Spooktober III Review 9 & 10: Child's Play and Child's Play 2

Child's Play (1988)
Tom Holland (not the good Tom Holland)

"I have a date with a six-year-old boy and you have a date with death!"

&

Child's Play 2 (1990)
John Lafia

"If I don't get out of this body soon, I'm screwed."

This past weekend I went out with a group of friends to tour this year's Grand Rapids ArtPrize offering. If you're not aware, my city hosts a yearly (now every-other-yearly) "art" "competition" to determine which painting of a soldier or Jesus deserves hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. It's always kind of bad, but this year was exceptionally awful. A top five finalist for 2018 is a mural of the late night TV hosts made out of duct tape. Why duct tape? Why late night hosts? Why is it so popular? Because whatever shred of our culture that still existed is now dead and rotten.

I don't pretend to be some great critic of art, although I am fair enough to myself to admit that I can do a pretty good job of sniffing out gormless facileness, and there's heaps of that at ArtPrize. One of the finalists was this pile of shit titled "Too soon:"

FYI: Curly Howard died in 1952.

This isn't art. There's no possible emotion to feel while looking at this, other than basic recognition of the people depicted and saying, "Oh that's John Candy." This is art in the way that the random shit on the walls at an Applebee's is art.

So why make it? Because you're bankrupt both creatively and literally, and some cretinous billionaire is offering money to the most bland, mass-appealing art possible.

What does any of this have to do with Child's Play or Child's Play 2? Christ, I don't know, but it sure was a frustrating day.

What's it about: In Child's Play, a murderer transfers his soul to a creepy My Buddy style doll through a voodoo magic spell after being mortally wounded by the police. The doll is purchased by a single mom for her idiot son, and the doll starts killing people, I guess. Then it ends after 85 minutes or so.

In Child's Play 2, for some inexplicable reason, the Chucky doll is rebuilt by the giant mega-corporation that designed him (it almost looks like the same toy company that was in the Robin Williams film Toys crossed with Silver Shamrock from Halloween III). Chucky escapes and begins hunting the boy who owned him in the first movie. Initially it feels like the sequel might be in on the joke (the factory and toy company are very weird, but are forgotten about right away), but that quickly gives way to more foul-talking doll banality.

What's interesting: Brad Dourif is an incredibly talented actor, and probably doesn't get enough credit for his career, which includes Grima Wormtongue, Doc Cochran in Deadwood, and the young and impressionable Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He also plays the murderer in Child's Play, but only for five minutes or so, then he does the voice of the doll for like 8 more movies or something. It's admittedly pretty funny to hear his voice screaming swear words out of a doll.

Does anybody genuinely enjoy these movies? I hadn't seen them up until now, because they were a little before my time. I was six when the first one came out, and eight when the sequel landed; a little too young to process that the My Buddy-type doll in my closet wasn't going to come to life and murder me. My parents were fairly permissive with my entertainment choices, but they did my prefrontal cortex a solid by keeping these away from me.

Full disclosure: because I was a plump Little Lord Fauntleroy dandy, I was given a My Buddy knockoff known as Corky for Christmas one year. It was like My Buddy, except it could "talk" using a cassette deck stuck into his back (my cousins put a Pantera tape into my Corky at one point, which is a memory that's scorched into my brain) and had a face made out of incredibly hard plastic. I somehow did not think it was creepy or weird, probably because I was too young to realize it. 

I give my older sister a lot of credit for A) sleeping in the same house with that thing, and B) not throwing it into a woodchipper at first blush. 

Aaaaaaaaah!

There's a whole page of some Christmas photo album of me posing with my Corky doll in matching outfits, because of course. No I do not have them. Do not ask me for them. Ask my mom.

So you'd think with my rich creepy doll history these two movies would be right up my alley, but eh. They're incredibly dated and frankly a little dull. Each film is 70% "Chucky does things and no adult is paying attention, so they think the little kid is doing it," and that gets frustrating and boring damn quick. The doll kills aren't even all that exciting. Yeah he's kinda scary looking at times, but you can never suspend disbelief enough to ignore that you could just tear him apart with your bare hands...because, well, he's a 3 foot tall doll. 

The strong points? Brad Dourif doing swears, a couple of the kills are funny, and the ending of the second one features a doll machine that turns out body horror nightmares for no discernible reason. Why would you need a machine to create a fleshy dollpile with 8 arms and no head? Why would anyone design such a machine? It's frustrating that the sequel didn't explore this further.

Other movies I thought of: I thought of a lot of other movies while I was watching these two. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. Brad Dourif is real good in that.

Miscellany: The little kid smokes in the second one, and it seems like it might be a real cigarette. If so, that's cool as hell and this kid owns:

Also, in the first one, the kid's mom (played by the woman who played Captain Kirk's whale biologist girlfriend in Star Trek IV) works a part-time job at the perfume counter at some nameless department store, and yet owns a palatial downtown Chicago apartment. This tells me that the Child's Play movies take place in the John Hughes-verse, where everyone owns giant homes.

I guess I do love how they crowbar the voodoo subplot into the films. There's absolutely no explanation for why Brad Dourif's murder guy character knows voodoo, except that he was maybe friends with a voodoo priest at some point. But this is a universe where voodoo is extremely real, and not just on a fluke basis. Chucky straight up breaks a dude's limbs in real time using just a voodoo doll  (and then it's never used again).

Recommendation: I'm probably the wrong person to be asking. If you have some connection to these films out of nostalgia or an affection for the doll effects, that's cool, but they're a little hard to jump into in 2018.

Unremarkably Bad