My name’s Chucky wanna play?

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“Alexa… kill those people.”

June 29, 2023 Hud Leave a comment

M3GAN

2022/15/102m

“Friendship has evolved.”

Director: Gerard Johnstone / Writers: Akela Cooper, James Wan / Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Lori Dungey, Stephane Garneau-Monten, Amy Usherwood.

Body Count: 6

Laughter Lines: “I have a new primary user now: Me.”

That’s right – it sounds exactly like Child’s Play. And Dolly Dearest. And Annabelle. Actually, this campfest has more in common with the 2019 Child’s Play reboot than any of the others, as the age old tale of our reliance on technology coming back to bite us in the ass. But this one is better.

Starting as it means to go on with an all-out assault courtesy of the commercial for a Furby-like toy, PurrPetual Petz. Nine-year-old Cady irks her parents by playing with the talking, tablet-integrated toy during a roadtrip to a ski lodge, which ultimately turns fatal.

Shortly after, Cady is sent to live with her aunt Gemma, a toy designer who gifted her the annoying thing and is clueless about raising a child, let alone a bereaved one. They connect over one of Gemma’s early inventions, a robot controlled remotely. Cady’s uptick in mood inspires Gemma to revisit an AI companion she’d been working on as a side project – Model 3 Generative Android: M3GAN.

Gemma introduces her prototype M3gan to Cady, pairs her with it, and in no time at all she has a new friend who spews facts, reminds her of chores, sings her ballad versions of Titanium and Bulletproof, and hangs around looking a tiny bit sinister. The trope of ‘protect the human’ programming inevitably leads to interpreting all outsiders as a threat, starting with the neighbour’s aggressive dog, just as Buddi started with a claw-happy cat in the Child’s Play redux.

A nasty pre-teen bully is next to cross the line and ends up being chased into the road and slammed into by an SUV. Gemma begins to suspect M3gan’s configuration might need some work, but finds the doll is against having the hood popped, and learning that M3gan is interfacing with various digital assistants and household smart appliances. However, Gemma’s boss has set up a showcase to show M3gan to the world, planning on retailing her as a stand-in nanny to rich families at $10,000 a pop. M3gan, of course, has other plans.

More people die, M3gan sashays down corridors with confident swagger, stopping at one point to grace a fleeing victim with a dance. If you thought Chucky’s hokeyness was the height of camp, strap in: The bitchy snap-backs, the shades, the digital hijacking of a Ferrari that she zooms off in… I haven’t cackled with glee at a film this much in a long time.

A rare January horror release that made bank, thanks to smart marketing (and TikTok), this won’t be the last we’ve seen of this doll. Whispers of teaming her up with her red-headed cinematic grandpa are already doing the rounds.

Reviews

Doll Domination

May 12, 2023 Hud Leave a comment

CHUCKY – SEASON 2

2022/381m

Directors: Jeff Renfroe, Samir Rehem, Don Mancini, Leslie Libman, John Hyams / Writers: Don Mancini, Kim Garland, Rachael Paradis, Mallory Westfall, Nick Zigler, Alex Delyle, Isabella Gutierrez, Amanda Blanchard / Cast: Zackary Arthur, Bjorgvin Arnarson, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Brad Dourif, Devon Sawa, Fiona Dourif, Jennifer Tilly, Bella Higginbotham, Rosemary Dunsmore, Lachlan Watson, Alex Vincent, Christine Elise, Andrea Carter, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Meg Tilly, Barbara Alyn Woods, Carina Battrick, Billy Boyd.

Body Count: 15

Laughter Lines: “You’re worried about me? There’s a corpse in the closet and a killer doll on the loose – I’m worried about me.”

Given the ajar ending of Season 1, it was pretty clear that we’d be coming back to the valley of the dolls, which rapidly ties up how things were left off, with Andy in the truck o’ Good Guy Dolls, at (doll) Tiffany’s gunpoint. He succeeds in driving it over a cliff and everybody thinks the nightmare is over.

Several months later, Jake and Devon have been fostered by other families far apart, while Lexy is attending therapy at the behest of her politically-thirsty mom and liberally popping pills to get through each day. When the three of them reunite on Halloween, Chucky reappears to finish them off and ends up detonating a bomb that kills Jake’s pre-teen foster brother. Naturally blamed and written off as problem kids, the trio are packed off to the Catholic School of the Incarnate Lord – Charles Lee Ray’s boyhood residence – ruled by the rather dogmatic Father Bryce (Devon Sawa, but reportedly no relation to either of his earlier characters).

