Movies: Child's Play
I watched Child's Play 2 last night, and it was great. Having watched the first movie for the second time a few days earlier, I had the added bonus of continuity in the story being preserved. It is also worth noting that I have now seen all five Child's Play movies.The first film opens with serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) being cornered by cop Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon) in a toystore. To cheat death, Ray transfers his soul into a Good Guy doll named Chucky (Ray is a practitioner of voodoo and other black magic). Later on, working mother Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) buys the same doll and gifts it to her son, six-year old Andy (Alex Vincent). And soon, people start getting killed. Andy is the only one Chucky has revealed his secret to (the fact that he is alive), so no one else believes him when he says that the doll was responsible for those killings. Chucky was apparently destroyed at the end of the first film.
Of course, the company that manufactures the dolls wants to know what went wrong with the Chucky doll, and at the beginning of Part 2, they put together the doll only to have it escape and resume its killing spree. With his mother in a mental institution, Andy is adopted by a caring couple, but it's not too long before Chucky comes after him. Chucky must transfer his soul into Andy's body, otherwise he will permanently be trapped in the doll's body. Andy once again tries to warn his new family — the couple, Phil (Gerrit Graham) and Joanne (Jenny Agutter) Simpson, and Kyle (Christine Elise), a young girl who has also been adopted — but people still find the concept of a killer doll hard to believe, until it's too late.
I found both these movies to be extremely entertaining. The effects that brought the Chucky doll to life were great and very convincing, Brad Dourif's voice work as Chucky is awesome. I also thought Alex Vincent's acting as Andy was excellent.
The series consists of Child's Play (directed by Tom Holland), Child's Play 2 (directed by the first movie's co-screenwriter John Lafia), Child's Play 3 (directed by Jack Bender), Bride of Chucky (directed by Ronny Yu), and the recent Seed of Chucky (directed by Don Mancini).
Don Mancini created the concept for the series, wrote all the five movies, and directed the last film. While the initial entries in the series were more traditional horror films, the recent ones have been more inclined towards dark comedy. The last two are the strongest entries in the series in my opinion, with a great amount of creativity on display.
According to this page on IMDb, the TV version of Child's Play 2 is an extended version, and this is the version that I saw.
posted by Karthik Abhiram @ 3:11 PM
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