#×our love story could be kind of gory [Doug]

[garden-of-seraphim]

okay sorry in advance for this but I need to make a post compiling All my fo tags so I don't have to fully retype them every time. ty tumblr for saving tags so I type out the first few letters/words and it offers me the whole thing <3

if tumblr cuts me off I'll just make a comment to keep adding tags hfhxhchc

[the-desolated-quill]

Toy Story: Why I Love Chucky - Quill’s Scribbles

Yes! Yes! Yes! I know you’re waiting impatiently for me to continue reviewing Doctor Who and I will get back to it, I promise. But the trailer for Orion Pictures Child’s Play reboot was released yesterday and I want to take a moment to talk about quite possibly one of the weirdest horror franchises ever made.

My long term followers will know that I’m not really a fan of gory horror films due to the fact that I’m a grade A wuss whose backbone went on holiday to Barcelona in 1996 and never returned. However, as squeamish as I am at the sight of blood, I don’t mind gore so much if it’s in a comedic context. It’s why I don’t find the gore in Deadpool frightening. It’s cartoony and over the top, knowingly poking fun at other violent superheroes like Wolverine and the Punisher. The same is true of the Evil Dead films. Yes they’re violent, but there’s also a camp silliness to them that relieves the tension. The Child’s Play franchise is different in that the first three films (the first Child’s Play in particular) are intended to be straightforward horror films. A serial killer transferring his soul into a child’s toy and killing people. And yes, that is really scary... but... it’s a child’s toy.

It was this that allowed me to get into the Child’s Play movies. Yes it’s gory. Yes it’s often frightening. But it’s also downright hilarious.

I mean just listen to the premise. A serial killer called Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky, uses a voodoo spell he just happens to have learnt to transfer his soul into a doll in order to escape from the cops. Then rather than do something sensible like keep a low profile, he instead chooses to start killing the family who bought him. Then, weirder still, he tries to transfer his soul into Andy Barclay, the boy who owns the doll, and that’s his motive for each subsequent movie because Andy is the first person to learn the secret of Chucky and therefore is the only eligible body Chucky can possess. Oh yeah, and if Chucky doesn’t possess Andy, then the doll will become more human and his soul will be trapped in it forever.

I mean... what can you possibly say to that? It’s so odd and random, it practically borders on self parody. Which is fortunate because that’s EXACTLY what the franchise ends up doing!

After Child’s Play 3, the next two films in the franchise, Bride Of Chucky and Seed Of Chucky, veer heavily into horror comedy territory. We’re introduced to Chucky’s girlfriend Tiffany, played by Jennifer Tilly, who also gets her soul transferred into a doll and the two try to possess the bodies of an eloping couple. Then at one point in the film, the two dolls have sex... somehow... and at the end Tiffany gives birth to a ventriloquist dummy called Glen. 

But wait. That’s just Bride Of Chucky. Seed Of Chucky is even weirder.

So Glen reunites with Chucky and Tiffany in Hollywood and the three of them try to possess, I shit you not, Jennifer Tilly. Yes. The actual Jennifer Tilly. They also kidnap her chauffeur for Chucky and for Glen they need a baby to possess, so Tiffany gets Chucky to masturbate and then inseminates Jennifer Tilly with a turkey baster. 

Oh, and then it turns out Glen has a split personality called Glenda who has inherited all of Chucky’s murderous impulses because this film isn’t weird enough already. The plan completely falls apart however when Chucky refuses to give up being a serial killer in order to raise a family, wanting to now stay as a doll forever, Tiffany dies and Glen kills Chucky. Five years later, Jennifer Tilly gives birth to twins, Glen and Glenda, and she then kills the nanny, revealing that Tiffany managed to transfer her soul into Jennifer’s body after all. So Jennifer Tilly is playing Tiffany playing Jennifer Tilly.

Yes, I know. It’s stupid. It’s crazy. It’s convoluted as fuck. These films make absolutely no sense whatsoever... and I LOVE them!

