Review of Cult of Chucky (2017) by Jesse O — 24 Feb 2018

Part of me wonders if there's been a major horror franchise that's made the comeback more successfully than this reboot of the Chucky franchise. You could make the argument that Ash vs Evil Dead is at the top of that list and that's a valid argument, but the original Evil Dead trilogy remains high-quality to this day.

There wasn't a clear drop-off as there was for Jason, Freddy, Myers, Leatherface, Jigsaw and, yes, even Chucky in some of their later installments. All of these 'monsters' have made comebacks and, again, out of all of them, the one that seems to have made the transition most successfully, at least creatively speaking, has been the recent Chucky movies.

I say creatively, because both of these movies were direct-to-video affairs. I think that obviously limits your reach, but it's also an approach that allows you certain creative freedoms since there aren't many eyes on you.

The studio isn't on your ass to make it more appealing to a wider audience because they plan to release it in theaters. Plus with platforms like Netflix and Amazon, your movie will, hopefully, reach more viewers than you would have based on DVD sales/rentals alone.

Admittedly, I was a fan of Curse of Chucky. For a B-tier horror movie, it was quite entertaining and it brought the franchise back in a way that didn't feel like it was cashing in on the nostalgia of it being a new Chucky movie.

I was actually pretty excited for this sequel. I mean as excited as you can be for a direct-to-video sequel. I know it seems like I'm 'raving' about this reboot franchise. Let's just get this out of the way, I don't think either Curse or Cult of Chucky are great horror films.

They don't reinvent the wheel for the Chucky franchise, much less for the whole genre of horror as we know it. But the movies play to their strengths and hide their weaknesses. Well, as much as they can anyway.

The film has always had a tongue-in-cheek tone, a tone they pushed into full-on comedy prior to the reboots. The fact is that the film cannot take itself too seriously. If it did, it might have reached unimaginable levels of badness.

The fact they don't allows them to poke fun at themselves and the fact that a serial killer used an incantation/spell to trap his spirit in the body of a Good guy doll. This movie is a continuation of the last one, with Nica, believing that she made up the fact that Chucky murdered her family in order to cope with the guilt of her actions.

As a result, she is sent to an insane asylum when, of course, Chucky appears in the asylum to mess with her head. I think perhaps the movie messes up in that it focuses too much on the human characters inside this asylum as opposed to having Chucky gradually kill off the patients/doctors/nurses.

There's one major, and fairly gruesome, death about halfway through the film and that's really it until the third act. And, honestly, I just don't know if that was the right approach for this film.

It's not that it's bad at any time, but the film clearly is at its best when Chucky is around fucking with people and being an absolute dick to them while he kills them. The most inspired bits in the entire movie come at the end of the movie where THREE Chuckys run loose in the asylum.

They give each other shit and it is pretty fucking great. And I'm like even imagining if the entire film had three Chuckys running loose and it's just such wasted potential, to me at least. Having said that, I do think the film has some surprisingly solid characters.

Nica's arc continues from the last film and Fiona Dourif is great in the role. I think the movie manages to use its characters in the asylum in a way that doesn't feel like they're poking fun at people's mental illness.

I may have totally interpreted it wrong, but that's just the way I saw it. For example, Multiple Malcolm who, you guessed it, has multiple personalities is a fun character in that the personalities he has are those of famous people and it's a running joke in the film.

Nica has to figure out who he is at any given time. Also, the guy who plays Malcolm, Adam Hurtig, does a hell of a Jesse Eisenberg impression (one of his personalities is Mark Zuckerberg). I suppose that could be seen as poking fun at people with multiple personalities, but I still thought Malcolm made for an interesting supporting character.

I think Don Mancini felt more comfortable with his character developing because, as I mentioned, they take the spotlight away from Chucky to build up these characters and the mystery, at least to the doctor, of the patients that are dying and if Nica is truly behind these murders.

I will say that the third act of the film kicks the gore and violence up a notch and it was quite a lot of fun. Everything they don't give you for, say, the prior 75 minutes is more than made up for here.

One of the funnier aspects of this climax is the fact that Andy, trying to reach Nica at the asylum to prove her innocence, sneaks in a Chucky doll (that then proceeds to help kill the head doctor) with a gun in its stomach.

When Andy retrieves this gun, Chucky's very tiny guts spill out. It was a silly little touch, but it made me laugh. I will say that, again, I thought that this was a good little B-tier horror movie.

Not gonna change your opinion of horror movies if you hate them, but it will entertain you. Or at least it entertained me. And, again, with the way this film ends, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the story moves forward now that Nica ***SPOILERS*** seemingly has been possessed by Charles Lee Ray's murderous spirit.

She's escaped the asylum, so now we have to see where this leads her in the future. Yes, once again, I am excited for the future of this franchise and that's not something I can say for much these days.

Whether it be horror or not. I would recommend this if you have Netflix. I don't think this is the type of movie I'd have spent money on (at least not more than $8), but, overall, I did have fun watch this.

And that's all that matters to me.