Cult of Chucky (2017)

2017

Directed by Don Mancini
Starring Fiona Dourif, Michael Therriault, Adam Hurtig, Alex Vincent, Jennifer Tilly and Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky

When I was a kid, I loved the hell out of the original trilogy of Child's Play flicks.  Hell, I still do.  Watching those movies always takes me right the hell back to my childhood, back to a time before my biggest fears were things like turning 35 in a couple months.  Buzzkill.  They used to play those films on USA CONSTANTLY around 1993/94, and every time they came on I was all over the channel like a moth being drawn to a light.  I liked everything about them; the characters, the atmosphere, the humor, and, of course, Brad Dourif doing the voice of the main man himself and managing to both creep the f**k out of me and make me laugh.  Sometimes within the same scene.

I also enjoyed the Bride and Seed movies that came later, no matter how much they ramped up the goofy.  But then came Curse of Chucky, reviewed on the blog a while back and coming out many years after the series had been dormant.  The tone this time was totally different; Don Mancini, the man who has either directed or written every single movie in the franchise (and is back once again for this particular movie in both capacities) decided to bring the series back to its dark roots.  For my money, though, that movie was WAY darker and more serious than even the original movie.  Instead, it just felt more like the gritty reboot that has been done to death in Hollywood over the past 15 years - albeit one with a fantastic adherence to continuity.  Well, now we're all the way up to the present day, and it's time to continue the epic story of serial killers trapped in dolls and all of the people that his life affects.  It truly is a Shakespearian tale.  Let's get to it.

Well, in Curse of Chucky, we had a much more contained story within the family home of Nica Pierce.  She was played by Fiona Dourif, Brad's real-life daughter (and man, there is a strong resemblance), and by the end of that movie she was framed for the murders of her entire family and sent away to a mental institution.  Four years have passed, and Nica is still around, still played by Fiona, and she now believes that she was responsible for all of those deaths and that Chucky was just a manifestation of her psychosis.  The script actually does a decent-enough job setting up the institution as the setting for everything that is to come, to say nothing of some of the cameos we've already enjoyed.

See, Alex Vincent is in this movie.  The man, the myth, the legend.  The guy who once played Andy Barclay in the first two movies is now back as an adult after the awesome post-credits sequence from the last one, and he is in possession of the original Chucky's head.  Which he constantly tortures, no less.  Yeah, this ain't exactly the time period where Chucky used to beat teachers to death with rulers.  In a move that comes as a surprise to absolutely no one, people soon start dying in that mental institution, and we get kind of a dual-setting storyline where Nica deals with the presence of Chucky and her own slipping psychopathy while Andy deals with...doing something about it.  Again, truly Shakespearian.

And boy, what a cast of characters we have at the institution.  It's lorded over by Dr. Foley (Michael Therriault), and God is he annoying.  He's got a face that can strip wallpaper, and he's a perv.  There's another patient who goes by the moniker "Multiple" Malcolm (Adam Hurtig), with whom Nica shares a sex scene (holy Christ) and who eventually believes himself to be Mark Zuckerburg.  Honestly, this happens.  And once the Chucky doll shows up at the place, there's another patient who believes it to be her baby.  That storyline is creepy in the bad way, in that it actually gets under your skin and makes you feel kind of dirty.  I think Mancini was aiming for poignancy with this storyline, but wow, does it fail.

This movie really is the Chucky show.  Slowly but surely, it's revealed that there are no less than three of them running around in the institution in some nice nods to series continuity that fellow nerds like myself will pick up on.  That's where the movie gets its name, and it's where this movie gets its climactic scenes.  Eventually, Andy makes his way to the scene of the crimes.  And eventually, we get some showdown scenes and Chucky once again trying to do that familiar voodoo chant.  Only there is kind of a twist this time that feels like it was pulled directly out of Don Mancini's ass and is explained away in about .5 seconds flat.

Yes, kids, we have another Lick Ness Monster review that's decidedly negative in tone, but if you want some counterbalance I seem to be in the minority about these newer Chucky movies.  Yeah, they're darker and they're deadly serious.  A lot of people seem to like the approach, but I think it kills what made this series unique.  If you want some positives, though, there's plenty to talk about here.  In addition to Brad Dourif doing yet another home run job as the voice of Chucky, we get Jennifer Tilly (still smokin' hot at 50+ years old) returning to the series in scenes that steal the show.  The effects work on the various Chucky dolls are also top notch, and some of the kills are pretty cringe-worthy.  Not scary in the least bit, but cringe-worthy.

So what don't I like about this movie?  Well, it's not fun.  That was always what I could count on the [i]Child's Play[/i] movies of my youth for - a fun time in front of the TV.  There's this pervasive sense of darkness that just eats up any and all fun to be had, and also a kind of mean-spiritedness.  You want proof of that?  Just watch this movie and get a load of how it ends.  But remember to stay tuned after the credits for another fun cameo; it was definitely a big crowd-pleaser for this reporter.

Rating time.  This flick gets a ** out of ****.  Yeah, I know that the Internet horror community consensus says differently, but this newfangled Chucky universe just isn't for me.