Canary Duty - Child's Play

Before I get into the review, I should note that this film exists for somewhat nefarious reasons.  See, the original Child's Play was made by MGM/United Artists, but as Child's Play 2 started shooting, in 1990, they were bought out by the firm Quintex, who didn't want to make horror movies.  So the sequel, franchise, and character rights to Chucky were sold to Universal.  They did pretty well out of them over the years, with Bride of Chucky being one of the most fun of the post Scream slasher boom, and the last couple of straight-to-video ones being pretty damn good. As for Quintex... they went bust in 1991; deciding not to do a sequel to a film that earned a 400% profit margin shows the kind of thinking that lead to that.  But MGM did hang on to those rights to the original, so now we have this version (via the resurrected Orion Pictures), which I suspect purely happened so they can keep the name for another few decades.  It does irk a lot of people (including me) that this was done without series creator Don Mancini, or original Chucky voice Brad Dourif, who are still working on a new TV series to follow on from 2017's Cult of Chucky.  Still, despite the shady motives, what's the final product like?

Well colour me surprised because this Child's Play is pretty fun, definitely the more enjoyable of this week's two horror releases.  I know, I'm gobsmacked about this too!  I think one of the big strengths the film has is that it does what a remake is supposed to do; just take some of the key ingredients of the original, and find new ways to fit them together.  In many ways this version, in jettisoning the whole "serial killer soul gets into doll because Hollywood voodoo" business of the original, this plays more like a very dark version of Small Soldiers (as if that film didn't already have a lot of dark elements!).  I love the idea in here that this version of Chucky is basically what will happen to AIs if they learn everything from humans without some major safeguards in place.  (The opening scene shows a disgruntled factory worker deliberately disabling all of the behaviour restraint programs; I wonder if Asimov's three laws were amongst them?)  Not only is that nicely cynical in a Black Mirror-ish way, but remarkably something like this has already happened in real life; remember the case of that chatbot that Twitter managed to turn into a Trump voter?

The music is pretty damn great too!  Bear McCreary clearly had way too much fun making this!

So with this new concept for Chucky's origins (which in a nicely meta touch include getting a few ideas from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), we have something very different in terms of his characterisation, and this is where the talents of Mark Hamill really come into play.  Of course cartoon/comics fans already know that he can voice a psychopath pretty well, but he does stellar work in this one.  Chucky starts off nice and friendly, and later even as he's started doing no-OK things we get a sense that he's just misunderstood the world and Andy intentions rather badly, but as things go on, we get the emergence of a more malicious, possessive personality.  He has a proper character arc in this, a sort of Frankenstein-esque tale of an artificial being driven more and more to terrible acts by not being treated or parented properly.  In terms of rebooted slasher villains (of which all the big names have been at some point or another), this Chucky is the most successful, simply by thinking of him as a toy first of all, and building a character from there.  BTW, this one's marketing has made a big thing about this being released on the same day as Toy Story 4, and in many ways you can see this Chucky as an evil version of Woody (even down to both being owned by an Andy; was that intentional when they made the first Toy Story?), but if you were wondering, no they don't make any obvious gags about that in the film.

Speaking of the marketing, check out what Lee Hardcastle has done for this!  Warning; a lot of plasticine gore!

So how is it in the horror stakes?  Pretty damn good, that TCM2 clip was definitely a statement of intent, it has a wonderfully old-school vibe to it, with some really shocking deaths, quite a bit of gore (I'm amazed this didn't get as much trouble from the BBFC as Brightburn to be honest), and great tension building moments.  BTW, I'm amused that this is the second film I've seen this week with a villain with glowing read eyes and using off-screen teleportation a tonne.  Now there are a few contrived horror movie-ish bits, but only one major one in terms of plotting (when after the main characters have done something very sensible the film gets to continue for another act), and only one moment of "oh c'mon, how did a doll do that?" towards the end.  There are a few bits of characters making dumb decisions, but it's mainly on the kid leads, and I can forgive that because, y'know, they're kids.  Overall, this one has pretty good characters for this sort of film, some proper jerks for the early victims, and some quite nice people to really raise the stakes later on the tale.  It should be said that the acting across the board is great, with the stand-outs being Aubrey Plaza, Brian Tyree Henry, and relative newcomer Gabriel Bateman as Andy.

Seriously, this one gets its tech satire angle absolutely spot-on; watching this right after E3 makes me realise just how on point it is.

Now I still feel a bit off about this existing while the main Chucky series is still going on, this is probably going to be viewed as sort of the Never Say Never Again of the series (except MGM actually made it), but as a separate self-contained thing, Child's Play 2019 is a lot of fun.  I do think that maybe if it was it's own thing a bit more, losing the Chucky "brand" and such it might be looked on more favourably; I don't really think it hurts the film as much as some people have said, but it would let it have more of its own identity.  Still, it is a really fun mix of modern ideas with dashes of 80s excess. I know you're all probably going to check out Toy Story 4 this weekend, rightfully so, but if you're in the mood for something a little more adult and fun, and you have a sense of humour as sick as mine, you'll get a lot out of this.  Not sure this is a "good" movie in traditional terms, but it's sure an enjoyable one; time to play!

Sidenote

Now a few critics have said that Chucky's design doesn't really fit the "Alexa in a cute body" concept in the script, and said it's a weakness due to having to fit the Child's Play IP.  I don't see it that way, because of something that happened a while ago, which I suspect that might be another inspiration to making this one.  Remember Teddy Ruxpin from the 80s?  Well, they revamped the toy recently, making it app compatible, and, well...

Yes, it's perfectly OK to be really creeped out by that.  I do think this influenced not just part of the story, but some of the design of Chucky, especially the eyes!