Franchises: Child's Play. Child's Play 2 (1990)

On that night before Halloween in 1999 when I watched the first Child's Play, the USA Network inexplicably skipped the second movie and played the third right after it. However, I did see a little bit of Child's Play 2 the next night on TNT but I wouldn't see the entire film for a couple more years when I bought both it and the original on VHS. As such, my opinion on it is the same today as it was back then: it's not a bad sequel at all but, that said, it's not one of my favorites. What's weird about it, though, is that I can't explain why that is. I should love it since, while not as good as the film that spawned it, it has a lot of good ingredients, such as nice actors, taut direction, more great animatronic effects for Chucky, and whatnot, but something is still missing from this movie for me and I can't put my finger on what it is. Maybe it's the absence of Catherine Hicks and Chris Sarandon or that this film's tone isn't as dark as the original or something along those lines. Mainly, though, this movie has always felt... rushed to me, which I know isn't the case since there were two years in-between this and the first film. If anything, Child's Play 3 is the one that was rushed but, regardless, this one still doesn't feel quite as genuine. It was little more than a cash-in sequel, so maybe that's what it is, but who knows? I'll try to explain myself as best as I can throughout this review but I'm not sure if I'll succeed since I seem to be off to a shaky start already.

Taking place two years after the events of the first film, the movie opens with Play Pals Inc., the company that produces the Good Guy dolls, in an uproar after the commotion that Andy Barclay's story of a killer Good Guy doll has caused now that it's hit the newspapers. To prove that there's nothing to the boy's story, the company recovers the burned remains of Chucky and rebuilds him. Needless to say, this revives the soul of Charles Lee Ray that's still in the doll and he quickly resumes his mission to transfer his soul into Andy's body and become human again. Meanwhile, Andy has been living at a foster center while his mother undergoes psychiatric evaluation for backing up her son's story and is adopted by a couple, Phil and Joanne Simpson, who take him to their home in the suburbs near Chicago, where he also meets Kyle, a teenage girl who's staying with them. However, Chucky manages to track him down very easily and, once again, Andy must defeat the evil doll in order to protect his foster family and to save his own soul.

The rights issues with these movies have always been very interesting to me since you have the first film, which was released by MGM, and then, you have all of the sequels, which have been produced by Universal. I used to wonder why MGM gave up the rights to the franchise immediately after the first film, with one possibility that I came up with being that the studio was having a lot of financial problems in the late 80's (which caused the Bond franchise to go into hiatus until the mid-90's). Now, I've learned that it's because at the time, the studio was about to be bought out by a company that decided that they didn't want to produce violent horror films, especially ones that involved and were believed to influence children, which this series has dealt with now and again. The fact that there was a group of protesters that showed up outside the entrance to MGM around the time of the first film's release probably didn't help matters either. Regardless, it always felt bizarre that, until 2013, all of the sequels could be found together in box sets while the original, the best one, was never in there with them.

According to IMDB's trivia section, Wes Craven was originally going to direct this film but, ultimately, they decided to go with John Lafia, who helped write the screenplay for the original along with Don Mancini and who, along with Mancini, got caught up in a bitter rights issue dispute with Tom Holland. Lafia has only directed ten movies at this point, with the last four of them having been TV movies made in the early to mid-2000's (the last theatrical film he made was back in 1995), and the only other one of any note is the 1993 killer dog flick, Man's Best Friend, which is pretty decent but not a classic by a long shot. Before this, he'd also directed a couple of episodes of Freddy's Nightmares and he would go on to work on shows like Babylon 5 and The Dead Zone. All in all, Lafia proves to be a pretty capable director here, coming up with some interesting camerawork and visuals, and he also got along much better with Mancini, making the production of this film a happier experience for the writer. The tone that he creates for the film is much more lighthearted and fun as opposed to Tom Holland's dark, serious tone for the original, with the deaths being bloodier and more outrageous and this is also being where Chucky, like Freddy Krueger before him, starts to become a jokester. Again, I can appreciate that since horror movies can be fun and don't always have to be doom and gloom, but I've always liked the darkness of the original more.

