Franchises: Child's Play. Curse of Chucky (2013)

During my first year of doing this blog in 2011, I reviewed the five Chucky movies that had been released up to that point (I've also since majorly overhauled and updated those reviews, if you want to go check them out), ending with Seed of Chucky. And at the time, with no new movie in seven years, and despite talk for a little bit about a possible remake of the original Child's Play, the series did seem to be dead. Not that I was absolutely chomping at the bit for a new movie but, at the same time, it was disconcerting to think that Seed, which I'm not the biggest fan of, would mark the end for the Chuckster. But then, in the fall of 2013, virtually out of the blue, I heard that there was a new one coming... but it was going direct-to-video. And that immediately felt like the death knell because, as we all know, "direct-to-video" is never something you want to hear for a franchise that began in the theaters. Not only does it almost always mean lower budgets, crappier acting, and lesser quality all around, but it all but screams that the studio has lost faith in the brand. Once in a while, you get a nice surprise, like Tremors II: Aftershocks (and, you could argue, Tremors 3 and 4, when the original creators were still attached), but those are the very rare exception. And even though this was touted as going back to the dark and scary approach of the initial chunk of the franchise, the fact that Don Mancini was again writing and directing, despite how poorly-received Seed was, didn't inspire much more confidence. Then, I saw the trailer that October, and it looked promising. It seemed to be something of a reboot, as there were no indications that it was connected to the previous movies, with Chucky being delivered to this house and terrorizing an apparently random family. Moreover, he wasn't scarred up like he'd been for the past two movies, and while I found his look to be kind of off-putting, it was nice to hear Brad Dourif voicing him yet again. And it did indeed seem to be going back to the series' horror roots (the clip of Barb sticking her finger towards Chucky's mouth and him lunging actually made me jump a little). On top of that, when it was released, it got really good reviews from just about everybody, including some I knew who weren't even the biggest Chucky fans to begin with, which was very encouraging. I didn't see it myself until that January, when I bought the Chucky: The Complete Collection Blu-Ray set (I figured if I was going to get Curse on Blu-Ray, I'd like to have the others on Blu-Ray as well)...

... and my reaction was, "Who would've thought that going direct-to-video was like the best thing that could've happened to Chucky at that point?" This was, indeed, exactly what the series needed to get back on its feet after Seed, as it turned out to be a well-directed, atmospherically-shot, genuinely tense little thriller that made good use of its confined setting. In addition, Chucky himself is especially well-utilized, the movie introduces a new character who has since become a fairly popular, and increasingly tragic, part of the mythology, and the story has a good number of twist and turns, some of which further enrich Chucky's backstory (although I do have some qualms with it as well), and nicely surprising appearances. Now, that said, the movie isn't perfect, as the low, direct-to-video budget does rear its ugly head from time to time, mostly in the effects to bring Chucky to life. Also, some of the acting leaves a lot to be desired for, and Mancini screws around with the established mythology in a fairly egregious manner this time. But, on the whole, it's an awesome flick that I think any fan should, at the very least, enjoy.

A package is delivered to the secluded home of Sarah Pierce, who lives with her disabled daughter, Nica. Upon opening the package, which has no return address, they find it contains a Good Guy doll, which goes by the name of Chucky. Put off by it, Sarah throws the doll in the trash. That night, Nica awakens to the sound of her mother screaming, and comes downstairs to find her lying on the floor, in a huge pool of blood. The death is ruled a suicide and the body is taken away, after which Nica is visited by her sister Barb, her husband Ian, their daughter Alice, live-in nanny Jill, and Father Frank, the family priest. Alice immediately takes to Chucky, whom she says is her "friend till the end." With everyone staying over that night, Nica cooks her special homemade chili, but unbeknownst to her, Chucky puts rat poison in one of the bowls, which is eaten by Frank. Becoming ill, he promptly leaves and ends up in a traffic accident that results in his being decapitated. Unaware of this, the family watches old home movies of Sarah when she was living in Chicago with her late husband and was pregnant with Nica. In footage of a family cookout, Nica notices a strange man standing off to the side and watching everybody else, someone who Barb doesn't recognize either. As the night goes on, unusual things continue to happen around Chucky, whom Alice claims is alive and talking. After Nica is momentarily trapped in the elevator with him and finds a bleeding knife wound on her leg, she looks into where the package came from and, though the phone signal is scrambled because of the storm raging outside, hears from the delivery company that it came from an evidence depository. And when she researches Chucky on the internet, she learns of the strange deaths and murders linked with the doll, as well as its connection to Charles Lee Ray. Seeing the latter's photo, Nica recognizes him as the man in the home movies. But no sooner does she learn this than Chucky begins murdering everybody in the house, eventually leading to a confrontation between him and Nica, where she learns of his connection to her family.

