Cult of Chucky

I finally got around to seeing all the Child’s Play / Chucky movies, and pound for pound, this is probably the most tolerable deep dive of a long-running horror franchise I’ve ever done. A few notes:

• The decision to continue with animatronics and puppetry for the duration of the series is absolutely crucial to its success. CGI would have made these movies unwatchable.
• I like how the series is kind of made up of rhyming couplets: The first movie (★★★) is mostly straight-faced; Child’s Play 2 (★★½) and 3 (★★) settle into conventional slasher rhythm and ramp up Chucky’s wisecracks; Bride of Chucky (★★★½) and Seed of Chucky (★★★½) go waaayyyy over the top into unapologetic camp; and Curse of Chucky (★★½) and Cult of Chucky (★★) take a more back-to-basics approach to horror with a few inventive twists to keep things interesting.
• My family didn’t have cable, so I asked a friend to tape Child’s Play off HBO for me in 1989 or 1990. (Killer Klowns from Outer Space was on the same tape.) I must have watched it a lot back then, because rewatching it now, so many little details that I haven’t thought about in decades were already etched in my memory.
• Grace Zabriskie was in Child’s Play 2 a few years before she had a recurring role on Seinfeld, and Child’s Play 2 is in Jerry’s VHS collection. Coincidence? Probably! But Pretty Woman, featuring Jason Alexander, is in that collection too, so maybe Seinfeld had a set dresser with a mischievous meta streak.
• Apparently Peter Jackson was the first choice to direct Child’s Play 3, which would undoubtedly have resulted in a better film, but the world is much better off with the amazing film he made instead, Braindead.
• Bride and Seed get the highest marks from me mainly because I’m simply astonished they were made at all, and especially Seed, whose Ed-Wood-inspired title character is not only transgender, but the result of two sentient killer dolls fucking. A Universal Pictures release! From this point on, the series embraces queerness more than any other mainstream horror franchise I can think of, certainly helped along by its creator, Don Mancini, who is gay.
• Chucky really benefits from being able to do his thing in a variety of environments and scenarios—apartments, foster homes, mental hospitals, factories, schools, carnivals, RVs, moving cars, etc.—and the budget constraints of the last two movies confining them each to a single location is a primary factor in their diminishing returns.