Alex Vincent returns as Andy Barclay and his acting, which was already pretty good and naturalistic, has definitely improved in the two years since the first film. In fact, I must say that I like him even more here. He looks and feels much more confident in what he's doing and he's also able to bring a little more depth to Andy, now playing him with a feeling of haunted paranoia. As I said in my review for the original, the events of there have left Andy quite scarred and he's deeply afraid of Chucky coming back to life and finding him again. He's still a fun-loving child but he's frightened and feels completely alone, having been separated from his mother, the only other person who believes him. It really makes you feel bad for the kid. What I really like about Andy here, though, is how proactive he is. Once he finds out that Chucky's back and is after him again, he takes measures to protect himself, grabbing an electric, carving knife and heading down into the basement where he knows Chucky is hiding in order to kill him before he can get at him. While it doesn't work and leads to him getting framed for Chucky's evil deeds once again, it's great that he didn't stupidly wait around for Chucky to attack, and during the climax in the toy factory, he fights back against Chucky, eventually burying him in hot melted plastic. One thing that you can definitely say is that, if the events of the first film turned him halfway against dolls, what happens here does it for all time. Despite his fears, Andy was willing to play with the Good Guy doll that Phil and Joanne had in their house but then that doll turned out to be Chucky, who took the place of the actual doll, Tommy. That poor kid will never look at another doll for the rest of his life!

Jenny Agutter, who played David Naughton's love interest in An American Werewolf in London, plays Andy's foster mother, Joanne Simpson, who is the foster parents who's much more sympathetic towards Andy. Naturally she, like everyone else, doesn't believe Andy's story about Chucky but she understands that the kid has been through a tough time and wants to help him get back to a normal life. Even though her husband doesn't like the idea of having a potentially disturbed child in their house and all the evidence does seem to indicate that Andy is, indeed, quite trouble, she defends Andy because she says she likes him, which Andy overhears and makes him a little more settled. It even gives him enough confidence to play with the Good Guy doll that the Simpsons have in their house (not knowing that it is, in fact, Chucky). And even when strange things continue to happen that Andy appears to be behind, Joanne continues to stick up for him. It's a shame that Chucky spoils everything by not only making Andy appear to be a bad kid but also, like before, framing him for murder. He causes Joanne to turn completely against Andy, shouting at him to get away from her when he tries to comfort her after Phil's death, thinking that he's responsible. Chucky kills Joanne herself not long after this and, after everything she tried to do for him, it's really sad that she died hating Andy.

Gerrit Graham plays Phil Simpson, Andy's reluctant foster father who, unlike his wife, is not at all welcoming towards Andy, feeling that he's a troubled little boy who hasn't come to terms with his "delusion" about a killer doll. You can just tell that he doesn't like Andy from the moment they bring him home and, at every turn, continues to believe that the kid is nuts. He does seem to generally care about his wife but his opinion on Andy has them at odds. One really unlikable thing he does is, when he and Joanne are having an argument, he loudly yells about how Andy is going to tear the family apart and finally saying to Joanne, "He's not our child!" I will say, though, that he does make a good point about how they may be unfit to care for a child who's as troubled as Andy appears to be and, when it seems like Kyle tied Andy up to keep him from telling Joanne and Phil that she snuck out of the house while she was grounded, he angrily comes to the boy's defense over it and does get rid of the doll in order to calm Andy down (although, he could have done more than simply throw it into the basement). He's eventually killed by Chucky when he goes down to the basement upon hearing their struggle and sees Andy holding the carving knife and one thing that I find interesting is that he sees Chucky right before he dies, meaning that he died knowing that Andy was telling the truth, whereas Joanne dies hating Andy since it's not known if she saw Chucky before he did her in. It might not have been intentional but it's an interesting idea, if you think about it.

