philosoraptor42

Child's Play 3 (1991)

Just as "Omen III: The Final Conflict" decided to move the years forward, so has Child's Play 3. Okay, so this is totally not a comparison I would be making if it weren't for the decision to randomly review both franchises side-by-side. But more significantly for the Child's Play series (particularly considering that Brad Dourif has remained the voice of Chucky throughout the films), this is the first time that Chucky's regular rival Andy is played by a new actor. Some may recognise Justin Whalin from his time as Jimmy Olsen in the cheesy Superman tv series "The New Adventures of Superman". Not knowing that connection going in, Justin definitely looked familiar when I was watching the movie and he does a good job here as Andy.

The decision to fast forward Andy to greater age and maturity allows for a step forward in Andy and Chucky's rivalry. Not only is Andy now feeling reponsible for others rather than being mostly a helpless and distressed figure with little choice but to simply worry about himself, but he is also old enough to have a serious love interest (something that Chucky won't have any opportunity for until the next movie). I don't think the decision to switch from the previous actor, Alex Vincent, suggests any kind of gripe with him by the filmmakers since they weren't going to get such a clear change in the age of the character releasing this sequel barely a year after the last one.

The new, more mature Andy now has to take responsibility for others and one opportunity for this is that Chucky has a new victim. He is now pursuing a different little child and so Andy is not in a position of being the victim again, but rather being the only person who really knows how to stop Chucky. Just like how Ripley has become the expert in defeating the aliens by "Alien 3", Andy is now the expert Chucky-hunter. The thing that hasn't changed however, is that there is still pretty much nobody who will believe him.

Child's Play 3 has it's problems, but there are some great moments and acting and characterisation are both far improved from the previous instalment (where it should be noted that I bizarrely had more concerns about Jenny Agutter's performance than I did about Alex Vincent as Andy). The new child-victim Chucky is pursuing is pretty good in the role. We also have a rather cool feisty female character who does a good job in her role.

One thing I was a little concerned about was the typical cheesy bully character, but everyone does such a great job with their performances and are handled so well as individual characters that it all ends up working pretty well. Unlike in "Child's Play 2" where everyone seemed a little 2 dimensional, this time around we have a bunch of characters who really seem like people.

Of course, we cannot spend the whole movie just hanging out with the characters. We are here to see Chucky cause mayhem and what's more, we need something new and interesting. And, having built up these new characters, the film really promises a quite spectacular finale and it completely fails to deliver. Seriously, it feels like they had planned to deliver so much more and the producers said no. It feels a bit like when Frank Henenlotter was making "Basket Case 3", where he claimed he thought he'd be able to make a highly gory and twisted movie and was then told that the movie needed to hit a rather lower certificate than that, so he basically had to dump a third of the script and re-write it during filming. That's what it feels must have happened to "Child's Play 3".

Even Chucky's demise has been toned down! It was a pretty important element in both "Child's Play" and "Child's Play 2" that, moreso than most movie villains, Chucky just will... not... die! After the demise of Chucky was done so well in "Child's Play 2" I was really excited to see how they'd up their game this time around and they just don't even appear to have tried.

Also the promise of an exciting finale came from possibly Chucky's most diabolical and potentially horrific act yet. At one point in the film we see Chucky replacing paintball ammo with real bullets. A scheme that, interestingly enough, I also saw used in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's excellent book spoofing the Omen series: "Good Omens". Of course, if this scheme played out fully, it would mean dead boarding school children and clearly that's further than the filmmakers want to go. However, the movie doesn't even really tease us with this threat. I can imagine plenty of comedy moments with Chucky getting frustrated by near misses and gun jams and all sorts of opportunities for his diabolical scheme to not quite go to plan. Organising a potential massacre is a great way to show that Chucky's size in no way makes him a less formidable villain, but when the script is unwilling to follow up on the potentially horrific outcomes it makes Chucky look weaker than ever. After all, after setting it up Chucky is mainly just waiting for the carnage to begin.

While "Child's Play 2" had lame characters and acting, but made up for it by being really inventive, "Child's Play 3" has fantastic characters and mostly ends up redoing things we've seen before, even toning down the Chucky violence. There was a lot of potential for this to do some really good things with the characters, but sadly the biggest problem with the movie comes with its ending and endings are really quite important.

Still I don't feel like I can entirely say this is a bad movie. Brad Dourif is still on top form and the comedy is still up to scratch. But it's not too long after the film has set up its entertaining characters, that we discover that actually this film isn't going to be in the same league as the previous instalments. It's especially sad since if you want people to care about what happens in a horror movie, good characters can be a great asset. If they'd been prepared to push the boat out on violence this could potentially have been one of the better Chucky movies. But in the end, in spite of the less impressive performances, "Child's Play 2" was just so much more inventive than this film.