Fan-made poster

Whatever you may personally think of Seed of Chucky, what can't be denied is that it didn't do so hot at the box-office and thus, caused the series to stagnate after Bride gave it such a nice boost (kind of like what Halloween: Resurrection did to that series after the massive success of H20). And just like how Child's Play 3's under-performance led to Universal shelving the series, the same thing happened after Seed, the story of which the studio wasn't crazy about to begin with. The authors of Reign of Chucky also suggest that the horror remake trend that dominated much of the 2000's could be a reason why there was a nine-year gap between films. With just about everything else getting revamped, and Rob Zombie's Halloween remake especially proving to be an enormous hit in 2007, Don Mancini and David Kirschner decided to, again, beat everyone else to the punch and produce a remake of the original movie themselves. I can remember Mancini mentioning it in the special features on the 2008 special edition DVD of the original Child's Play, and there was plenty of talk about it online that year and in early 2009, with speculation about the story and talk of Brad Dourif returning to voice Chucky. But the reason why the remake ultimately didn't happen (at least, not then) was MGM, who've always held the exclusive rights to the original film and whom Universal couldn't finalize a production deal with. The studio's financial problems at the time and eventual bankruptcy in 2010 only compounded things. Once that fell apart, Mancini instead came up with the idea of a movie that would be a soft reboot but still qualify as a sequel, which ultimately led to Curse of Chucky. But because Universal was reluctant go with another theatrical movie due to Seed's lackluster box-office, and with Rogue Pictures having been sold off, the only option he had to get it made was through Universal 1440, the studio's direct-to-video section.

While Mancini has and likely always will defend Seed of Chucky, he was smart enough to realize that it wasn't what fans wanted from the franchise and that he needed to bring it back around to its scary roots. He said in an interview, "The sin I committed was that I was making a comedy, where people wanted a horror movie... Bride of Chucky kind of successfully walks a line and perhaps satisfies both audiences, and I lost the horror audience with this movie." He's also said that he feels, had it not been for his ongoing friendship with David Kirschner, he likely would've been booted out after Seed. As flamboyant as he got with Seed, and as crazy as he would get with Cult of Chucky and the TV series, I think Curse proves that Mancini is more than capable of doing a straightforward, dark, and suspenseful horror film, one with a lot of atmosphere and some interesting twists and turns. I also think it was quite clever of him to start the movie cold and not flat-out say initially whether it acknowledges Seed or any of the previous movies, for that matter, until quite a while in. As a result, while I would say enjoy most of the past movies more, I think Curse is, by far, the series' brightest shining moment since Mancini took full creative control.

