Monday 9 October 2017

Cult of Chucky Review

So I have mentioned how I came to horror before and how I used to grab pretty much whatever was available to rent for 50pence a night from the middle of my old Video Rental store, well one of the games I grabbed one weekend was Childsplay. Now the first Childsplay absolutely blew me away I thought it was an awesome film, it was just such a neat idea and Chucky was so well done the way he moved the voice they had given him, back then the second I had finished watching the film I wanted more, little did I know that years latter I would be watching the 7th film. Not only have they reached the 7th film they have actually done it without either going in to space or hell, recasting the main killer or rebooting it.

So with this being the 7th film in a series despite it not having a number in the title do you need to have seen all of the other films for it to make sense? Well it would certainly help if you had seen a few of them, the original so you know who the character of Andy is, Bride so you know who Tiffany is and Curse of Chucky as Nica (played by Fiona Dourif) returns from that film and well its also very obviously a continuation from that film. In general the more you have seen the more in jokes and references you will understand so the more you will get from the experience. OK so now before I go further I want to say that there will be some spoilers in this review but I will try not to go too far into all of the twists and turns or give too much away.


So this film continues a short while after the end of  Curse Of Chucky (A great film I highly recommend) all of Mica's family are dead apart from her niece and she is locked up in a psychiatric hospital as everyone believes that she is responsible for the murders. Nica’s has been receiving therapy including the electro shock kind and has been pretty much convinced that Chucky is nothing but a figment of her imagination, that she was/is mentally ill and her mind dreamt him up as a coping mechanism so it could try to protect her from the knowledge that she sliced and diced everyone else who died in the last film due to jealousy over the fact she was stuck in a chair and her sister could walk and had a partner and a child. We join her just before she is transferred to a medium security mental health facility.

Well if you watched Curse you will know that right at the end an adult Andy Barcley (the child from the original Childsplay and Chuckys oldest nemesis) showed up and blew Chucky to pieces , so where is Andy during all of this and where is Chucky? Well Andy has his own place and well he is basically the caretaker of Chuckys head which is still alive swearing threatening and laughing away. Andy watches Chucky talks to him and even tortures what is left of him, why he doesn't simply burn whats left who knows maybe its partly because he feels if he killed Chucky there would be no proof of everything that he and Nica had gone through (we do latter see a Video of him tyring to use the head to prove Nica Innocent) but still personally I would have burned the living crap out of that head. Still I need to say I love the stuff between Chucky and Andy I think they have this fascinating relationship there is some degree of respect as well as hate there, they both push each others buttons and they both know that the other has fucked up there life/plans. It also made me wonder if in some way the whole experience of dealing with Chucky had warped Andy not making him evil but certainly blurring the edges of his moral compass what with the fact that he seems to enjoy torturing Chucky so much, still who am I to judge Chucky has killed or been responsible for pretty much everyone who has ever cared about Andy leaving his life in one way or another.

The majority of this story is really Nica's though we get to see her moved to a medium security unit, we get to see her meet and begin to get to know her fellow inmates and then Chucky is introduced to proceedings at first the Doctor brings in a Good Guy doll which happens to be a Chucky, he informs everyone that there were around 50 different good guy dolls and that a certain percentage of the dolls where Chuckys and that he purchased this one for well therapy reasons. We then get to see how various people react to both Chucky and to Nica, once again Chucky is a master at knowing who to use how to use them and how to make the audience laugh.

OK so that's as much of the story as I am going to give away so lets get into what I thought about the film. Well I really enjoyed it but I did feel like the film brought new ideas to the table but then didn't fully develop them as much as it could have. The film was good I would give it a 7 out of 10 but  I really felt that there was so much more there which was left unsaid or unexplored. I could have had a lot more of the Andy and Chucky interactions, I would have liked to have seen a scenario which was a much more sort of cat and mouse battle of both brains and will between them with each thinking they had the upper hand on the other. I guess the most important thing is that this film has made me want to talk to other fans about it and it has left me wanting more, I want an 8th Childsplay, I want it soon and I want it to link to this film, I want to see what happens next and I want it to expand on some of the possibilities that I feel that this one did not fully grab ahold of.

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