Bad kids galore should provide a buffet of meat for Chucky to torment, a la the military academy seen way back in Child’s Play 3, but instead Season 2 embarks on a rather restrained path, with the few remaining dolls being quickly dealt with and, in one case, deprogrammed and turned into a Good Good Guy, who Jake quickly believes, along with new team member, Nadine.

Meanwhile, Tiffany struggles to prop up her Jennifer Tilly identity, and, when non-binary twins Glen and Glenda arrive for a visit, they’re accompanied by Jennifer’s real-life sister Meg, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, Sutton Stracke, and a mysterious butler. The episode openly excludes the other narrative entirely, functioning as a bizarre farce that ends with quad-amputee Nica being liberated, while Chucky ‘presents’ to the audience. It’s a weird bump in the road, exploiting Tilly’s comedic muscle, but sadly really sucks you out of the flow, reminding me of a review I saw way back when that posited the series has become a bit of an in-joke that only Tilly and Don Mancini are in on.

Things eventually realign: Kyle and Andy return, the priests and nuns finally face up to the reality of Chucky, the kids fall out, make up, fall out, make up, and then it kinda stops with one episode to go. In the finale, we leap another few months forward, to Christmas, back in Hackensack, where the final Chucky doll makes a play for the kids one last time, and Tiffany, now wanted for murder, tries to get her mitts on a new doll to transfer herself into.

Where the movies had slowed to an instalment every few years, the demands of a 10-part series and all of the criss-crossing storylines built up over thirty-plus years becomes an entanglement difficult to write itself out of. Consequently, the result is choppy and peppered with ideas and concepts seen in earlier movies as various character motivations collide. Dare I say, Mancini might need to kill some of his darlings for the next season to up the stakes.

Blurbs-of-interest: Dourif’s other slasher film credits include Color of Night, Trauma, Urban Legend, Chain Letter, Dead Scared, Rob Zombie’s Halloween and its sequel; Jennifer Tilly was also in The Caretaker and Far From Home; Devon Sawa was Alex in Final Destination; Meg Tilly was in Psycho II.

Reviews

Rankfest: Child’s Play

December 30, 2018 Hud One comment

The interesting thing about the Child’s Play/Bride of/Seed of/Curse of/Management Appraisal of/Grocery List of Chucky movies is that none of them are legitimately bad. Sure, some went for a very campy approach with in-jokes surely only Don Mancini and Jennifer Tilly were in on, but if they weren’t scary, they were at the very least funny.

Mancini’s unwavering commitment to the series also deserves a lot of respect. Most creators turned away from their projects when they didn’t get the critical acclaim they hungered for, but Mancini stayed with Chucky, ensuring that the continuity of the films has been maintained almost flawlessly.

How do they stack up?

7th best: Seed of Chucky (2004)

Probably waiting a bit too long to cash-in on the success of Bride, this fifth go-round was only a modest success, and represents the only strand in the canon to go unresolved in the form of Glen/Glenda, the offspring of Chucky and Tiffany, who travels to Hollywood in the hope of finding them on the set of Chucky Goes Psycho, starring Jennifer Tilly.

A huge amount of in-the-know jokes abound at the expense of horror, making the film a comedy first. That said, in this sense it at least succeeds in being an absolute riot, with some hilarious setups and cameos.

Best bit: Chucky runs Britney Spears off the road: “Oops! I did it again!”

6th: Cult of Chucky (2017)

The enthusiasm with which Curse was met didn’t quite carry over into the next straight-to-DVD/VOD feature, which reverted to the comedy>horror structure, but at least moves the story forward significantly by the end.

The concept of Charles Lee Ray’s spirit inhabiting several dolls at once ices the film with an amusing blood-red frosting, allowing for a veritable Doomsday Book of gags, but some gruesome demises too. Mancini’s ability to bring back in characters from previous installments must be pretty much unequalled in horror.

Best bit: A twisted revisit to the ceiling mirror slaying from Bride.

5th: Curse of Chucky (2013)

I got to see the European premiere of this at FrightFest and it was definitely a crowd pleaser. An effort to take the concept back to its more sinister roots. Here, Chucky is delivered to the home of an old acquaintance and wreaks havoc during a wake.

The smart move here was keeping Chucky’s movements off camera for a good portion of the running time, rewinding things back to the is it/isn’t it questions posed by the original. It runs a little too long given the small cast and setting.

Best bit: “It’s a doll. What’s the worst that could happen?”

