The Great Catch-Up Returns with a Fond Look at the Nifty 2017 Horror Sequel Cult of Chucky
Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of The Great Catch-Up, a column I launched with great fanfare last year. As its title hopefully conveys, The Great Catch-Up gives me an opportunity to finally see all the important motion pictures I missed the first time around for various reasons.
I wrote pieces on Halloween Ends and The Rise of Skywalker that received terrific responses. I enjoyed my journey through the films of the past decade, and so did my readers.
Then, in classic Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place tradition, I got distracted. Oh, sweet blessed lord, did I ever get distracted. I fear that unless I turn my life around soon, my epitaph will read, “Nathan Rabin 1976-2087: He was going to do great things, but he got distracted.”
There are so many mesmerizing, essential and controversial movies I can cover for The Great Catch-Up. For example, I have inexplicably not seen Sorry to Bother You, and now that DOOM is dead and Kanye’s a Nazi, Boots Riley is my all-time favorite rapper. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Riley’s film, yet I’ve somehow seen the movie where Winnie the Pooh disembowels teenagers, but not the acclaimed directorial debut of a man whose mind and art I have loved and celebrated for thirty years.
In a related development, I am definitely going to see Sorry to Bother You in the very near future. I need to push past my unfortunate predilection for self-sabotage and write things that might appeal to an audience beyond the seventy people who read this website religiously.
The last two winners in Great Catch-Up polls were 2017’s Cult of Chucky and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. I am a big fan of Scorsese. I think he’s great. And he seems to know a lot about film! A real movie buff, that guy.
Unfortunately, The Irishman is seven and a half hours long, while Cult of Chucky clocks in at a more reasonable 90 minutes.
I came to Cult of Chucky backward. My wife and I are huge fans of the television adaptation Chucky, which is one of the most tender and sensitive depictions of gay interracial teen romance in pop culture. It is also an audacious and wildly ambitious horror comedy/satire.
Chucky builds upon the world that Child’s Play guru Don Mancini, who has been with the franchise since 1988’s Child’s Play and has writing credits on every film in the series, has built over the course of three and a half decades of meta-textual weirdness.
It brings back Alex Vincent as Andy Barclay, a PTSD-ravaged survivor who first tangled with the evil doll voiced by Brad Dourif all the way back in 1988 when he was seven years old.
The survivors of Chucky and the Child’s Play series are defined by their trauma and damage. Chucky and the later Child’s Play sequels are about weary souls wrestling with the kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that no one talks about because it’s rooted in deadly clashes with an evil doll possessed by the sinister spirit of a prolific serial killer.
Andy is deeply unwell. He’s introduced on a date that quickly goes south because of his unfortunate and eminently Googlable past before heading home to drink beer, smoke a joint, and torture the disembodied head of Chucky.
He’s a sick fuck, but who can blame him? I had a difficult childhood. Andy Barclay had a REALLY tough time growing up.
Fiona Dourif returns as Nica Pierce, the wheelchair-bound protagonist of 2013’s The Curse of Chucky. Dourif is yet another beautiful actress who is the daughter of a weird-looking character actor.
Brad Dourif has beautiful eyes and an intensity his spectacularly talented daughter matches. She has an extraordinary presence and a sense of vulnerability heightened by playing a disabled character who is resourceful but forced to push through her limitations in order to survive.
Fiona Dourif brings a real sense of loss and despair to a character defined by her relationship with a cunning, voodoo-adept children’s toy voiced by her iconic old man in Jack Nicholson in The Shining mode.
Fiona Dourif is sometimes terrorized by her father’s voice. Sometimes, she is possessed by the spirit of her father, and sometimes, she plays her father in gender-bending Chucky flashbacks.
To save money, The Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky are limited to a single spooky setting. The Curse of Chucky was a haunted house movie in Child’s Play sequel form. Cult of Chucky cheekily moves the action to the auspicious place where Brad Dourif’s extraordinary film career began.
Dourif picked up an Oscar nomination for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s a film referenced by Chucky (whose voice actor is doing one of pop culture’s more impressive and enduring Jack Nicholson impersonations) while galivanting murderously around a mental institution.
Despite being held criminally liable for killing five people, Nica Pierce is transferred to a more lenient mental hospital where, in a decidedly misguided bit of psychotherapy, the creepily controlling and paternalistic Dr. Foley brings in a Chucky doll in a failed attempt to convince Nica that he’s just a cheap hunk of molded plastic and not a prolific serial killer in a cunning new/old form.
Cult of Chucky has a smartly limited cast of characters. It is an elegant piece of storytelling that gets us to know and care about its misfits and oddballs before Chucky brutally murders them in a variety of creative ways.
Watching Cult of Chucky made me wonder if Chucky was the funniest slasher. Freddy Krueger is an impish scamp full of sassafrass. He certainly makes the most of the word “bitch.” But Chucky has a smart-ass delivery, a dark, frequently exercised sense of humor, and an innate sense of the ridiculousness of his life and afterlife.
Late in the film Chucky rhapsodizes about the surreal nature of his existence when he tells two doppelgangers about how he savors “the look on my victim’s face when they realize, in that final moment, a children’s toy is actually beating them to death with a yardstick! Or setting them on fire! Eviscerating them! All actual examples!”
As always, Brad Dourif’s delivery is perfect, the ideal combination of crazed psycho killer and enthusiastic open mic night stand-up comedian. Acknowledging the impossible, improbable nature of Chucky’s situation and past does not make him any less of a threat.
The genius of Chucky is that it knows how preposterous the concept of an unkillable child’s toy powered by voodoo is, yet it is legitimately scary all the same.
In Cult of Chucky Nica’s fellow mental patients fall under the sinister sway of Chucky. An old woman thinks he’s a delusion. A mother who did something horrible to her own baby takes on Chucky as a surrogate child. She even tries to breastfeed the little bastard.
Chucky takes great delight in separating mental patients and staff from their limbs. He’s a poet of brutality, a true artist of the evil and the obscene. But he derives just as much joy in tormenting his victims, in toying with them like a cat batting about a terrified mouse. He’s playing the long game and all the angles.
Cult of Chucky morphs into the Cult of Chuckys. There are a number of different Chuckys that are different but also, on some level, the same. There’s the destroyed disembodied head Andy tortures as well as variations that are newer and cuter but every bit as murderously malevolent.
Audiences have reason to be skeptical of direct-to-video horror sequels, but this clever, scary, well-written, and well-acted sleeper, which is better than 95 percent of theatrically released horror movies, threatens to give them a good name.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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