Christine Elise plays Kyle, a rebellious young woman who's also staying with the Simpsons. At first, she doesn't give a crap about Andy or anyone else for that matter, and you find out that's because she's been in and out of foster homes since she was very young, so she doesn't trust other people to keep her around for very long. Like any rebellious teen, she sneaks out of the house when she and Andy are supposed to be grounded for breaking something of Joanne's (Chucky did it) and while she inadvertently saves Andy from having his soul taken over when she sneaks back in, she still doesn't believe his story and teases him about it. That said, she does start to grow a little more sympathetic towards him when she sees how depressed he is when he knows that he's going to be sent away. She knows it's hard on him since he hasn't lived with a number of different foster families like she has and she tries to get him to be more self-reliant as a result. Unlike Joanne, she doesn't believe that he caused Phil's death but she doesn't find out the truth until she's attacked and taken hostage by Chucky, who forces her to drive him to the adoption center to find Andy. However, like Mike Norris in the original, she's determined to help Andy defeat Chucky from then on out and, also like Norris, is the one who ultimately kills him. But, also like Norris, what becomes of her after the events of this movie, which ends with her and Andy having nowhere to go after they've killed Chucky at the Play Pals factory, is left completely unknown as she's never mentioned in any of the other movies.

There are some other interesting characters in the film's supporting cast. Grace Zabriskie plays Grace Poole, the head of the adoption center, who I kind of like her since she's always sympathetic towards Andy and even he's sent back her to her, she doesn't believe that he killed Phil. Unfortunately, she also finds out that Chucky is alive right before he kills her. Peter Haskell is a real asshole as Mr. Sullivan, the president of Play Pals, who tells his assistant to put a lid on everything that's happened surrounding Chucky that hasn't made it into the newspapers, particularly a weird, lethal incident that happens when they finish rebuilding him. Obviously, he cares more about his business than anything else. Greg Germann as his much put-upon assistant, Mattson, ends up being taken hostage by Chucky and forced to drive him to the suburban neighborhood where Andy is now living before being suffocated by a plastic bag over his head. I've never been able to tell if he actually sees Chucky during this sequence or if he thinks he's a carjacker because he acts rather calmly towards a doll putting a gun in his face. (The TV version turns him into a cheater because they put in a moment of him calling his wife before he calls girlfriend, the latter of which is all that was in the theatrical version.) Finally, the most hateful character in the film by far is Beth Grant as Andy's teacher, Miss Kettlewell. She refuses to listen to Andy when he yells at a kid that's bugging him and when she thinks he wrote an obscenity on his paper, she acts even more like a bitch, locking him in the classroom and yelling, "Head, down!" Like all unlikable characters in horror movies, she's killed off rather quickly. (Although, I never understood how Chucky was able to kill her with a yardstick.)

While Brad Dourif played Chucky in the first film very seriously with just a tiny bit of humor, here he's more of a wise-cracker, with the jokes and one-liners being much more blatant, like, "How's it hanging, Phil?", "You goddamn woman drivers!", "Playtime's over," "You act like you never seen a dead body before," and "I hate kids," and his laugh becoming much more of a Joker-like cackle, not to mention moments like when he gives Kyle the finger. However, the humor is not as overbearing as it would become in the later films. Here, there's a nice balance between the jokes and keeping Chucky still relatively menacing, and the deaths also strike that balance: some are over the top, others are much more mean-spirited. For instance, Chucky's strangulation of Mattson with a plastic bag over his head, the way he kills Phil by causing him to fall and break his neck, gagging and then cutting Joanne's throat, and stabbing Grace Poole repeatedly in the chest are all pretty nasty and twisted. Ms. Kettlewell getting stabbed with a tire-pump is pretty grotesque too but, as I said, I just don't see how you could beat someone to death with something as flimsy as a yardstick. Wouldn't it break after so many hard smacks? But the silliest death in the film by far is the death of this random maintenance worker in the Good Guy dolls factory. While repairing a machine that slides dolls into place and slams plastic eyeballs down into their eye-sockets, Chucky attacks him, causing him to fall onto the machine, and doll eyes get jammed into his own eye-sockets. Even more laughable than that is later on when the corpse is now suddenly hanging from a rope and comes swinging in and slams into Kyle. How the hell did Chucky manage to tie that corpse up and hoist him up into the air, especially when he only had one arm by that point? And what exactly happened at the beginning of the film when, after they finish rebuilding Chucky, a surge of electrical energy goes up through the machine that planted the plastic eyeballs into his head and sends one of the technicians flying through the window behind him? I'm guessing that it's meant to be his evil soul being revived but that's only speculative since it's not explained at all in the actual film and comes across as completely random.