4th: Child’s Play 3 (1991)

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, the saying goes. In the early 90s, various UK tabloid “news”papers decided to blame the murder of a toddler on a film his pair of 10-year-old killers supposedly watched (but it later turned out, didn’t), rather than look to greater problems in society, parenting, or the kind of right-wing bullshit they pedalled every day. They also took credit for the film being banned, which it never was.

Teenage Andy is packed off to a military academy just as Good Guy dolls are ready to go back into production. Chucky succeeds in mailing himself to the academy and the usual occurs. The setting is original and there are some good ideas, but Mancini later admitted he was forced to churn out a script he wasn’t altogether satisfied with.

Best bit: Garbage disposal demise.

3rd: The Original (1988)

Third!? Yes. I’d already seen a couple of the sequels by the time this came around and I was slightly underwhelmed, expecting an overarching classic that the follow-ups were but poor imitations of. Hell, I saw Dolly Dearest before I saw this!

I guess like any first-in-a-series horror movie, there’s a restraint that is accompanied by the thicker depths of storytelling – the canvas needs to be established before we draw all over it. I just find Child’s Play a bit… inaccessible. Whereas, I can slot into any of the sequels at any given time, I feel I owe more to watching this one (and also the originals of any other given franchise).

2nd: Child’s Play 2 (1990)

My first foray into Chucky-dom was this one, played repeatedly on cable back in the 90s, which is probably the most straight-up slasher of the lot. I can never remember if it’s supposed to pick up straight after the first one, or a year or two later, but Alex Vincent has, of course, sprouted.

Chucky rampages through various unfortunates in his bid to ‘hide his soul’ in Andy, and in doing so notches up some of the more memorable sequences of the franchise: The mean teacher beaten with a ruler, that guy from Ally McBeal asphyxiated, and the gloopy factory finale, where the doll just keeeeeeps on comin’ back.

1st: Bride of Chucky (1998)

The combination of depleting box office returns and the scandal around the third movie pretty much finished off Chucky as a horror force in the 90s, but then Scream came and tossed the salad, giving a series about a killer doll plenty of self-referential gags to chew on and spit out. Best idea? Give Chucky a pal.

Casting Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany was a masterstroke and once dolled, it seems strange to imagine the series without her and Dourif bouncing off one another. Adding in John Ritter as an overbearing patriarch also lends well to the comedic feel employed by Ronny Yu’s direction, which helped him land the Freddy vs Jason gig a few years later.

Lists

Back to the Bellylaughs

October 24, 2017 Hud Leave a comment

CULT OF CHUCKY

2017/18/88m

“You may feel a little prick.”

Director/Writer: Don Mancini / Cast: Fiona Dourif, Michael Terriault, Alex Vincent, Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Adam Hurtig, Zak Santiago, Elisabeth Rosen, Grace Lynn Kung, Ali Tataryn, Marina Stephenson Kerr.

Body Count: 8

“…The look on my victim’s face when they realise in that final moment that it’s all really happening: A children’s toy is actually beating them to death with a yardstick.”

Credit where credit’s due – the Child’s Play series has done an impressive job when it comes to continuity, more or less keeping on top of film-to-film plot lines for almost thirty years and seven movies. To that end, rather huge spoilers are necessary to ‘splain Cult of Chucky…

Four years after the events in Curse of, original hero Andy Barclay – now mid-30s – has kept Chucky’s living head in a safe at home, and ritually tortures it. Nica Pierce, meanwhile, has been locked up in an institution and convinced by her shrink that she was the one responsible for the murders of her family.

Said shrink decides to move Nica to an isolated lower security clinic now that she no longer blames it all on a possessed Good Guy Doll, going so far as to bring in such a doll to a group session. Nica is fine with it, and the doll is summarily adopted by fellow inmate Madeleine, who treats it like a real baby. Bitchy Claire doesn’t trust Nica; away-with-the-fairies Angela claims she received a phone call from Chucky, warning them all he’s coming back; and multiple-personality sufferer Malcolm flips between thinking he’s Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Phelps.

Nica receives a visit from Tiffany, who was somehow appointed guardian of her niece Alice, and breaks the news to her that Alice is dead. Broken, Nica attempts suicide but wakes in the morning to find her slashed wrist stitched up and a message for her left in blood. Meanwhile, another patient has successfully topped themselves, and the floodgates soon open in Nica’s memory.

Chucky stalks the halls, killing patients and staff by shattered glass and powerdrill, while Andy races to save the day, but has to get around Tiffany first.