I'm sure many were saying that the casting of Brad Dourif's daughter, Fiona, in the lead here was nothing more than nepotism (she had done some acting beforehand but it wasn't much to write home about), but I didn't think much about it going into the movie. And when I saw it, I felt those naysayers had to be eating major crow, as she is awesome as Nica Pierce. As tragic of a character as Andy Barclay turned out to be since, as Chucky himself says, he killed the kid's childhood, Nica takes the cake for the most pitiable person in the whole series. In fact, her story rivals that of Jamie Lloyd in the Halloween series in terms of sheer tragedy. When we first meet her here, she's a paraplegic who's stuck in her isolated family home with her overbearing, smothering mother, Sarah, and desperate to escape her sad existence (the first time we see her, she's looking up a website that reads "Explore Europe,"). As she signs for the package that's randomly delivered to their doorstep, you learn that she used to be in college, majoring in psychology, but ended up dropping out, likely due to her mother's insistence. Even though she's delighted when the charming young mailman appears to be flirting with her, her mother squashes her confidence when she suggests that he was just being nice because of her condition. And then, that night, after they've opened up the package to find Chucky, and Nica has made her disdain for her mother's attitude bitterly clear, she finds Sarah dead from an apparent suicide. The next day, after the body has been taken away, Nica is visited by her family, but while that should bring her comfort, it mostly only adds to her distress. That's because her older sister, Barb, proves to be as overbearing as her mother, treating Nica like she's an absolute invalid who's unable to take care of herself at all, as well as mentally unstable. She gets along much better with her little niece, Alice, and their scenes together are very charming, as you can see their bond. However, as the night goes on, Nica starts to wonder where exactly Chucky came from, especially since Alice is so attached to him and strange things start happening around him. She also gets a weird feeling when she sees a man she doesn't recognize in her family's old home movies. And when she looks up the doll's history, she learns about the murders around it, as well as its connection to Charles Lee Ray, whom she realizes is the man in the footage.

Seriously, Fiona is just awesome in this role. She makes Nica a lovely, sweet-natured young woman who has been dealt a massive blow in life and is constantly put upon and repressed by those around her, from her mother to her sister. Then, she starts to suspect that there's more to this mysterious doll than meets the eye, and slowly but surely learns a dark secret about her family's past. After uncovering the Chucky doll's history and learning about Charles Lee Ray, Nica grows especially concerned for Alice and

tries to warn Barb, but due to a misunderstanding, Barb refuses to listen. Unable to use the elevator to reach the house's second floor because the power has been knocked out, Nica is forced to crawl up the stairs. But by the time she gets up there, Chucky has killed Barb and comes after her. Nica tells Ian of the murders and the two of them attempt to escape, but when Ian goes back to look for Alice, who's disappeared, Chucky attacks Nica again. She uses an axe to defend herself, but when Ian comes back and

sees her brandishing it, it makes her look like she's lost her mind and could herself the murderer. The stress of the situation also aggravates a heart condition that she has, causing her to pass out. When she awakens, she finds that Ian has tied her hands to her wheelchair and duct-taped her mouth. Unfortunately, he learns the truth about Chucky too late and is killed by him, while Nica is pushed through the stair railing and falls down into the foyer. There, faced with Chucky, she learns that, as Charles Lee Ray, he became enamored with her mother, and

actually murdered her father and abducted Sarah. And when Sarah contacted the police about his whereabouts, Ray, before fleeing, stabbed her in her pregnant stomach, resulting in Nica's paraplegia. On top of that, Nica also learns that Chucky, as expected, killed Sarah the night he was delivered to them. But when Chucky admits that he never killed Andy Barclay, Nica decides to throw that in his face to get him angry, as well as how it took him 25 years to find her and her family to finish the job, accusing him of having "completion anxiety." Overall, despite her

handicap, she proves to be quite a formidable foe for him, sometimes using the lack of feeling in her legs to her advantage, and also takes drastic steps to get the knife away from him during their final confrontation. Unfortunately, while she survives the night, she's accused of the murders, with even Alice thinking she did it, and  isput away in an asylum. Still, as she's being wheeled out of the courtroom, she mocks Chucky, who's sitting there as a piece of evidence, for still not killing her.

