Review: "Bride of Chucky" Revived the Franchise

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 130 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux

Bride of Chucky (1998)
Running time:  89 minutes (1 hour, 29 minutes)
MPAA – R for strong horror violence and gore, language, and some sexual content, and brief drug use
DIRECTOR:  Ronny Yu
WRITER:  Don Mancini (based upon characters he created)
PRODUCERS:  David Kirschner and Grace Gilroy
CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Peter Pau
EDITORS:  Randolph K. Bricker and David Wu
COMPOSER:  Graeme Revell

HORROR/COMEDY

Starring:  Jennifer Tilly (also voice), Brad Dourif (voice), Nick Stabile, Katherine Heigl, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Alexis Arquette, John Ritter, and Kathy Najimy

The subject of this movie review is Bride of Chucky, a 1998 horror-comedy from director Ronny Yu.  This was the fourth movie in the Child’s Play film franchise, and the first released since 1991’s Child’s Play 3.  With Bride of Chucky, the franchise changed in tone, emphasizing black comedy and parody (of itself and other films).  The franchise also started to use the name “Chucky” in the film titles, instead of Child’s Play.

Chucky, the doll possessed by a serial killer, discovers the perfect mate to kill and revive into the body of another doll.  The fourth film in the Child’s Play series, Bride of Chucky, takes the inherent humor of the series and moves it up about three notches.  So how does Chucky (voice of Brad Dourif), the murderous doll, come back from the dead for a sequel after being killed again and again?

Chucky, of course, was once a human and the mass murderer, Charles Lee Ray, who used some kind of magic (voodoo) spell to transfer his spirit from his mortally wounded body into that of a “Chucky” doll.  Ray’s plan was to transfer his spirit into another body, but that failed over the course of three Child’s Play movies.  Now, in Bride of Chucky, Charles Lee Ray’s girlfriend, a wannabe killer named Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly), bribes a policeman to steal the “Chucky” doll (from Child’s Play 3, in which is was almost completely destroyed) from the evidence room in which it’s hidden.  After dispatching the dumb pig, Tiffany uses voodoo to revive Charles Lee Ray’s spirit and bring the Chucky doll back to life.  However, Chucky isn’t showing Tiffany the love and respect she thought he’d give her as a reward for reviving him.  Pissed off at her antics, Chucky kills Tiffany and uses the same voodoo that transferred his spirit from his dying human body into the Chucky doll (as seen in the first Child’s Play) to transfer Tiffany’s spirit into a bridal doll.

After some initial disagreements, the murderous doll couple, Chucky and Tiffany, band together and coerce two teen lovers-on-the-run, Jesse (Nick Stabile) and Jade (Katherine Heigl) to transport them to the New Jersey graveyard where Charles Lee Ray is buried.  Jesse and Jade are unaware of Chucky and Tiffany’s diabolical plan.  The evil dolls want to use a Satanic voodoo amulet on Ray’s corpse to transfer their spirits in the young lovers’ bodies.

Bride of Chucky doesn’t take itself seriously, but the movie isn’t the kind of comedy that pokes fun of slasher movie conventions and clichés.  Bride of Chucky is less like Scream and more in the vein of something like The Evil Dead.  Chucky creator Don Mancini’s script is a funny and as sarcastic and caustic as Mancini’s earlier Child’s Play scripts.  However, it is director Ronny Yu who seems to take most delight in turning up the comedy even more and transforming this entry in franchise into a gleefully insane and mean-spirited delight.  He seems to go out of his way to offend the sensibilities of even the most tolerant horror movie fans.

It’s that “don’t give a fuck” attitude, probably best exemplified in the delightful voice work of Brad Dourif as Chucky and the special effects work on the doll that makes this film series unique, and Dourif, Mancini, Yu, and the effects crew raise their game for this film.  Although there are times that this film goes too far in terms of violence and seems a bit too bloody, Bride of Chucky is a slasher movie delight, and for this horror fan, damn fun to watch.

7 of 10
B+

Updated:  Monday, October 07, 2013

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Freddie Vs. Jason Simply Bad

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 128 (of 2003) by Leroy Douresseaux


Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)
Running time: 97 minutes (1 hour, 37 minutes)
MPAA – R for pervasive strong horror violence/gore, gruesome images, sexuality, drug use and language
DIRECTOR: Ronny Yu
WRITERS: Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (based upon characters created by Wes Craven and Victor Miller)
PRODUCER: Sean S. Cunningham
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Fred Murphy (D.o.P.)
EDITOR: Mark Stevens
COMPOSER: Graeme Revell

HORROR/FANTASY/ACTION/THRILLER

Starring: Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Ken Kirzinger, Kelly Rowland, Jason Ritter, James Callahan, Brendan Fletcher, and Lochlyn Munro

There’s little reason to say a whole lot about the long-awaited film showdown between two venerable movie maniacs, Freddy Krueger of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th films. It’s not simply a question of loving or hating it; when you get down to the bare bones, Freddy Vs. Jason is a truly awful film.

Freddy (Robert Englund) is in hell, fuming because he can’t get at the children of Elm Street in the town of Springwood. The parents and town leaders have found a few ways of keeping Freddy from the minds and dreams of their children. Thus, Freddy resurrects Jason (Ken Kirzinger) in hopes that Jason will scare up memories of Freddy. Of course, a plot, even a silly one, between two undead, homicidal maniacs is bound to fall apart. Jason gets out of hand, taking all the kills for himself, so Freddy decides to take him out of the equation.

Ronny Yu, who breathed new life into the Child’s Play series with Bride of Chucky, can’t do a damn thing for Freddy Vs. Jason, and I totally blame the manically lame script. Whereas Bride was perverse, funny, and perversely funny, Freddy is clunky, dull, and painfully dry. I think the writers, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, instead of telling a good story, used too much of their script to shoehorn into this new film all the continuity and characteristics of the two original series. Because of this, more than half of Freddy Vs. Jason is without a story beyond what amounts to preflight commentary. There are quite a few good moments in the film, but everything else is, to speak plainly and crudely, crap.

Although the film as some imaginative effects, it’s not nearly as imaginative as the original Nightmare films, which all surely had smaller budgets than this film. Oh, it does have its moments, but it’s cursed by all the things that typically make horror movies bad: poor acting, weak plot and script, and lack of imagination. As far as horror films goes, most fans are willing to overlook all those problems if the damn thing is scary, and Freddy Vs. Jason isn’t, not even close. It’s just vile and violent, mostly a self-parody that exudes an air of cynicism about itself and the audience.

We, who loved the originals, were programmed to come, despite the misgivings we had from the moment we first heard of that “they” were making a Freddy Vs. Jason movie. Some of us just can’t resist, so we deserve the occasional cow patty thrown squarely in our mugs. The real tale will be told when we see how many of us come back for more, because in the end we deserve a much better film than this.

2 of 10
D