The cult in Cult of Chucky is reached by a new voodoo curse that allows his spirit to possess multiple vessels at once, so ultimately we end up with this:

At the time Curse of was released, there was much hoopla over the back to being scary approach, which was the result of the remake falling through and the straight-to-DVD quasi-reboot coming instead. Though the film was sluggish in places due to its reduced budget, it succeeded in creating some atmosphere lacking in the Bride and Seed chapters.

Well, forget all that as Cult takes us back to the comic one-liners (albethem sometimes hilarious), wacky demises, Jennifer Tilly’s loony toon Tiffany back in the fray (but not centre stage), and a bit of a mess to try and untangle as things get weirder and weirder.

Mancini weaves things together well enough, leaving the door wide open for the eighth film – Christ knows what they’ll title it though – and as per Curse‘s post-credits gag, another face from pastures old puts in an appearance, giving the entire series a familial boost over its contemporaries. Fiona Dourif also gets to flex some reasonable acting muscle as well.

I’ve never been more than a casual fan of Chucky at best – he’s always entertaining and none of the instalments are crap, but I’d rank Cult in the lower echelons of the series, though it’s great to see the original creators still onboard and pushing things forward rather than phoning in a crummy remake or instalment-ignoring cash-grab as most of the others have done.

Blurb-of-interest: Adam Hurtig, who plays Malcolm, was also in Curse as Officer Stanton.

Reviews

Baby Doll

October 20, 2017 Hud Leave a comment

Day Four… Getting a bit over-Chuckified by this point…

SEED OF CHUCKY

2004/15/83m

“The family that slays together, stays together.”

Director/Writer: Don Mancini / Cast: Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Redman, Hannah Spearritt, John Waters, Billy Boyd, Steve Lawton, Jason Flemyng.

Body Count: 13

Laughter Lines: “If this is what it takes to be human, then I would rather take my chances as a supernaturally possessed doll – it’s less complicated!”

I remember a criticism of the series at the time of the release of Seed of Chucky that it’s become a joke only Don Mancini and Jennifer Tilly are in on and, despite how hilarious this outing is, they weren’t far off the mark. The horror series with some comedy had done a one-eighty and was now a comedy with some horror.

A pint-sized doll slashes its way through a British household in what’s revealed to be a dream of Shithead, a living doll imprisoned and mistreated by a ventriloquist. Shithead watches a report from the in-production movie Chucky Goes Psycho and realises Chucky and Tiffany are their parents, escapes, and makes it to Hollywood. When Shithead discovers C&T are just prop dolls, they read from the amulet they’ve had since forever and restore life to them one more time.

Chucky and Tiffany awake, kill a poor schmuck, and discover Shithead is without gender-decisive parts. They rename them Glen. Or Glenda. Pending their offspring’s decision. Chucky wants a son, Tiffany wants a daughter.

The trio of dolls hide out in lead-role Jennifer Tilly’s limousine and set up home at her place, planning to transfer themselves into the bodies of her and rapper-turned-director Redman. Jennifer, disillusioned with her career, plans to sleep her way into Redman’s Biblical epic, much to the disappointment of Jennifer’s PA Joan (former S Club 7 member, Spearritt), who is then subsequently fired.

Tiffany convinces Chucky to give up killing to set a better example to Glen/da, which he dishonestly agrees to, but offs Britney Spears and Serial Mom director John Waters’ paparazzi behind her back, taking Glen/da along with him. Tiffany meanwhile, sorts out a voodoo pregnancy for Jennifer, and tries to atone for her past sins in a hilarious scene where she calls the widow of a previous victim and apologises.

The film begins to fall to pieces towards the end as everyone falls out, Glen/da appears in drag, then wants to be a boy, or a girl, and the dolls attack each other while the now-heavily pregnant Jennifer tries to escape, eventually writing itself into a bit of an inescapable corner that Curse of Chucky largely ignored nine years later, but at least didn’t entirely retcon.

Best viewed as a dark comedy – you’ll certainly get a lot of laugh-mileage. The confusing narrative with Tilly voicing Tiffany was well as playing herself is difficult to get to grips with at various points, but the fans’ ambivalence and only moderate box office success (about half of Bride of Chucky‘s haul) kept a lid on things for almost a decade, during which threats of a remake were rife. That at least hasn’t happened yet, rubber fingers crossed.

Blurbs-of-interest: Tilly was also in The Caretaker and, in 1989, Far From Home; Dourif can also be found in Rob Zombie’s Halloween re-do’s, Urban Legend, Chain Letter, Dead Scared, Color of Night, and Trauma; Jason Flemyng (who later stated he wished he could erase this film from his resume) was in From Hell.

Reviews

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