreen.
10. Gravedigger is shot.
11. Tiffany is stabbed in the chest.
12. Chucky is shot to death.

TL;DR: Bride of Chucky is a beautifully silly, creepy romance for the ages.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1309

Reviews In This Series

Child's Play (Holland, 1988)

Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)

Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)

Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)

Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)

Curse of Chucky (Mancini, 2013)

Toy Guns

Year: 1991

Director: Jack Bender

Cast: Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There comes a time in every young franchise’s life when they must embrace childish things. Specifically, I’m referring to camp and humor, which tend to creep up on even the hardiest of horror properties. It took Nightmare on Elm Street two go-rounds for Freddy to transform into a homicidal stand-up comedian, Jason Voorhees’ fifth turn behind the wheel of the machete was marked by self-referential comedy and even a James Bond homage in the opening credits, and Halloween: H20 featured Michael Myers battling a gaggle of Kevin Williamson-weaned teens.

Although Chucky’s humor heyday was still yet to come in 1992, Child’s Play 3 is a clear transition piece, still utilizing the killer doll as a source of fear, but upping the ante on his already-prevalent sarcasm. As a result, it teeters a bit on the brink of two genres, but returning screenwriter Don Mancini manages to hold it together long enough to see it through to the next phase.

Phase 2: Chucky squares off against Iron Man and whatever Avenger has the cheapest contract.

Child’s Play 3 continues the story of Andy Barclay (now played by Justin Whalin), who has been shuttled through a series of foster homes but had trouble adjusting, probably because they had a severe lack of blondes in rad leather hats. As a last ditch effort, he is sent to military school with the hope that a little straightening out will quell his killer doll fantasies.

Unfortunately for everyone, the greedy Play Pals corporation has restarted production on their popular Good Guys line of dolls, and it just so happens that the plastic used to make the first model was unknowingly spiked with Chucky’s blood. Before OSHA Safety officials could arrive on the scene, Chucky has been resurrected and quickly ships himself off to the Academy. While there, he realizes that this is a new body, so he can transfer his soul into a new person. He picks Tyler (Jeremy Sylvers), an impressionable kid with an absentee father who is desperate for a friend. Now it’s up to Andy to stop Chucky from possessing Tyler’s body, though he must fight through strict military officials and meathead bullies to get there.

Those nine months were hard on him. Stress has a way of aging a boy.

Coming out only a scant 9 months after Child’s Play 2, it’s a miracle that anything in the film works at all. Hell, it’s a miracle that Chucky isn’t just a paper cutout glued to a popsicle stick. And while this is Don Mancini’s least favorite screenplay and certainly his shallowest, it nevertheless scrounges up a decent setting, a handful of engaging characters, and throws in a scant theme or two when nobody’s looking. Even though it could certainly use tightening up and the low budget hobbles the capacity for particularly cool effects, it remains a fun, breezy watch, pepped up by Brad Dourif’s evergreen performance.

Dourif is like a sponge, absorbing any wacky tonal imbalances with no apparent effort and embracing the ludicrous fun yet chilling otherness of being a killer doll. The best scenes are those that put him front and center, where he leads the film from beat to prearranged beat like a demented drill sergeant. The plot itself might just be a tarted-up rehash of the first two films, but he pummels it along at a steady clip, whether he’s frustratedly pursuing his naïve yet slippery quarry or spouting haircut puns while slashing a manic barber’s throat.

However, while the character comedy is spot-on, Chucky’s tendency toward quipping renders the film a bit of a shallow clone of the later Elm Street films. Mancini would find the proper balance for his humor in Bride of Chucky (which I can’t wait to write about), but for the time being we’re stuck with but a shadow of the comic monolith Chucky would become. However accomplished the performance is it can’t completely save a rushed, lackluster script.

It's a tough pill to swallow.

Despite its shortcomings, Child’s Play 3 does at least bring some new elements to the table. The military school setting provides ample opportunity for unique setpieces and a set of characters at least slightly to the left (left, left, right, left) of the typical slasher milieu. Instead of a parent refusing to believe their child’s story, it’s the brass refusing to allow insubordination, and instead of Chucky causing “accidents’ with assorted household objects like a homicidal Martha Stewart, he wreaks explosive havoc with armory equipment. It’s the same set of stock situations, but the new setting (which I believe hasn’t been used since 1981’s plodding Evilspeak) wrings the last droplets of life from them.

The downside of this is that every actor has the exact same outfit and haircut, so they’re about as distinguishable as the members of ZZ Top. But there is also an added dimension of Chucky stalking people trained in the art of combat, although the film’s most promising character (a kick-ass chick with an attitude) is shunted aside in the finale like a ten dollar wedding present.

Salt shakers? That's the last time we invite Jenny and Brad anywhere.

The kills are also only intermittently successful. Whether they were limited by budget or time, they’re generally unremarkable (save Chucky’s gloopy demise, which comes after the film’s longest sustained period of tension – a battle inside a funhouse ride). If I’d wanted to see people keel over without a hint of blood, I’d have watched a 50’s Western instead of a Chucky sequel. Fortunately the circumstances surrounding the murders muster up frissons of fright, especially the very first, in which Chucky uses the various toys in the Play Pals CEO’s office to menace him before taking him out.

So really, though Child’s Play 3 may very well be the weakest of the franchise, I’s still worth a look for Chucky devotees. There’s enough material to render it an affable 90 minutes while the franchise uses it as a stepping stone to greener, bloodier pastures.

Killer: Chucky (Brad Dourif)

Final Girl: Andy Barclay (Justin Whelan) feat. DeSilva (Perrey Reeves)

Best Kill: Colonel Cochran dies of a heart attack before Chucky can get to him.

Sign of the Times: Andy shows up at school with a mullet that looks like he was the victim of a drive-by perpetrated by a gang of Billy Ray Cyrus’ rejected stylists.

Scariest Moment: When Chucky is menacing the Play Pals CEO, he sets two Good Guy dolls on the desk to talk to each other in a continuous loop.

Weirdest Moment: Chucky somehow figures out how to mail himself places

Champion Dialogue: “What are children after all, but consumer trainees?”

Body Count: 8; including Chucky, who sure as hell dies a lot for somebody with six movies under his belt.

1. Mr. Sullivan is strangled with a yo-yo.
2. Garbage Man is crushed in a trash compactor.
3. Colonel Cochran has a heart attack.
4. Sergeant Botnik has his throat slit with a razor.
5. Shelton is shot in the chest.
6. Whitehurst throws himself over a grenade.
7. Security Guard is shot in the head.
8. Chucky is slashed to pieces by an industrial fan.

TL;DR: Child's Play 3 is a decent, if rather generic second sequel.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1224

Reviews In This Series

Child's Play (Holland, 1988)
Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)
Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)
Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)
Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)
Curse of Chucky (Mancini, 2013)