Review: Curse of Chucky (2013)

 Curse of Chucky (2013)

Rated R for bloody horror violence, and for language (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 4 out of 5

Curse of Chucky was a film ahead of its time in some very important ways. Released nine years after Seed of Chucky killed the Child's Play franchise all over again, it at first appeared to be yet another gritty remake of a sort that we got way too many of in the 2000s, but what it turned out to actually be was something very different: a nostalgic, back-to-basics soft reboot of a sort not too dissimilar to the 2018 Halloween movie, except five years earlier. It's a film I'm comfortable calling the second-best in the franchise behind only the very first movie. Don Mancini learned a lot in the nine years since his directorial debut, swinging in the opposite direction towards straightforward horror in presenting Chucky at what may be the most menacing and truly scary he's ever been, building an atmosphere of dread and suspense that's punctuated by some very gory kills, and delivering characters who, while not necessarily likable, were still quite compelling and multilayered. Only at the end did it really start to lose me, continuing for some time after the actual ending to set up the sequel, in scenes that provided some very fun fanservice for longtime fans but otherwise felt awkwardly bolted onto a rock-solid film. That said, it's otherwise a return to form for a franchise that's had some painful lows but also reached great heights.

We start the film in the Pierce household, where the artist mother Sarah raises her adult, paraplegic daughter Nica. One day, they receive a package containing an old Good Guy doll, and later that night, Sarah dies from what at first seems like a fall down the stairs. Shortly after, Nica's sister Barb shows up to settle the remaining affairs, bringing her husband Ian, their daughter Alice, their live-in nanny Jill, and the priest Father Frank, and right away, we see that Barb has ulterior motives in mind. She wants to sell the house and send Nica to an assisted living facility for the disabled, implicitly to pay for her family's lavish lifestyle, including the lesbian affair she's having with Jill behind her husband's back (or so she thinks). I hated Barb in the best way possible. Danielle Bisutti does such a great job playing her as somebody who can only be described as a rich bitch, one who raises valid points about Nica's ability to care for herself but does so with such callousness and obviously greedy intentions that it's no wonder Nica won't stand for it. She earns all the rope that Chucky eventually hangs her with, an all-too-human villain to go along with the actual killer. The rest of the supporting cast, too, was shockingly good for a movie like this, whether it was Ian's growing paranoia over things both real (his wife's adultery) and otherwise (thinking that Nica is killing people in order to hold onto her house and freedom) or Jill turning out to have more of a conscience than one might think as she calls out Barb's greedy behavior and actually takes her job as a nanny seriously. For a direct-to-video slasher sequel, this film had a much better cast of characters than one would expect.

As for our heroine Nica, casting Brad Dourif's real-life daughter Fiona in the part was certainly a stunt, but it was a stunt that paid off. Nica is not helpless, and proves eminently capable of holding her own against both the physical threat in her midst and the misdeeds of her family, but her physical impairment does leave her vulnerable, and so she gets some of the scariest scenes in the film as she's thrust into situations where she can't readily defend herself or escape, whether it's in a garage or the elevator she uses to traverse the house. She was a massive improvement over the flat and bland human protagonists in the last two movies, somebody who I actually rooted for to win.

When it comes to Fiona's father Brad, once more returning to play Chucky both as the voice of the doll and in human form in flashbacks, he and the film not only jettisoned the camp that Bride of Chucky injected into the franchise but went further and made Chucky the darkest he'd ever been. He doesn't even speak (outside the canned dialogue the Good Guy doll "normally" gives) until forty-five minutes in, the film making it clear before then that he's the bad guy but otherwise spending a lot of time on ominous shots of the doll as he exploits his small size and the fact that he's beneath suspicion to his advantage, staging him almost like the Annabelle doll from The Conjuring. (Not the movie Annabelle, though. Fuck that movie.) When it is time for him to speak, the jokes he does crack feel like they could've come out of the mouth of Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, coming across as threats that he decided to inject some humor into because he's a sick little fuck. This is Chucky back in his classic white-trash-thug-in-a-doll's-body mode, and something I haven't found him to be in a very long time: scary.

And on that note, this film brought the pain not only in the actual kills, but in the setup to them. I went and looked up the cinematographer for this, Michael Marshall, just so I could commend him and Mancini for delivering such a well-shot film, one that made excellent use of one of the oldest horror settings in the book, the old, dark house. This was a movie that looked a lot more expensive than it was, its direction, cinematography, and score doing a lot to set the mood and make me feel that I'm not safe as long as that little two-foot hellion is lurking around here somewhere. If you want blood, then you've got that too, the film not messing around as we get a beheading, axe attacks, and terrible things happening to people's eyes. This movie's production values could've easily gotten it a theatrical release, making it puzzling why Universal decided to send it straight to DVD and Blu-ray instead.

My big problems with the film mostly came in the last fifteen minutes, which are absolutely packed with fanservice and sequel bait that didn't hit as hard as it might have ten years ago. Yes, it was cool to find that, far from a full-on remake, this film maintained continuity with all of its predecessors and even returned to plot threads from those films; if nothing else, Mancini loves his baby. That said, a lot of it felt shoehorned in, the scenes seeming to exist only to get cheers out of fans by bringing back certain characters. It felt like Mancini had more ideas for the film than either the story or the budget allowed, the opposite of the problem he had with the third film, yet tried to contrive ways to throw them in anyway, if nothing else to set up the sequel. It also didn't really know what to do with the young daughter Alice, almost seeming to forget about her at the end and only throwing in one last scene during the extended epilogue to remind the viewer that it hadn't. Whereas Alex Vincent in the first three films was a well-rounded character who got a lot to do and served as the main hero, here a lot of that role goes to Nica, and Alice becomes little more than a little kid who the main characters have to protect.

The Bottom Line

Curse of Chucky was a very good slasher movie that, while held back from greatness by an ending that didn't know when to quit, was still a hell of a return to form for a venerable series, one that offers a lot of treats whether you're new to Chucky or have seen every film up to this point. I had a blast, and I give it my firm recommendation.