The seventh film in the Chucky series, Cult of Chucky, has no business being as good as it is. After I finished it, I marathoned the other murderous doll's films that I'd missed, hoping they all were hidden gems like this one. They... were not. Child's Play 3 is a dud, Bride of Chucky is a failed experiment in slapstick, and Seed of Chucky posits that this freckled child toy actually fucks. No thanks. It's in 2013's Curse of Chucky that things get back on track, swapping out expanding the mythology for a simple horror premise: Chucky being mysteriously delivered to a new family in a big house.
So suffice it to say, I'm pretty excited about the release of Child's Play next month, a reboot of the Chucky franchise with the likes of Bryan Tyree Henry, Aubrey Plaza, and Mark Hamill in the cast. As a child of the nineties, I've seen Chucky sneer at me from Blockbuster VHS display cases throughout my childhood, and I think I saw the second half of Child's Play 2 when I was far too young once, and it fucked me up.
Chucky, for some reason, has endured despite his less-than-fully-serious appearance. He's in the pantheon of horror icons like Freddy Kruger, Jason, maybe even Michael Myers but, yeah, he's a redheaded kid's doll. Freddy, Jason, and Michael have had spins put on them and reboots seemingly every few years, but—get this—the original Child's Play franchise is actually still going. I had no idea until I found Cult of Chucky on Netflix.
In 2013's Curse of Chucky, he (of course) kills nearly everyone involved, save for the paraplegic Nica, who is in a mental institution at the beginning of Cult of Chucky, because even though Chucky's reign of terror has been going on for nearly 20 years, no one believes the girl who says a toy murdered her entire family. A new Chucky doll (two, in fact) are brought to the facility to help Nica with her therapy and, well, you get where this is going.
Except it goes there and then some. There are some wickedly inventive, gory kills. Brad Dourif, who has voiced Chucky since his very first appearance, is as good as ever, and director Don Mancini (who co-created the character to begin with) makes the most of the bright, sterile hospital as a funhouse of horrors where Chucky(s) can wreak havoc.
As the name suggests, there is more to this story than just a foul-mouthed toddler-sized maniac on the loose: Chucky has a following, some maybe even inside the institution. Cult of Chucky's breathless final 20 minutes reintroduces some old faces, and takes the franchise in a very bold new direction which is about to take place on a new TV series that was recently announced, parallel to however this reboot pans out.
A sensitive treatise on mental illness this is not; Cult of Chucky is crass, gross, and mean-spirited. It's also a real blast, and a reminder of why some iconic horror characters are able to stick around for so long.
