Cult of Chucky (2017) Universal/Horror RT: 91 minutes Rated R (strong horror violence, grisly images, language, brief sexuality, drug use) Director: Don Mancini Screenplay: Don Mancini Music: Joseph LoDuca Cinematography: Michael Marshall Release date: October 3, 2017 (US) Cast: Fiona Dourif, Alex Vincent, Michael Therriault, Brad Dourif (voice), Adam Hurtig, Elisabeth Rosen, Grace Lynn Kung, Marina Stephenson Kerr, Zak Santiago, Ali Tataryn, Jennifer Tilly.
Rating: *** ½
Allow me to whet your appetite with the following scene description. A drugged woman tied to a table directly beneath a skylight and a compressed air tank in the hands of Chucky the killer doll. A head rolls and it isn’t a toy one. It’s one of the most imaginative kill scenes I’ve seen outside the Friday the 13th franchise. To think, it’s perpetrated by a psycho standing only two-and-a-half feet tall. Color me impressed!
Cult of Chucky, the seventh installment in the long-running horror series, is the third best entry in the Chucky saga following the first movie and the super-campy Bride of Chucky. They’re horror movies only in the academic sense. They contain the usual elements of the genre, but they can’t be taken too seriously. The killer is a doll that looks like My Buddy (a toy popular in the 80s), but acts like a homicidal maniac. It probably has to do with it being possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. I haven’t seen a My Buddy in decades, but Chucky’s still around and he’s up to his old tricks again, this time in a psychiatric hospital.
Four years after the events of Curse of Chucky, accused killer Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif) appears to be on the road to recovery. That’s what her psychiatrist Dr. Foley (Therriault, Reign) says. He has the wheelchair-bound woman convinced that she’s schizophrenic and Chucky is just a figment of her disturbed mind. He decides she’s well enough to be transferred to a medium-security facility to continue her treatment.
It isn’t long before Chucky finds Nica. Actually, it’s Chucky’s girlfriend Tiffany Valentine (Tilly, Bound) who finds her. She comes to visit bearing bad news- her niece Alice, the sole survivor of the previous movie’s massacre, is dead- and a gift, a Chucky doll. He’s not the only one of his kind present in the ward. Foley uses one in his group sessions. This one ends up being adopted by Madeleine (Rosen, House of the Dead) as a surrogate for her deceased baby. This is when Cult of Chucky traverses into Bad Dreams territory. One by one, Nica’s fellow patients die in gruesome ways and they all look like suicides. She knows Chucky is the real culprit, but the real shock is yet to come.
As teased by the post-credits scene in Curse of Chucky, Andy Barclay is back! Played by original Andy player Alex Vincent, he’s now a troubled adult who lives in an isolated cabin. He has the still-living head of the Chucky doll he blasted with a shotgun. He regularly tortures it as punishment for messing up his life. OKAY, WAIT A MINUTE! How can Chucky be at Andy’s and the hospital at the same time? That’s the “shock” I referred to in the preceding paragraph. It seems that Chucky learned a voodoo curse that allows him to inhabit several bodies at once, both doll and human. He has special plans for Nica.
Don Mancini has been involved in the Chucky series from the beginning. He wrote the screenplays for Child’s Play 1, 2 & 3 and Bride. He directed Seed, Curse and Cult of Chucky. Let me tell you, this flick is totally bonkers! He puts an original new spin on the series. I LOVE the concept of multiple Chuckys, the “Cult” of the title. I’m interested to see where Mancini takes it from here, just as long as he doesn’t send Chucky into outer space. It didn’t work out so well for other movie slashers as you may recall.
The other cool thing about Cult of Chucky is the finale. It’s a complete bloodbath! The scene I described at the beginning takes place about midway through the movie and it’s great. The killings that follow are also nice and gory. The highlights include a man’s head being stomped to a bloody pulp, another victim is drilled through the back of the head, somebody is stabbed and disemboweled, a security guard’s throat is cut and a woman’s spine is pulled out of her mouth. With all this mess, they should have mentioned the guy that mopped up at the end of each day’s shooting in the closing credits. That reminds me, watch them all the way through (or fast forward, it’s up to you). There’s a nifty surprise at the end. I’ll only say a familiar character returns.
Fiona, daughter of Chucky voice actor Brad Dourif, is a welcome addition to the series. I don’t want to say too much about what happens to her in Cult of Chucky except she doesn’t play the traumatized victim for long. I like the direction the writers take her character in. As for Brad, he’s always great. I’ve been a fan for years. I first noticed him in Dune and came to learn he also played stuttering mama’s boy Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He would go on to play The Gemini Killer in the cult favorite The Exorcist III. He’s still awesome more than three decades later. Therriault is also good as the doctor who turns out to be a horny piece of slime. It’s nice to see Alex Vincent back as Andy after all these years. His previous ordeals with Chucky left him a permanently damaged person who can’t even keep a relationship going because his entire life is on-line waiting to be Googled by potential girlfriends. As for Tilly, she’s still FREAKING HOT!
The effects in Cult of Chucky are quite good. I’m pleased to see Mancini went with stop-motion instead of CGI for the Chucky effects. Even better, he doesn’t go with CGI gore. That’s good because Cult of Chucky is the goriest of the Chucky movies. It’s a neat throwback to the 80s and 90s school of horror filmmaking in that respect. Like I said, it’s one of the best of the series. I can’t wait to see what Chucky has in store next.
