BRIDE OF CHUCKY
Yes folks, it IS tasteful and romantic
That's what I'd heard about the "doll sex" scene in this movie, and I didn't believe it. Today, I believe.
Two things convinced me to go out and drop two bucks on this movie. One is director Ronny Yu. If Bride With White Hair is any indication of where this guy's coming from, he's got no grounding in the real world...AT ALL, and I can't imagine a better kind of director to make a movie about killer dolls. And two - two words, baby. DOLL SEX. Other than that, I expected a mild diversion. But what I got was one of the three funniest movies I've seen all year. (the other two being The Big Lebowski and There's Something About Mary)
So far the whole Child's Play series has been most notable for coming up with good tag lines - "Look who's stalking!" "Sorry, Jack. Chucky's back!" and my favorite, "You're in luck! Here comes the Chuck!" This film, easily the best in this silly series, adds "Chucky gets lucky!" to the list.
I do have to confess, half of the goofy shit in this movie wouldn't have been funny at all had it all been done by, say, a couple of humans. The mere fact that they were dolls was often enough to keep me laughing. Why's aside, it's still damn funny. One expects a very Scream-ish tone going in to the movie, when we're first shown a police evidence locker - with Jason's mask, Michael's mask, Freddy's glove, and a chainsaw, presumably from our favorite big fat retarded guy in a mask of human skin. And while the accent in this movie is clearly on humor instead of scares, the humor isn't all that Scream-ish. Some of it is ("Why does that look familiar?" muses Chucky after launching, via airbag, about twenty nails right into John Ritter's face), but most of it is just goofball doll stuff, which I happened to find hilarious.
The plot's kind of silly (Chucky and his girlfriend hitch a ride to New Jersey to dig up the body of Chucky's original human self and retrieve an amulet that nobody mentioned before that will put them in human bodies again), but the interaction between characters is a lot of fun to watch. Chucky and his girlfriend, Tiffany, have a hilarious love-hate relationship, the logical result of the perpetual cynic and hardass Chucky is, and the starry-eyed romantic Tiffany is (however psychotic). Likewise, the human company isn't bad, though I'd expected them to be extremely annoying and unnecessary. What's fun is that all three of the human leads suspect each other of doing all these dirty deeds, never once suspecting the doll...and yet, two of them STILL get married!
The chick's played by Katherine Heigl, who still can't act but is nevertheless quite the hottie :D Brad Dourif has fun, as always, as Chucky's voice, and Jennifer Tilly is a real hoot as Tiffany, both as a human and later on as a doll. (check out the sacred tome she uses for the voodoo spell with which she resurrects Chucky) Nobody else really stands out, although one guy is pretty amusing as a Marilyn Manson wannabe (how redundant) who's after Tiffany.
This is a weird one, ladies and gentlemen - the deaths are absurd and over the top (when one unlucky bastard gets hit by a truck, POW! You've never seen anyone get hit by a truck quite like that, at least not in a movie. That may very well be what actually happens IRL, as far as I know.),the direction's a bit off-kilter and wonky, and there's nary a moment of subtlety in the whole film. And, like I said, it's one of the funniest movies I've seen this year.
Now, it ain't all great. John Ritter's just annoying in everything he ever does, and he doesn't help here. He plays a law enforcement officer - you can tell, because he's ALWAYS in uniform, even late at night, at home. Ritter's minion doesn't help things either. There's also the additional problem of the fact that outside of the two dolls, nobody in this movie can act. You've got a problem when the only good actors in your movie are made of plastic, just like MuchMusic has a problem when their only good VJ is a talking sock with a cigar stuck to it.
But it's a real hoot. In fact, for sheer entertainment, I'd put it only behind the original Scream, so far as the recent crop of teen horror goes. Maybe movies like IKWYDLS and Urban Legend are more respectable efforts, in that they genuinely try to be real horror movies with real scares, but neither of them really worked. Good marks for effort, but get a decent script next time. Bride Of Chucky may well be the very kind of thing that's "wrong" with horror today. Right, wrong...what's good or bad for the genre doesn't affect what works and what doesn't in this one film, and BoC works.