Review: Child's Play 3 (1991)

Child's Play 3 (1991)

Rated R for horror violence and language

Score: 2 out of 5

After a really good first movie and a watchable, if compromised, sequel, it's no surprise why Child's Play 3 threw Chucky to the back of the attic for seven years. Most of the people involved with making it, including Don Mancini (who admitted that he'd run out of ideas) and Brad Dourif, regard it as the worst film in the series, and I frankly agree with them. All it really had going for it was some still-solid animatronic work, asshole human villains who I loved to hate, and Dourif trying his best to make Chucky interesting even when the rest of the movie was making that difficult. It gets way too goofy, the kills are flat, an important scene was too unreal for me to buy, it feels like two different movies awkwardly welded together, and worst of all, it's often boring. I only recommend it for Chucky completists, as while it has its moments, it has too many missed opportunities and downright bad parts for me to call it good.

Set eight years after the last movie, Andy Barclay is now in Kent Military School after having been bounced around the foster care system and gotten in trouble with the law one too many times. Meanwhile, the Play Pals Corporation decides that enough time has passed for people to have forgotten about Andy's crazy stories and the related murders, causing them to reopen the factory and make new-and-improved Good Guy dolls -- which allows Chucky to come back from the grave by possessing the first new doll to roll off the assembly line in the factory where he died at the end of the last film. Out for revenge, he makes a beeline for Andy by hitching a ride to his new school, where Andy, the young military brat Ronald Tyler, the nerd Harold Whitehurst, the teenage bully Brett C. Sheldon, the headmaster Colonel Cochrane, the love interest Kristin De Silva, and everybody else all have to fight to survive against the two-foot-tall possessed toy that wants to make them his bitches.

I still don't get this series' fascination with trying to awkwardly insert social commentary mocking consumerism and big business, especially since it's never amounted to anything except providing an excuse for why Chucky keeps coming back, and it always gets dropped after the opening. Chucky's first kill here, set in an executive's office, feels like it belongs in a different movie altogether from the one that follows, set in a strict boarding school full of kids and teachers/drill instructors. I said this before, but it bears repeating: the 2019 remake, for all its flaws, did a better job handling this subject than the second and third movies in the original series did, largely because it actually tried and didn't treat it as an afterthought. Here, it feels like pointless padding to get the film up to ninety minutes with a rather forgettable opening kill.

The movie doesn't get much better from there, sadly, as the characters turn out to be a mixed bag. Andy's new actor felt rather flat, the little kid Tyler was annoying, all of the adults were completely forgettable, one-note caricatures, and while De Silva left a great first impression for how willing she was to both talk back to Sheldon and back her words up, the film never really did much with her afterward, feeling like it was just keeping her around to prevent the film from turning into a total sausage fest. It felt like there was the seed of a good boarding-school teen movie here, and that it would've been better served fleshing out the supporting cast; since this is a military school where Andy was sent as punishment for delinquency, they could have explored why each of the characters was sent there, for instance. Maybe the dweebish Whitehurst was sent there because he had a father who didn't wanna raise no sissy? Maybe De Silva mouthed off to the wrong people and got in trouble? Instead, all we get character-wise is what we see at first glance, and the fact that Tyler's father is in the military. It ultimately wound up being the jock asshole Sheldon who left the most impression, largely because his personality was perfectly tailored for wanting to see him die.

As for the horror side of this movie, it fell into the trap that the last two movies studiously avoided, slipping over the line of silliness versus seriousness and making Chucky feel like a clown. A big part of why Chucky worked so well in the past was that he felt like he was written as a human villain, the fact that he was in the body of a doll being largely incidental. It was his own sick sense of humor combined with the image of an evil doll that made him grimly funny, not the film drawing attention to its own ridiculousness. Here, however, Chucky feels like a cartoon version of himself, sporting a maniacal laugh and lots of Freddy Krueger-style one-liners that make it a lot more difficult to take him seriously. The animatronics are still top-notch, and Dourif still kills it and does what he can with the dialogue he's given, but otherwise, I wasn't scared of him like I was before. Whereas in the past Chucky's presence elevated the kills and made it so that they didn't really need a lot of blood to be effective, here his diminished presence made those kills stand out for all the wrong reasons, lacking much real bite to them and feeling half-baked. In particular, a pivotal kill late in the movie, where Chucky sabotages a war game by swapping the paintballs used in the rifles for live ammunition, falls apart the moment that you realize that real rifles can't fire paintballs and vice versa. It speaks to a broader problem that this movie has: that it feels like it was hastily thrown together to cash in on the success of its predecessor, without much thought as to where to actually take the series.

The Bottom Line

There were a few good ideas buried here, but sloppy execution on nearly all fronts squanders them. All told, it's just a dud, a boring and basic body count slasher that marks the series at its worst.