The Child’s Play franchise is all over the place. What started as a [fairly] serious slasher series surrounding a killer doll would morph into a Nightmare on Elm Street-like horror comedy before self-correcting to find a solid middle ground. I’ll be the first to admit that I have never really cared much for this franchise. Child’s Play frightened me when I was a kid, and it wouldn’t be until my college years that I decided to watch Bride and Seed–this altered my overall opinion of what the franchise stood for. Watching Child’s Play 2 and 3 back in college left me wondering how a franchise as culturally impactful as this one fluctuated in style and substance.
Bride of Chucky follows two groups of people who inevitably meet up for a final climactic finale. Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly) procures Chucky’s (Brad Dourif) body following the events of Child’s Play 3. Her goal is to perform a voodoo ritual to put his soul back into a human’s body. Through a questionable series of events, Chucky kills Tiffany and puts her soul into the body of a doll. The side story follows Jade Kincaid (Katherine Heigl) and Jesse Miller (Nick Stabile) who elope, with a thousand dollars, from Jade’s overbearing police chief uncle Warren (John Ritter). After Chucky kills Warren, Jade and Jesse are fingered for the murder. That’s when hijinks ensue.
Before the comments start, let’s return to the opening comment regarding Child’s Play turning into a horror comedy. Chucky was always one for quips. Like Freddy Krueger, Chucky would hit a one-liner shortly before or after his kill. These jokes worked to help cut through Chucky’s horror. It gave some momentary relief from the kills. Bride of Chucky is just one long gag, and for me, it’s frustrating. Like Nightmare, Bride of Chucky has lost the plot. Every scene seems to exist to facilitate a setup for the next bit or one-liner, rather than having moments of comedy flow naturally. The doll sex scene and swinger couple bits are just poorly thought-out filler.
I know this is going to anger some of you, but Bride of Chucky is a seriously awful movie.
There are a few moments that I do truly enjoy and work well in the overall Child’s Play universe. Tiffany kills the officer she buys Chucky’s body from with a nail file and then uses it to file her nails. The moment Tiffany stabs Chucky in the back at the cemetery is a great character moment, but it makes everything that led up to it pointless. With the exception of a few moments here and there, Bride of Chucky ends up being a chore to watch rather than entertainment. For a genre that has always been political, gay representation has been lacking for quite some time. The character of David Collins (Gordon Michael Woolvett) is a welcome addition to the story, but he feels underutilized in the grand scheme of it all.
While I may not care for the franchise much, I’ve done some research on it over the years. Bride of Chucky features many recycled bits from other Child’s Play scripts and you can really feel it. The kills are few and far between and feel overly forced. Child’s Play 4 was initially put on hold after the abysmal box office of Child’s Play 3 and maybe writer/director Don Mancini should have taken another year or so to really flesh out the canon of Chucky. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of Tiffany becoming a doll and becoming pregnant with Chucky’s baby. But I don’t think the ends justify the means.
Cult and Curse of Chucky, thankfully, take the series back to a more grounded and to-the-roots nature of what Child’s Play was, and I’m glad it took nearly a decade after Seed for it to come to fruition. Mancini is an excellent voice in horror, but time and constraints are necessary for his vision to be fully realized. Those who are Child’s Play die-hards will probably disagree with everything I’ve said, and that’s okay. As a casual Chucky fan, Bride of Chucky feels nothing more than a nu-metal, Hot Topic, try-hard entry into the franchise. The kills look solid, and Dourif gives an incredible vocal performance (as always) but there’s little to no substance to Bride of Chucky.
No wonder half of all marriages end in divorce.