Bride of Chucky (spoilers galore)

I finally got around to seeing Seed of Chucky. While it’s no Bride of Chucky it is a worthy addition to the Chucky series. Seed of Chucky fails at exactly what Bride of Chucky did so well. BoC is an examination of the slasher genre using the conventions of the slasher genre to explain itself, while at the same time advancing the Chucky story a great deal. One can watch BoC as a deconstruction of the very genre that it’s part of. Seed of Chucky doesn’t have the same coherence of purpose and falls back to the more pedestrian slasher/Hollywood satire of say the Scream trilogy.

I’m sure Billy Boyd and Brad Dourif had some nice LOTR reminiscing between scenes. The Academy Award nominated (Supporting Actress for Bullets Over Broadway) Jennifer Tilly is the proverbial glue around which the movie is built since she plays herself and the Tiffany doll and most of the best jokes involve her or Tiffany making fun of Jennifer Tilly’s career. This movie and P.S. also co-exist in a short list of movies this year that address addiction and recovery in the main plot. (Tiffany wants to end her addiction to murder)

It’s chock full of movie references. The best one is hands down the Shining moment where Chucky breaks through a door with an axe and with the audience waiting for “Heeere’s Chucky” after a pause he says “I can’t imagine what I could possibly say right now.” The new spawn of Tiffany and Chucky is of indeterminate sex and lives through it’s own Glen or Glenda complex in the movie. Glen has a hilarious breakdown and captures James Dean’s rebel yell “You’re tearing me apart!” so accurately I wonder if it was sampled. The Child’s Play franchise also had it’s first bit of human nudity which the director insists was done as a reference to the Hammer horror films since he chose a British actress with the “Hammer look” to do it.

I couldn’t help but laugh at Glen’s belief that his family is Japanese because of the “Made in Japan” label the Chucky family bears. He even speaks in Japanese hoping for a deeper family bond. I was reminded of The Eighth Day where Georges thinks he’s Mongolian and fantasizes about riding through the countryside on small horses because people referred to him as a mongoloid baby.

Probably only worth a rental, and even then only if you’re a movie buff or Chucky fan. I’m still trying to figure out what those two families with the eight kids were doing at the showing I was at. They stayed through the whole thing.