Review: Cult of Chucky (2017)

 Cult of Chucky (2017)

Rated R for strong horror violence, grisly images, language, brief sexuality and drug use (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 3 out of 5

Not counting the 2019 remake, Cult of Chucky is the last feature film in the Child's Play franchise, and a film that, above all else, demonstrates that at this point Don Mancini was already envisioning its future as being on television. A lot of its biggest problems feel like they stem from it being overstuffed with plots and subplots, the kind of thing you'd throw into a television story to bring up the runtime to something you can justify spending several episodes on, and it ultimately ends in such a manner as to indicate that they did not intend for this to be the end, not by a long shot. And indeed, television is where this franchise ultimately wound up, with the TV show Chucky premiering four years later and by all accounts doing the franchise some real justice. Above all else, this movie, for better or worse, feels like Mancini setting the table for where he ultimately wanted to take the franchise, less a full story in its own right than a setup for a bigger, meatier adventure to come.

That's not to say that this is a bad movie, though. For as many problems as it has in the storytelling department and as much as it feels more like a two-part season premiere than a feature film, it still feels like a pretty damn good two-part season premiere. Chucky gets some of his old sense of humor back (just read the tagline on the poster) but is still a scary villain above all else, the psychiatric hospital setting was very well-utilized and avoided a lot of the unfortunate pitfalls that you normally see in horror movies of this sort, and while the supporting cast was a mixed bag, I still enjoyed Fiona Dourif's performance as Nica, especially towards the end of the film. Word of warning, though, it's also a movie that relies heavily on franchise lore. If Curse of Chucky was made to appeal to both longtime fans and complete newcomers, then this movie leans far more on the former to the point of being pretty inaccessible if you haven't seen any other films. If nothing else, I recommend at least watching Curse first, largely because this movie follows on directly from its ending. (So, spoiler warning.) Overall, if you liked Curse, then I can see you enjoying this movie too, though I wouldn't recommend it if you're completely new to the series.

We start the film with... well, here's the big problem I alluded to earlier. We really have three separate plots, with one of them getting more screen time than the others but all of them competing for attention and not really coming together until the very end. The first and most important concerns Nica Pierce, who's been institutionalized after Chucky framed her for the events of the last movie. After five years of punishing electroshock therapy to convince her that she did, in fact, have a psychotic break and kill her family out of jealousy of her sister, Nica is moved to the medium-security Harrogate facility under the care of Dr. Foley alongside a group of other patients: a man named Malcolm with split personalities (some of them celebrities like Michael Phelps and Mark Zuckerberg), an old lady named Angela who thinks she's a ghost, a woman named Claire who burned down her house, and a mother named Madeleine who killed her infant son. But the actual first scene brings us back to Andy Barclay, the protagonist of the first three movies, now an adult who the last film's post-credits scene revealed was still alive and had been awaiting Chucky's return for years. On top of that, we also have Tiffany Valentine, who put her soul into Jennifer Tilly's body at the end of Seed of Chucky and is now working with Chucky towards some nefarious goal.

While Nica's story is central, Andy is treated as a secondary protagonist, and one whose scenes rarely intersect with Nica's or seem to leave much impact on her. While I was pleasantly surprised with Alex Vincent's performance as Andy given how long he'd been retired from acting before this, his entire character felt like it could've been cut from the movie with minimal changes, like Mancini was setting him up to have a greater role in the follow-up he was working on but didn't really do much to integrate that with the story itself. Only at the very end does he ever interact with Nica, after Nica's story is finished. A more interesting direction might have been for Andy, who we see has been keeping track of Chucky for all these years and at one point tried to prove Nica's innocence by showing Chucky to Dr. Foley (he dismissed it as creative animatronics), to get in contact with Nica before and during the events of the film, letting her know that he's the only one who believes that she's not insane and that there really is a killer doll on the loose. This would've given him more to do over the course of the film rather than spend most of it at his house, and having them know each other would've added more weight to what is, in this movie, their only scene together. Instead, the two of them are kept apart for far too long, producing a story that constantly shifts gears and pulls me out.

Fortunately, the meat of Nica's story was still good enough for me to enjoy. Mancini gets a lot of mileage out of the hospital setting, portrayed as a landscape of creepy, ascetic white hallways that makes me wonder if he ever had a bad experience in an Apple store. More importantly, he avoided taking the easy route with the other patients and presenting them as threatening forces in their own right, an all-too-common depiction that plays into some very unfortunate stereotypes of mental illness. Even though it's made clear that Harrogate is a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, meaning that its patients each did something bad to get sent there, they are presented as human beings first, whether it's Claire distrusting Nica for having (allegedly) done far worse than she did, Madeleine's repressed feelings of guilt over her crime leaving her easily manipulated by Chucky, Angela finding a way to piss Chucky off when they first meet, or Malcolm finding himself vulnerable to attack because he doesn't know if he can trust his own senses when he encounters Chucky. Mancini felt interested in developing these people as actual characters, not caricatures of mental illness, and it meant that I actually cared about them when Chucky started going after them. Madeleine especially was one of my favorite characters for the dark directions her story ultimately went.

The kills are exactly as over-the-top as you'd expect from a movie that proudly flashes the word "Unrated" on its DVD cover, with highlights including a decapitation and somebody's throat getting ripped out alongside the usual stabbings. Brad Dourif's portrayal of Chucky, meanwhile, brings back some of the sense of humor he had in the past without making this an outright horror-comedy. His argument with Angela early on made it clear that this wasn't the deathly serious Chucky of Curse, but the insult comic who frequently mocked and taunted his victims, complete with some outright one-liners as he scores his most brutal kills. There's one scene late in the film where we're finally introduced to the titular "cult" that I'd hate to spoil, but may just be one of the single funniest Chucky moments in the entire franchise (and one that makes me give some well-earned props to the animatronic work). Mancini also likes to indulge in a lot of flair behind the camera, much of it influenced by a love of '70s giallo, and while it can be distracting at some points, it otherwise made this film feel lively, especially when paired with the austere environments the film takes place in. Again, this was a movie that felt like it had a bigger budget than it actually did.

The Bottom Line

Cult of Chucky is a movie for the fans, for better and for worse. If you're not already invested in the series, you'll probably enjoy the main slasher plot but find yourself scratching your head at some moments. If you're a fan, however, you'll get a huge kick out of all the callbacks and Easter eggs this film has to offer, and eager to see what the series does next. (TV, here we go!)