October 8th, 2013: Curse of Chucky

"Chucky fans should rejoice as [it] is clearly going to re-ignite the franchise for years to come. Chucky has never looked better..." -  Brad Miska, Bloody Disgusting

I was very excited when I first heard that they were going to be continuing the Child's Play franchise.  It had been a long time since we've heard of or seen Chucky and a reboot/reimagining/sequel/whatever was long overdue.  My only hope was that they would take a different direction than the last couple installments; I can't fully express my opinion on Bride of Chucky or Seed of Chucky simply because I haven't seen them.  However, just watching the trailers is enough for me. 

I grew up watching the first three Chucky movies and as I have gotten older, I have noticed few things.  Child's Play is so much darker than the rest of the franchise.  Everything that followed the original used a substantial amount of dark humor in the writing.  This could have been a good idea, but once each film concluded, I felt like the creators spent more time on Chucky's one liners instead of the horror in the each scene.

Curse of Chucky takes place 25 years after the original movie.  The lead character, Nica, is a paraplegic who lives with her mother.  A package containing a Good Guy doll randomly arrives in the mail one day.  With no evidence or sign of who sent it, the mother and daughter set it aside.  Later in the evening, Nica finds her mother dead on the bathroom floor.

Nica's sister, Jill and her family arrive to help with planning the funeral.  Jill has a young daughter named Alice who finds Chucky and begins a friendship with him.  As the film progresses, Chucky continues to terrorize the family.  Eventually the story unfolds and connects with events that happened in the first movie. 

While I appreciated how the creators decided to take Chucky back to his dark roots, Curse of Chucky just didn't do it for me.  There are a few decent scenes and I liked how they tied the whole franchise together, but it just wasn't enough.  The character development was so poor that I found it incredibly difficult to feel any remorse for the family.  I recommend this movie for  fans of the Child's Play franchise only because of its conclusion.  However, I most likely won't be watching this again. 

-CS