I really like the way Chucky looks in both this movie and the next one. He looks really mean here in particular and the animatronics are just as good as they were in the original, if not better. They may have abandoned the idea of Chucky's design slowly changing over the course of the film into something more human, and they would never bring it back for any of the other sequels, but he still bleeds and the like as he starts to turn human again. I'm sure they used a couple of different faces for him as well because, as you can see from those screenshots, he tends to look so different here and there that it can't be due to the lighting or the movements of the animatronics. Sometimes, his facial features, like his cheekbones and brows, are more streamlined and typically doll-like while other times, they're much more pronounced and make him look more like something that's really alive. They also don't use the midget double as blatantly here as they did in the first film. The most of the double that you see is in far away, full body shots or shadow shots, but not much else, which, in turn, helps the effects look much more legit. Chucky also actually fails in his mission to transfer his soul into another human being and it's made clear that his doll body has now become too human and he's stuck like this (something they would conveniently explain that away in the next film), and once that happens, all he wants to do now is kill Andy out of revenge. In order to achieve that goal, he takes an awful lot of abuse throughout the climax, being forced to pull his right hand off when Kyle traps it in a grate and jams a knife blade into the stump so he can still use it as a weapon and later, getting stuck on a conveyor belt and carried into a machine that jams a bunch of doll hands and legs into his body, which ends up ripping his legs off. But, as before, he's still not dead, and even after Andy pours hot, melted plastic all over him, he's still attacking. He finally dies in a really funny way when Kyle shoves a compressed air hose into his mouth, causing his head to inflate and eventually explode! While the theatrical version of the movie simply ends with Andy and Kyle walking out of the factory, saying they're going home even though they don't know where that is, the TV version has a different ending, with a piece of Chucky's face seen floating in a tank of hot plastic and the machine eventually creating a doll face that smiles evilly (my cousin had seen this and told me all about it, so I was pretty confused when I watched the movie on VHS and it didn't end in that way). This is similar to the opening sequence of Child's Play 3 but I like how it was done there much better than this.

One drawback to the film that I can point out is that I've never found the setting of the suburban neighborhood near Chicago to be as interesting a location as the city itself. The change from a dreary, seedy, snow-covered city to a bucolic, quiet, and constantly sunny neighborhood was probably intentional in order to make the film feel as different from the original as possible but, as a result, it's not as successfully atmospheric in my opinion. The inside of Joanne and Phil's house is never creepy, not even on a dark and stormy night, no matter how they try to make it so. They may have thought that the idea of a great evil like Chucky lurking in one of the idealic houses in this nice, white-bread neighborhood would have been an effective contrast, kind of like Michael Myers arriving in the innocent town of Haddonfield in Halloween, but it doesn't work that way for me. That said, though, the film's look and setting are very pleasing to the eye, especially in the daytime scene in the backyard between Andy and Kyle, and it is interesting how they play on the idea that the neighborhood isn't quite as innocent as it seems, with the other kids on the bus and at school picking on Andy and the teacher he ends up with being a mean, unreasonable, and, in some ways, downright abusive bitch. And there's one location in the movie that I do absolutely love: the Play Pals factory where the climax takes place. This is where Don Mancini originally wanted to set the ending of the first film and I can see why because it's a great place for a chase sequence in a horror film, with those boxes upon boxes of Good Guy dolls that turn the heart of the place into a confusing maze, the machines and conveyor belts that Andy and Kyle have to get around in order to escape, all the different hiding places for Chucky, and the various ways they find to put him out of commission. Whatever other qualms I may have about this movie, that factory makes for an awesome finale.

