Seed of Chucky
If we forget the strangely humourless animated sperm-up-a-fallopian-tube opening (unsure if Look Who's Talking has earned the respect of being homaged just yet) the opening few minutes of Seed of Chucky is damn, damn, cool. From puppet POV we see a new present, a toy, pull itself out of its toy-box in the middle of the night and attack and kill those who are unfortunate enough to inhabit its new home. Kind of like those cool POV snuff films in Strange Days, only from a lot shorter perspective. Awesome, I thought, Chucky has his balls back.
The preceding film to this one, Bride of Chucky, the fourth film in the franchise and the first to drop the "Childs Play" title, (which was, like, so 80s, y'know), injected the series with a much needed dose of humour. I mean the other films had always had that Freddy Krueger type one-liners going on (these are films about a killer doll after all) but Bride of Chucky certainly took it a lot further. Yes, I'm talking about the hilarious doll-on-doll sex scene that pre-dated Team America by a few years. That film was a nice and needed detour, but luckily for us the overly self-referential horror flicks that swamped the 90s have since departed, so to get back to some old school Child Play horror (intact with cheesy one-liners of course) was exactly the type of film I was looking for.
I didn't find it here. This film provides neither good horror nor good laughs. The main plot revolves around Chucky and Tiffany's son that was conceived in the previous film and has somehow since been taken to the UK , and forced to perform with a bikey ventriloquist in his stage act. He spends his days wondering where he came from and why he keeps having these strange homicidal dreams (the cool POV scene from the first few minutes) until he sees his parents on the TV in a Hollywood film where they are playing themselves (although still dead as a result of the last film) in a film about…wait for it… killer dolls (groan…cue start to reflexive gags) and a minute later the chipper British child-doll is reunited with his parents and inadvertently brings them back to life.
Now here the film quickly introduces two interesting things: 1) that the child-doll has a strong aversion to killing, much to the disgust of his daddy, and 2) that as he is not anatomically correct (just smooth nether regions like all my…um, my sister's dolls) his parents are unsure what gender he is, and thus what to call him.
My wish from here was that they focused on the first point and got a good couple of gags from the second and moved the fuck on, however the main focus turns out to be the doll's gender, with Glen (or Glenda) going bi-polar and transvestitey – and all the gender confusion apparently triggers his latent homicidal rage. Or I think that's what happened.
With the Ed Wood reference and a bit of queer sensibility thrown in, it certainly seems appropriate that camp director John Waters plays a main role here as a paparazzo. That the tone is over-the-top wacky without being pointedly funny shows affinity for Waters' type of films, however this one is without the spark of originality and satire that his own work contains. His performance is quite entertaining though, and his death scene is the only glimpse we get into what would have been potentially a great recurring joke with mortified Glen accidentally killing someone whilst Papa Chucky glows proudly (see point1)). Pity, as the other death scenes are really quite insipid.
Of course there's a little bit more going on in the film than a gender-confused puppet. The dolls again spend their time trying to transport their souls back into human form, and select playing-herself Jennifer Tilly (who plays herself-playing-a-doll-who-is-played-by-herself…or something) and rap “star” Redman as their surrogate bodies. Tilly proves a good sport – although I'm unsure if making fun of herself for appearing in such crap merits applause or just a look of pity – and there's quite a few amusing moments that all revolve around her lesbo-action in Bound. (“I can hear you screaming”… “No, I'm just watching Bound and its up to the part where Gina Gershon is fingering me!”). I must admit I am not really familiar with this Redman but one can hardly dissect a performance where he plays himself, and at least he kept the gangster “fo schnozzle my nizzle” talk to a minimum.
At first I thought the title was a reference to Glenny boy, but turns out it's quite literal as they try and squeeze some Chucky-spoof into actress Jennifer Tilly to create a 'voodoo baby' so they can have a body for Glen to transfer to too. The 'payoff' here is that this produces a set of twins…one boy and one girl. Which will he choose? To be Glen or Glenda? Or does he have to choose? Why are we still coming back to this horrible plot point? Why am I still watching this film when I'd rather be watching any of its predecessors, or even that killer-Krusty doll episode of The Simpsons where the switch was turned to 'evil'? Why am I wasting all this word count on it? Time to wrap up.
The ending of the film smacks oddly of Being John Malkovich whilst the final shot very surprisingly leaves the door open for the tantalising sixth installment which will, based on this shot, probably be called The Arm of Chucky – which actually sounds a fuckload more interesting than the crap I just watched.