I know there are die hard Child’s Play fans who really don’t like Bride and Seed, but I personally adore them. They are just so unashamedly daft, it’s hard not to enjoy yourself watching them. I think what helps is that the central premise itself is inherently silly, so it makes sense to dive headfirst into the ridiculous comedy of it all, and Bride and Seed seem to take the Gremlins 2 route of being satires of horror sequels rather than being actual horror sequels. Hell, Chucky basically gives up his quest to find a human body and chooses to stay as a doll simply because it’s a good marketing gimmick. How can you not love that kind of tongue in cheek self awareness?

Bride and Seed are canon by the way. I’m not even joking. The next two movies have narrative ties to them. Tiffany even shows up in Curse Of Chucky, still in Jennifer Tilly’s body, and the writer Don Mancini has said that Glen/Glenda will be coming back too.

After Seed Of Chucky, Child’s Play went the straight to DVD route, but unlike most straight to DVD movies, Curse Of Chucky and Cult Of Chucky were actually surprisingly good. These films go back to the original Child’s Play’s darker horror roots, but manage to maintain the self aware humour of Bride and Seed. They’re not as funny as those films, but they’re still really entertaining and really suspenseful, as well as adding interesting lore to the franchise. In Curse Of Chucky, the family he’s terrorising turn out to have been old friends of his until he killed them and severely injured a heavily pregnant Sarah, which caused the main character Nica to be a paraplegic and is actually the crime Chucky was running away from in the first film before transferring his soul into the doll. After that, in Cult Of Chucky, we see a now grown up Andy Barclay return and we’re introduced to the idea that Chucky somehow managed to transfer his soul into multiple dolls. I haven’t the faintest idea how that works, but it honestly leads to some of the funniest scenes in the movie, so I’m not complaining. It’s also nice to see a horror film set in a mental hospital that doesn’t make mentally ill people the bad guys. Oh and Kyle, Andy’s step sister from the second film, comes back in a post credits scene to torture the original Chucky doll, so that should be interesting.

And that’s the original Child’s Play movies. They’re intense, frightening, silly, farcical and utterly enjoyable. I’m not in any way suggesting they’re groundbreaking movies, but they’re unique in that they’re a real oddity in the slasher genre and have managed to carve a nice little niche for themselves.

In my opinion, two things contribute to Child’s Play’s success. The first is Brad Dourif as Chucky. He’s amazing. A maniacal, charismatic performance that’s both frightening and hysterical in equal measure. Like Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, Dourif has become intrinsically linked to the character. You can’t imagine anyone else playing him. The second is the franchise’s creator Don Mancini. Unlike the vast majority of horror franchises that are often ripped away from their original creators and become little more than shallow cash cows for movie studios, Don Mancini has managed to keep hold of the rights to Chucky. He has written every single movie and directed Seed, Curse and Cult. He’s like the Doug Naylor of horror movies. He created this franchise, he loves this franchise, he got the franchise through its various rough patches and when he became sick of studio interference, he just went ‘fuck it’ and decided to make his own Chucky films instead. So there is a consistent narrative voice throughout all the films, which is rare not just for horror films, but films in general. Films, especially sequels, are often passed from screenwriter to screenwriter before being approved for production, so to have a franchise authored entirely by one person makes Chucky stand out. It’s what made the bizarre comedy in Bride and Seed feel less alien to the much darker Child’s Play trilogy and the straight to DVD movies. They’re clearly written by the same person and use a similar foundation to build off of. It’s this that also makes the films unique. Franchises, especially horror franchises, tend to grow stale as they end up just rehashing the same material over and over. Child’s Play looked like it was going in that direction, but then Bride Of Chucky came out and the franchise took a complete left turn, taking both the story and the audience in a new direction we weren’t expecting. It’s Don Mancini’s willingness to experiment and try new things and take risks that has allowed the franchise to continue this long and maintained people’s interest. We want to know what happens next. We want to see what the next weird thing is going to be.

Speaking of which...