On a technical level, the film is very well-made. Like I said up above, it's a very pretty-looking film, with nice, bright colors, and the lighting is quite bright and nicely done as well, making it all the more appealing to the eye. That doesn't make it feel as creepy as the first one did, and I think the nighttime scenes are a little too bright for their own good, but it does help give the film its own visual identity. There are also some nice instances of camerawork and editing that John Lafia does, like a long tracking shot that goes from Andy's bedroom in the Simpsons' house, down the hall, and to a shot of Chucky standing at the bottom of the stairs, an upward, spiraling shot when Andy awakens to find that Chucky has tied him to the bed and gagged him, an editing trick that cuts the camera further and further away from the school as Chucky kills Miss Kettlewell, and a POV shot that frantically moves back and forth after Kyle manages to throw Chucky off of her when he attacks her in Joanne's bedroom. I also really like the way they film the sequence of Kyle and Chucky in the car together. There's nothing that special about the way it's framed or anything but it does really look like two people driving in a car and interacting with each other, rather than an actor playing off of an animatronic puppet.

Among other things, Don Mancini intended for the original Child's Play to be something of a dark satire on marketing and how it can affect children but that got pretty much tossed aside when Tom Holland rewrote his script. However, as he would with other elements of his original concept throughout the series, Mancini did get to put a little bit of that idea at the beginning of both this film and the next one. It would get more traction in the first real scene of Child's Play 3 but there's still some of it present here, with how the Play Pals corporation is trying to extinguish the bad publicity surrounding their best product by taking the actual doll, which should really be in an evidence locker somewhere, and rebuilding it to prove that there's nothing wrong with it and put their stockbrokers at ease. You also get a sense of some of the rumors that have been circulating as a result of the story, with one of them being that someone at the company tampered with the doll's voice cassette to make it say the things Andy claimed Chucky said, as well as how far businessmen like Mr. Sullivan will go to protect their company's reputation, including covering up another death that's tied to the Good Guy doll and threatening to fire someone if they don't do it, adding, "As far as the stockbrokers and I concerned, the matter is finished."

Graeme Revell, who would return to the series eight years later for Bride of Chucky, composed a pretty good score for the film. Unlike Joe Renzetti's dark, frightening score for the original, this one has more of an air of thrilling fun in keeping with the film's overall tone. For instance, the opening theme, which I do enjoy, has a bigger-than-life, almost operatic sound to it, and the music that plays during the climax in the factory is very exciting and helps keep the momentum going but, at the same time, doesn't have the dark edge that even the first film's music did for its action oriented sequences, like the big scene in Detective Norris' car. Throughout the score, there are instances of an eerie-sounding, child-like melody that is reminiscent of the piece that played over the first film's ending credits as well as the main theme for the Good Guys TV show there, although it's never as unsettling as the former theme. The music for the more suspenseful moments, like when Chucky comes to life in Andy's room, and when Andy goes down into the basement to find Chucky, is nicely tense and the piece that plays over the ending credits is a nice touch too, going from creepy to kind of sad and tragic and finally ending on a thrilling and exciting note. It may not be my favorite music score in the entire series but it serves its purpose well and, given some of the scores that he's done, it's definitely one of Revell's more memorable pieces of work.

Child's Play 2 is a pretty good sequel all things considered. It has great actors, nice direction, is very well-done on a technical level, Chucky is still on form (both effects- and acting-wise), the movie still has a nice pace to it, there are nice elements like the little jab at corporations and how the neighborhood isn't quite as innocent as it seems, the climax in the factory is pretty thrilling, and the music score is good and fits the film well. I realize that, having said that, I haven't done a very good job in this review of explaining why this film isn't one of my favorites in the series, except for my comments on how its setting and look doesn't invoke fear or atmosphere like the original. I said at the beginning that the movie feels rushed, yet I didn't elaborate on why I feel that way. I guess it's because it's even shorter than the first film (84 minutes, this time) and is still so fast-paced that it feels like the movie was trying to get to the finale a whole lot sooner. Or maybe it could simply be that the original was special, while this is just a run-of-the-mill, cash-in sequel. I know, I suck at explaining this but, whatever the reason, other than Seed of Chucky, I just can't help but like the other movies better than this (which Brad Dourif would disagree with me on since this is his personal favorite). Still, it is what it is and does its job well, so I do recommend it. Don't take my schizophrenic review too seriously.