If there's one downright loathsome victim in this movie, it's Barb (Danielle Bisutti), Nica's older sister. From the minute she and her family arrive, she starts belittling Nica, acting as if she's completely incapable of taking care of herself and talking down to her as if she's a child. And she clearly resents it when Nica stands up for herself and says she can take care of herself, justifying it as Nica needing her help but hating her for it. Moreover, when she tells her, "Mom would have wanted you to be taken care of. That's all she ever wanted," it's clear that she's always been jealous of Nica for getting all of the attention when she was growing up disabled and sees her as nothing more than an annoying burden. Late in the film, this resentment boils over to where Barb, thinking that Nica knows that her husband, Ian, is aware of the affair she's having with Jill, as well as the nanny-cam he hid in Chucky's overalls. She seethes, "You resent the fact that I actually have a life... Well, you know what, Nica? It isn't my fault. Okay? What happened to you isn't my fault. And it isn't my fault that you dropped out of school, and it isn't my fault that you chose to never leave this goddamn house! I mean, what the hell were you waiting for, a sign from God?... Fuck you, Nica." Not surprisingly, she also proves to be downright narcissistic. Shortly after she arrives, she tries to talk Nica into selling the house, ostensibly so she can move into a facility closer to them, but Nica sees right through it and knows it's about Barb wanting the money they would get from the sale. She gives this big sob story where she claims that they're struggling financially (despite the fact that they have a live-in nanny), condescendingly mentioning that her husband is working at Starbuck's and that Alice will have to go public school instead of the private one she, supposedly, had heart set on. But she honestly doesn't have much use for her own family, as her and Ian's relationship is clearly on the rocks, and she finds Alice to be more of a bother than anything else. The only person she really cares about is Jill, whom she's planning to leave Ian for once she has the money. However, Ian all but tells Barb that he knows about the affair, as well as that he hid a nanny-cam in Chucky's overalls, and threatens to take Alice away if he's able to prove it. However, as angry as Barb is towards everybody following this, she soon learns the truth about Chucky and dies a horrible death for it.

Throughout much of the movie, Ian (Brennan Elliott) is shown to have a passive-aggressive relationship with Barb, often in how he seems to be rather flirty towards Jill, as well as overruling her in matters pertaining to Alice, like when he allows her to keep Chucky, which Barb is against. In fact, unlike Barb, Ian comes off as a more loving parent towards Alice, but laments at one point that he hasn't been spending much time with her lately, saying he's either working or is tired. And he also proves to not be as blind about what's going on in his own house as he may seem. Though he appears to be flirting with Jill, he actually suspects that Barb is having an affair with her, and when she makes the excuse that she has to check in on Alice to go and see her, Ian all but reveals his suspicions. Barb tries to write off what he says as paranoid delusion, and that's when he tells her about the nanny-cam in Chucky's overalls, as well as threatens to take Alice away if he's able to prove it. And when Barb starts ranting at him about this, he puts in some earbuds and tunes her out, much to her frustration. However, this also prevents him hearing the chaos of Chucky's rampage, until Nica wakes him up and tells him about the murders. Finding Jill's body in the one room, Ian takes Nica down to the garage, then goes back into the house to look for Alice. Nica warns him about Chucky but Ian doesn't take her seriously, and while he's gone, Chucky attacks Nica again. When Ian returns, the sight of Nica wielding an axe to protect herself makes him think that she's the murderer. She passes out when her heart condition is aggravated, and when she awakens, Ian has tied her hands to her wheelchair. Thinking she's hidden Alice somewhere, he checks the footage on the nanny-cam to try to find her, but instead, learns that Chucky is indeed alive. But even though he checks the live feed and sees that Chucky is entering the room they're in, he gets incapacitated and brutally killed before he can do anything.

Little Alice (Summer Howell) basically fills the same role that Andy Barclay did in the original Child's Play, becoming an unwitting and easily manipulated pawn in Chucky's plan. She meets him not long after she and her family arrive at Nica's home and begins carrying him around, saying he's her new best friend. In fact, given how tumultuous we learn her home life has been lately, due to what's going on with her parents, it seems as though he's bringing her the first real joy she's felt in a long time. She's also very close to her Auntie Nica, eagerly helping her prepare the chili dinner that night and enjoys spending time with her in general. Chucky disappears at one point in the evening and Alice becomes obsessed with finding him, much to Barb and Jill's frustration. After Nica "finds" Chucky and brings him to Alice, she asks her aunt to read her a bedtime story, but Barb doesn't let her, much to Alice's chagrin. And also like with Andy in the first movie, her mother is disturbed by what she claims Chucky is saying, like, "He says there is no God... He said that life's a bitch and then you die, bleeding like a stuck pig." In the end, though Alice is the only one other than Nica to survive the night, Chucky, as it turns out, has more sinister plans for her. Shortly afterward, following Nica being sent to the asylum, he finds his way to the home of Alice's paternal grandmother, where she starts living afterward. Surprising her when she comes home one day, and having, unbeknownst to her, murdered her grandmother, he proceeds to use the Damballa chant to take possession of her body, intending to use her to commit another crime.