C-

Okay, below is my original review for the fourth Chucky movie from back in April 2011. It still remains my favourite movie in the series so my opinions here remain the same. Just one thing though. The negative comments I've heard about "Bride of Chucky" criticise it for going too far into comedy. Here's my problem with that.... Every single Child's Play movie is a comedy! Yes seriously! Heck, "Bride of Chucky" is, if anything, the closest to providing actual scares. Perhaps the problem is that the fans of the series had grown up too much by the time this came out. They remembered Child's Play as being scary because they saw it when they were young. By the time "Bride of Chucky" was released perhaps they were capable of handling more vicious horror content and it seemed tame as a result. The film is, after all, a full seven years after "Child's Play 3". But even so, by comparison to the fairly toothless third movie, "Bride of Chucky" is just SO much tenser.

Anyway, there'll be more chance for me to express my updated feelings on "Bride of Chucky" when I review the follow-up, "Seed Of Chucky", since both movies contain what is possibly the most fantastic addition to the franchise: Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany (or even, in "Seed Of Chucky", as herself).

Bride Of Chucky (1998)
(originally reviewed here)

I don't know what brought me to consider this one. I wasn't really terribly impressed with the original "Child's Play". Still with one of the Child's Play movies being tied to the Jamie Bulger tragedy (and the coinciding "video nasty" scare) I guess I'd felt it was necessary to watch it.

Meanwhile "Bride of Chucky" was a movie that was being released at a time when I was still quite uncomfortable with the horror genre. Still there must have been something about it that played on my mind. At the moment other films I plan to see include "Bride of Frankenstein" and "Bride of Re-Animator", so when making my list of movies "Bride of Chucky" somehow naturally fell into the list. It's certainly notable that while the original Child's Play scores higher at 70% on RT, Child's Play 2 scores 37%, Child's Play 3 scores 27%, yet Bride of Chucky makes a remarkable leap back up to 42%. With the unmet fascination which had played on my mind in my late teens, this was enough to make me consider this movie.

The original Child's Play has not dated well and has an extremely strong 80s feel to it. While intended to be scary the animatronics were always going to detract from that. Needless to say they detract more and more from the movie as time goes on. Perhaps the same will be true in time of "Bride of Chucky", but thankfully (and if only I'd known this sooner) this is more of a comedy than a horror movie. Still, it's interesting to see how Chucky has changed.

In the original movie:

In "Bride of Chucky":

Of course, what really shows the quality of the effects is watching the doll move, particularly in terms of facial expressions. Of course, if you really want a doll to look creepy, you only have it do small subtle movements to start with. That way the audience can spend a bit of time wondering whether they really saw it. Personally, I find myself thinking of "The Hole" at this stage...

In "Bride of Chucky" they clearly avoid actually showing Chucky moving for a while, though it's more to make sure they've whet your appetite for Chucky, rather than building up fear. Like I said before, this movie isn't really so much about the fear as the comedy. Some of the lines are just brilliant. Also there's great chemistry between Chucky (who, after all this time is still being voiced by Brad Dourif i.e. "Wormtongue" from LOTR) and Jennifer Tilly.

Left: Jennifer Tilly in "Bride of Chucky"
Right: Brad Dourif in the original "Child's Play"

Tilly's most obvious other role is in "Bound", the Wachowski's movie before The Matrix. It seems that asides from that she's been voicing Joe Swanson's ever-pregnant and soft-spoken wife Bonnie in "Family Guy" and also voiced a character in "Monsters Inc." In fact, as you can guess from the poster and even the blooming title, voice-acting skills are going to come in handy for Jennifer Tilly's role as Chucky's old girlfriend.

The movie also features Katherine Heigl who is in a lot of stuff that I wouldn't watch in a million years and, to be quite honest, this is more of a "passable actress who looks pretty" role (and of course the same is true of her love interest who's barely been heard from since). The movie also features John Ritter. Now while John Ritter was great in that one episode of Buffy, my excitement at his appearance was increased because I'd also got him mixed up with Charles Cyphers who plays all sorts of roles in John Carpenter's movies.

The character's interact well (and in a much more interesting way than in "Tron Legacy", which I also saw recently). The pacing is good. I guess if you were expecting a horror movie, you might easily think the comedy was unintentional, but to be honest some of the lines (which I won't give away here) are so obviously making fun that you'd be daft not to notice. With it's new comedy focus, the movie plays freely with the silliness of a seemingly immortal plastic serial killer with now three movies of carnage behind him.

Comparing this to the original movie (as I hadn't seen 2 or 3 when originally writing this), I would have to say (and this isn't even a difficult decision) that "Bride of Chucky" is the better of the two. Sure, it doesn't play on the creepiness of the doll and goes for playful silliness instead, however the premise of an evil plastic doll only seemed to have limited scope in the original movie (so no wonder it felt stale in the initial sequels). Bride of Chucky takes the premise in a new direction and I loved it!