Review: Bride of Chucky (1998)

Bride of Chucky (1998)

Rated R for strong horror violence and gore, language, some sexual content and brief drug use

Score: 3 out of 5

The return of the Child's Play franchise after seven years of dormancy, Bride of Chucky is the point where everybody involved decided to just go and say "fuck it, let's make a straight-up horror-comedy" -- and in doing so, probably guaranteed the series' continued relevance. There had always been a measure of black comedy to the character of Chucky, a doll possessed by the spirit of a serial killer who series creator Don Mancini wrote as a foul-mouthed, trailer-trash thug, but in the prior films, it mostly lurked in the background and concerned the idea of a children's toy saying such terrible things. Here, however, perhaps realizing that it'd be difficult to take the fourth movie in a slasher series about a killer doll seriously, especially after the third movie hit diminishing returns, Mancini and director Ronny Yu opted to put the humor front and center, giving Chucky a similarly twisted romantic partner and doing a story that homaged Natural Born Killers as they went on a road trip. I've seen some fans rank this one next to the original as one of the best movies in the series, and while I had a bit too many problems with the human side of the story to come to the same conclusion, I still highly enjoyed this film and thought that Chucky was as good as he'd ever been.

We start with the film retconning in a romantic partner for Charles Lee Ray when he was still alive, as the beautiful but trashy Tiffany Valentine gets her hands on the remains of the Chucky doll he once possessed, rebuilds it with parts from her own doll collection, and uses a voodoo ritual to bring him back to life. Unfortunately, while Chucky is happy to be alive, he and Tiffany saw their relationship very differently, and when Tiffany breaks up with him over it, Chucky kills her and proceeds to use the same ritual to put her soul into the body of another doll. Now in the same boat together, Chucky and Tiffany head off to Hackensack, New Jersey, Chucky's old hometown where he was buried, thanks to another retcon: apparently, Chucky was wearing a magical amulet called the Heart of Damballa when he died that wound up buried with him, and he needs that amulet to transfer his soul back into a human body, implied to be the real reason why his prior attempts to do so with Andy Barclay failed. Taking a pair of local teenagers, Tiffany's neighbor Jesse and his girlfriend Jade, hostage, Chucky and Tiffany head off to Hackensack planning to transfer their souls into the young couple's bodies and be reborn as human.

I'm gonna get my biggest problem with the film out of the way now: Jesse and Jade are two very dull protagonists. Their actors Nick Stabile and Katherine Heigl give flat, forgettable performances that somehow aren't the worst acting in the movie, and their teen romance storyline, with Jade as the rich girl under the thumb of her cop uncle Warren who has to hide her love for the more working-class Jesse, felt rote and cookie-cutter in the worst way. Don Mancini has readily copped to the fact that this was essentially a Chucky movie done as a Scream movie, an influence that's obvious the moment you look at the font on the poster, and while he's speaking mostly of the film's sense of humor, it's also visible in how the film tries to be a teen drama with Jesse and Jade. The only scene where they're interesting is an unintentional one, where their friend David thinks that they're the real killers and we see their words and actions through his eyes coming across as something that killers might say. Most of the rest of the cast were two-dimensional, from Alexis Arquette as the goth poser Damien to John Ritter basically playing his character from 8 Simple Rules (but this time as a cop) to James Gallanders and Janet Kidder as the horny newlywed couple Russ and Diane who Jesse and Jade (and Chucky and Tiffany) encounter in Niagara Falls, but all of them were more interesting and fun in their limited screen time than the actual protagonists were.

Fortunately, while Jesse and Jade were the heroes, they weren't the main characters here. No, that would be the killer doll Chucky and his new bride Tiffany. The film does make reference to Bride of Frankenstein by having Tiffany watch it on TV early in the film, but the actual dynamic between her and the Chuck feels a lot closer to Mickey and Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers, minus that film's satirical thrust. They are depicted as the definition of "white trash", Chucky needing no introduction if you've seen any other movie in this series and Tiffany being a flirt who lives in a trailer and, as a human, is never shown in outfits that don't show off Jennifer Tilly's legs, cleavage, and hourglass figure. They're the kind of couple who, if this came out today, would compare themselves to the Joker and Harley Quinn, with an extremely toxic and volatile relationship dynamic in which the two of them are constantly fighting and then making up. We all know people like Chucky and Tiffany in real life (minus the murder), and that's a big part of why it works so well. Brad Dourif gets to use his great Chucky persona in a lot more contexts outside of threatening to kill people in his interactions with Tiffany, who Tilly plays as an almost Jessica Rabbit-like sexpot in ways that can't help but be hilarious when she's making all that sexy talk in the form of a two-foot-tall living doll. Their interactions were hysterical, not only making Chucky the best he'd been in the series so far but giving him an equally entertaining partner to bounce off of. They were undoubtedly a parody of Mickey and Mallory, but even though neither was playing it completely straight, they were still good enough that I could've easily pictured them playing the genuine article, especially with Tiffany's arc over the course of the film of her realizing that Chucky is a terrible partner for her and that she can do so much better.

The body count in this reached into the double digits, and the kills were about as violent as you could get in a time when the MPAA, even pre-Columbine, was under pressure from parents' groups over violence in the media, cutting away from the most explicit bits but frequently showing the bloody aftermath while Ronny Yu's sense of style behind the camera implied the rest. It wasn't a particularly scary film, instead inviting us to take Chucky and Tiffany's perspective as they snickered at the poor suckers they were about to take out, the film seeming to know that what we really came for was the gnarly shit that made the killers look like badasses. It knew, after ten years and at the tail end of the cynical, disaffected '90s, that nobody could take a movie about a killer doll seriously, and it fully leaned into that not just in its sense of humor but also in its action and violence. This was Chucky in franchise mode and fully self-aware about it, a slasher movie from the killer's sick, twisted perspective that not only delivered a thrill ride but regularly turned to the viewer to remark "heh, that was wicked, wasn't it?"

The Bottom Line

So far, Bride of Chucky is just about on par with the second film in my rankings of the series as a whole. Its boring teenage characters let it down and hold it back from greatness, but otherwise, this was exactly the kind of Chucky movie you would've made if it was 1998 and you wanted to bring the series back from the dead: a smarmy horror-comedy romp that anticipates every joke you could make about it, parries it effortlessly, and in doing so makes an inherently ridiculous villain seem cool.