Description from IMDB:
After her mother’s mysterious death, Nica begins to suspect
that the talking, red-haired doll her visiting niece has been playing with may
be the key to recent bloodshed and chaos.
Notable actors: Brad Dourif (of course), Fiona Dourif (his
real-life daughter), Danielle Bisutti, A Martinez
My thoughts:
I did not go into this movie with high expectations. While I enjoyed the previous films, a
direct-to-video sequel that comes 9 years after the last installment doesn’t
exactly scream “high quality”. Still, I
wasn’t looking for anything amazing, just something entertaining. So, with my expectations cranked down to an
acceptable level, I was ready to begin.
Let’s start with the things I liked about this.
Fiona Dourif was terrific as Nica, the wheelchair-bound
protagonist who is suspicious of the Chucky doll from the moment he arrives at
the house. The acting in this movie was
considerably below top-shelf, which only made Fiona’s performance stand out
even more.
The majority of this movie takes place in the old house
where Nica and her recently deceased mother lived. It looked fantastic. It kind of had the vibe of an old castle, or
a smaller version The Overlook Hotel.
Huge and spacious, but sparsely furnished and dimly lit. It allowed the film to feel claustrophobic,
while still allowing for a lot of shadows and corners for Chucky to hide
in. Even though we see much of the house
throughout the course of the movie, I always felt there was another room I hadn’t
seen yet.
Even though I liked the look and feel of the house, I still
kind of had a problem with it. The size
of the house (combined with the sparse furnishings) was pretty
distracting. They never said why they
were living in this house. I figured there
had to be a story behind it. But, unless
I missed it, there was no such story.
Maybe it’s not a big deal, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Perhaps this isn’t a problem for everyone,
but I found myself waiting for the bomb to drop. I was waiting for the scene where they would
talk about this house, and how them living in it was central to the plot
somehow. I felt like Dignan, screaming,
“How did an asshole like Bob get such a nice kitchen?”
There was a bit of showing the audience the weapons of the
family’s destruction early on. “Here’s a
knife. Here’s an axe. Here’s some rat poison.” And so on.
The Evil Dead remake did this
extremely well, building up a level of anticipation for the promise of gore to
come. The same concept was at work
here. The same concept was at work
here. And, while it wasn’t done nearly
as well as Evil Dead, it was still
enjoyable.
I really love the delivery guy at the beginning of the
movie. It was like they cast him
straight out of porn. “Hey there, pretty
lady. I like your face. Is your mother home? Yes?
Too bad. We could’ve had some
fun.” (This is a bit of an exaggeration,
but not as much as you might think.)
He fixes the cable?
Now for the things I didn’t like.
The Chucky animation looked horrible. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the other
movies, so it’s possible that the animation in those is worse than I remember,
but it was really cheesy here. I wasn’t
looking for it to be perfect, but it was distractingly bad.
There’s a trope that is common in movies with children, and
I really dislike it. It’s when the child
is the only one who can hear the doll talking,
yet acts like everything is normal.
In this movie, the little girl kept saying, “Chucky told me this.” At one point, she dropped the line, “Life’s a
bitch and then you die, bleeding like a stuck pig.” Which, while humorous, struck me as extremely
odd. What little girl says stuff like
that? Wouldn’t she think it was strange
that Chucky told her such a thing? She
was young (they don’t mention her exact age, and I’m terrible with the ages of
children, but I would say she was no older than 7). Wouldn’t she be freaking out that this doll –
which is almost the same size she is – is talking to her and saying things like
that? Sure, the Good Guys dolls talk, but
it’s mostly benign chatter like, “I’m your friend to the end,” and “I like
hugs.” Not “Your whole family is going
to die tonight.” Unless we’re dealing
with extremely stupid children, they would react differently than the children
in these movies do.
There’s a scene where a wheelchair hits a full-grown-man,
and he does a complete flip. I don’t
necessarily care that this flies in the face of Earth gravity so much as I care
that it looks terrible.
There was a complete lack of understanding of how electronics
work. On multiple occasions the power
was blinking in the house, and the screens of the laptops in use were also
blinking (in one instance, the screen turned to static snow, like an old TV
with bunny ears on a terrible connection).
Laptops have batteries. If the
power blinks, laptop screens do not blink.
And yet, over and over again, that’s exactly what happened here.
They worked very hard to work the story of this family in
with the first Child’s Play
movie. While I enjoyed the idea behind it,
the execution was terrible, and it resulted in entirely too many false
endings. It’s like they weren’t quite
sure how to end it. The first ending was
fine, if a bit sudden and more than a little illogical (I won’t discuss those
issues here, since it would include a pretty big spoiler). But each one after that got a little more
goofy. I could almost see the filmmakers
winking at me. “See? See?!
Get it?!” It got to be a bit old
by the end of it. (The end of the last
false ending before the credits was really terrible. And then, of course, there’s a stinger after
the credits. Just thinking about it
makes me tired.)
My main problem was this: this movie didn’t seem like it
knew what it wanted to be. It was pretty
serious and dark for the most part. But,
eventually, it turned into dumb Chucky one-liners, while never changing the
tone of the movie. It’s like they wanted
to mix the darker horror elements of the original with the goofiness of the
latter movies, but it just didn’t work.
If there’s a happy medium between those, they didn’t find it.
All of this sounds like I hated it. I didn’t hate it. For the most part, I enjoyed watching
it. If nothing else, it’s worth watching
for Fiona Dourif and the creepy spaciousness of the house. If you’re a fan of the previous movies, you
may not love this, but I’m sure you’ll find enough to enjoy to make it worth
your while.
In summary: it wasn’t great, but it was more-or-less
enjoyable. A rousing review, I know.
