I think this is not necessarily great but I do love that the show about the possessed evil doll has its third series declaring that the White House is so soaked in blood that the only way forward for it is to be burnt to the ground and when the mythical good non-partisan independent president gets killed the C.I.A. is positively gleeful about stage managing getting someone more amenable to them back into the office.

I decided to watch this in between the second and third series of Chucky. The voodoo serial killer angle has been entirely expunged—which is not surprising for a film released in 2019—and instead Chucky is now a doll with artificial intelligence who is meant to learn as you play with him.

It initially seems like the film is going to do something with this. The first victim in the story is a Vietnamese man who commits suicide after being fired from his job assembling products for a giant American tech corporation named Kaslan. One might expect the movie to then frame the Kaslan Corporation as the ultimate villains of the story, but the Foxconn-inspired death is quickly forgotten and the only bearing this has on the rest of the film is that Chucky can magically control any and all electronics around him with his glowing E.T. finger, up to and including a self-driving car.

I don’t find A.I. Chucky very interesting. The original Chucky was never a particularly deep character but he is fun where robo-Chucky is just predictable. Every step of his journey from damaged, innocent doll to serial killer is fairly obvious in advance.

Also why did they make the doll look like James Woods.

The first series of this show manages a steady escalation of both violence and camp as it starts to centre Chucky more and pull in various elements from the films, which is a thing the second series can’t really do a second time but it still manages to have a rising tide of ridiculousness throughout with its different versions of Chucky as well as the wonderful stuff focusing on Tiffany’s Jennifer Tilly facade falling apart. I also love G.G.

I will admit that people with mental health issues being preyed on and disbelieved is a very natural progression from the previous film but this is a Hollywood horror movie so how people with mental health issues is handled is not good.

It does pull of neat tricks with keeping you guessing which doll is the real Chucky before undermining that that even matters at all, with the puzzling question of how Chucky gets from being a head in Andy Barclay’s safe into the asylum acting as a hint to that.

But other than providing that hint Andy is entirely superfluous to the story. You could lift everything involving him out of the movie and it would work fine and his presence just messes up the pacing, especially in the climax which seems to pause just to wrap up his part.

And now I am caught up with the TV show having gone through a series of seven films that struggle to rise above “okay”. I still enjoyed this and it will hopefully give context for whatever the show pulls in the second and third series. Glen[da] surely has to come into it at least.

The series pivots back to horror and actually does a decent job of it. In particular I keep turning the treatment of Nica over in my head. A part of the threat in the earlier films is Chucky targetting children who have very limited agency and whose concerns people do not take seriously and this movie replicates that with an adult through the sheer ableism that Nica faces from her family and the world, though there is a few plot contrivances to make it work and the way it ties her paraplegia into the series lore is a bit ridiculous.

The lore is also a bit of an elephant in the room. The movie felt almost like a soft reboot at the start before it starts to dump more and more of that in. This is something I kind of liked in the television series but that has a lot more room to let that seep in over time to allow the show to evolve, while here it feels more like it’s bulldozing an otherwise tight plot.

And if the series is going to keep bringing up previous stories so much it should probably try to actually have it make sense as a whole. The backstory stuff here does not feel like it fits with either the original movie or the other retconned versions of it.

Definitely an improvement over Bride of Chucky, fully embracing absolutely nonsense and grotesque comedy, but also possibly the one that has aged the most poorly out of all of these so far.

It’s the late nineties, Scream came out two years ago and we think horror movies are cringe unless veiled with an layer of irony. The Child’s Play series over and now it’s time for the Chucky franchise.

Okay the move into horror comedy does make sense, really. This is a series about a serial killer children’s doll. And I think this film has a lot going for it. Tiffany is great and Chuck’s new design is pretty cool and stops it from repeating the schtick of the last three films of pretending to be a cute cuddly doll who fools children.

The movie makes up a magic amulet so that this doesn’t have to be a fourth film in a row of him chasing Andy Barclay, but road trip to get the MacGuffin is a pretty boring setup too and I don’t think making Chucky and Tiff the main characters instead of his victims was a great move. Chucky is fun but he’s very one-note. Tiff is great but doesn’t have that much more depth. Jade and Jesse are just boring and I do not care about them at all. And the general 90s-ness of it grates against me.

Still, the series has reinvented itself now and I know it does eventually find its footing by the time it gets to the TV show at least, I just hope it actually did it in one of the movies before that too.

The same basic plot again but this time in a military school. I might not be rating this so low if I wasn’t watching these back to back but I do think it is also a step down. We are getting a little sillier; Chucky gets some more abuse while pretending to be a doll and the kills are getting more elaborate or ironic. But we’re not fully into horror comedy yet and the result is neither tense nor particularly funny.

As horror sequels go it’s pretty decent but isn’t bringing much new to the table. Which Chucky now being an already established movie monster the film is not shy about showing him off from the get-go, so it lacks the first film’s sense of escalation. We do get to see a lot more puppetry though and it is very impressive work, though some lingering shots where Chucky’s face abruptly stops animating do break the illusion somewhat. In links to the TV show we have Kyle and also the theme music.

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.