Child's Play ★★★☆☆

I’ve been watching the first series of the Chucky TV show while sick and enjoying it. It starts off slow and focused, its own-self contained thing, but then as it escalates and gets sillier it starts steadily dropping in characters and stories from the movies. I’ve never seen any of the Child’s Play or Chucky movies and decided to give them a go before starting the second series of the TV show.

It’s always interesting going back to the original of a long-running series and seeing how it compares. What of the primitive iconography goes all the way back to the start? What inconvenient plot details have been forgotten? How does the glimpse of Charles Lee Ray’s pre-doll life we see in this movie compare to the flashbacks from the TV show?

Certainly how the show frames murder as a part of Chucky and Tiffany’s relationship gives a retroactive and unintentional bisexual subtext to Eddie’s underdeveloped relationship with Charles in this.

But just taking the movie on its own merits: It’s pretty good! I really like the slow escalation. The doll evolves from object of tension to a stalking presence to a slapstick slasher to a gruesome monster.

There’s some bits I think could have been left on the table. Much of the voodoo stuff and the second scene with the homeless guy who sells the doll to Karen in particular, but they don’t drag the movie down enough to ruin it. It’s easy to see why this was a hit that resulted in so many sequels.