Yes, not even Chucky could escape from Hollywood’s obsession with rebooting 80′s movies rather than coming up with their own ideas. Yesterday we got our first look at the new Child’s Play movie, which... Yeah.... Looks okay, I guess.... So lets talk about it.

For starters, there’s some confusion as to how this movie even exists. Just to be clear, this film isn’t canon to the original movies and Don Mancini’s version of Chucky is still going to continue. In fact this is the first Chucky film where Mancini isn’t involved, which should tell you everything you need to know about this movie in and of itself. I’ve been looking into how all this works. Apparently MGM hold the rights for Child’s Play, but Mancini holds the rights for Chucky. So Mancini can still make Chucky films. He just can’t call them Child’s Play. And MGM can still make Child’s Play films. They just can’t use all the voodoo magic stuff. (I think that’s how it works. If someone wants to correct me, feel free).

So the new Child’s Play doesn’t have a serial killer trying to transfer his soul into a little boy. Instead we have a rogue AI terrorising a family whose son looks far too old to be playing with dolls anyway. 

This does not feel like Child’s Play... and yet, strangely, it is.

When Mancini first came up with the idea for Chucky, he envisioned it as a satire on commercialism. How the modern world has become obsessed with objects and possessions, using Chucky to represent our own materialist culture attacking us. Obviously that’s not what the films ended up being, but just like how the the Nightmare On Elm Street remake resurrected Wes Craven’s original idea of Freddy Krueger being a paedophile as opposed to a child killer, the Child’s Play reboot seems to be playing around with this idea too. You could argue there is a commentary to be made about how dependant we’ve gotten not just on commercialism, but smart AI as well. And no, I’m not talking Skynet or the Terminator. I’m talking about something on a more intimate scale. In this digital age we live in, nearly everything is connected to the internet. Our TVs, our phones, our computers, our cars, our electricity meters and, yes, even our children’s toys. Giving Chucky power over the wifi, making him representative of our dependency on technology and how much AI has become entrenched into our society, could be a really scary idea to explore and it gives this reboot some real legitimacy.

But here’s the thing. The idea of smart technology running amok as a way of commenting on our over-reliance on it is a great idea for a horror movie in and of itself. But does it really need Chucky? Or are they just using brand recognition to get bums on seats?

Earlier I said that Hollywood prefers to reboot old movies rather than come up with their own ideas. The truth is there are plenty of new ideas in Hollywood. They just don’t want to take a risk on a new IP. So they’ll take an existing brand and tie it into the new idea in the hopes that it’ll get people interested, rather than trusting in both the creative team behind the idea and the audience to go and watch the bloody thing. It’s a really annoying trend that needs to stop. Once upon a time, Chucky was an original idea that someone took a risk on. Now it’s a profitable franchise in its own right and it’s still going strong. The same is true of Star Wars and Harry Potter and many other popular franchises. We can’t keep returning to the same well. If we do, the industry will become stagnant and audiences will eventually get bored. Studios need to take risks in order to find the next Star Wars. The next Harry Potter. The next Chucky.

I’ll still go and see the reboot. Mark Hamill is no Brad Dourif, but he’s an amazing voice actor in his own right and I’m sure he’ll be good in the role. And who knows? Maybe the film will be really good and reinvent the wheel. I just don’t understand why this needs to be associated with Chucky when it’s premise would work just as well, if not better, without him.

Fortunately, regardless of what happens with this reboot, the original Chucky will continue. A TV series is currently in development as well as a sequel to Cult Of Chucky and plans for a crossover with Nightmare On Elm Street tentatively called Child’s Play On Elm Street (I confess I haven’t seen any of the Elm Street films, but having watching the Chucky movies and from what I know of Freddy Krueger, that just seems like a match made in heaven. I can’t wait to see it). Don Mancini will be continuing to write for the franchise for the foreseeable future and I’m excited to see what’s in store for Chucky. It may not be the greatest horror franchise ever made, but it’s definitely the most unique and creative.