Throughout the movie, it seems as though Ian is having an affair with Alice's nanny, Jill (Maitland McConnell), as the two of them have a very friendly rapport that does tend to veer into flirtatious, and Ian often seems eager to talk with or just be around Jill, which Barb seems suspicious of. But then, when Barb gets Jill alone in the kitchen while she's looking for the missing Chucky, the two of them kiss passionately, revealing the truth (and I'll admit, I did not see that coming the first time I watched the movie). Jill, however, does prove to be a bit more compassionate than Barb, suggesting that they shouldn't force Nica to sell her home. And as aggravated as she was about having to look for Chucky, she seems to have genuine compassion for Alice, at one point telling Nica that she's happy the doll is keeping her happy, adding, "She's been so sad lately." However, she ends up being Chucky's first direct, onscreen kill, when he pushes over a bucket of water that streams towards an electrical outlet that her laptop is plugged into, shocking her to death.

Though she's killed offscreen at the beginning of the movie, and is characterized as an overprotective, smothering person who won't let her daughter out of the house and shoots down any interest she may have in the young delivery man, Nica's mother Sarah (Chantal Quesnelle) proves to be a very significant character. It turns out that her death at Chucky's hands was the culmination of a revenge he'd been plotting for 25 years. You learn that in 1988, when she was pregnant with Nica, Sarah was living in Chicago with her husband and young Barb. She met Charles Lee Ray at a family cookout and he became infatuated with her, to the point where he murdered her husband and abducted her, intending to live as a family with her, Barb, and Nica when she was born. But he was found by the police, and it was implied that she was the one who led them to her, eventually leading to his getting fatally shot and becoming Chucky. He also stabbed her in her pregnant stomach, resulting in Nica's disability. All of this explains why Sarah acted the way she did towards her daughter in the opening, and her own existence is just as sad as Nica's, as she seems to do nothing but paint all day long (specifically, she paints pictures of the very flowers that Ray brought her, speaking volumes about the effect he had on her). And when Chucky arrives in the mail, though she says she doesn't understand the significance, Sarah appears to know more than she's letting on, given how, when Nica calls Chucky cute, she says, "If you say so," while looking at him in a troubled manner. She also seems put off when the doll says, "Hi, I'm Chucky. Wanna play?", likely knowing that was Ray's nickname, and throws him in the garbage, despite Nica saying that Alive would probably like him. Of course, that doesn't stop Chucky from killing Sarah that night and setting the plot in motion.

Father Frank (A Martinez), the Pierce family pastor, is brought along to the house by Barb, despite Nica and Sarah having left the church years before. Initially, he doesn't offer much comfort, especially when Barb says they have to pray for the salvation of Sarah's soul after her "suicide" and he says the church doesn't judge but rather pities suicides, something Nica isn't thrilled to hear. Other than that, he kind of just sits around and doesn't add much to the proceedings, although Chucky seems familiar to him

in a manner he can't put his finger on. He ends up eating the bowl of chili that Chucky poisoned and quickly leaves when he starts to feel ill. This leads to him getting in a car accident that ultimately results in his decapitation. Officer Stanton (Adam Hurtig), one of those on the scene of the accident, knows that Frank couldn't have been drinking, and when he sees the priest caught up in the wreck, he orders the chunk of the car that has him trapped to be removed, leading to his head falling off. Later, upon learning that Frank was at the Pierce home all day, Stanton heads out there to see what they know. But by the time he gets there, just about everybody in the house is dead, and he arrests Nica as the possible killer. Following Nica's trial, he steals Chucky and prepares to take him to an unknown buyer, leading him to die in an all too familiar scenario.

Even more so than as Tom Holland intended in the original Child's Play, Chucky himself is utilized as a ticking bomb that you're just waiting to go off for almost the first half of the movie. When he arrives at the Pierce home at the beginning, we, of course, know that it means impending doom for everybody there, but Nica is completely in the dark and, while Sarah does seem to have a hunch, she doesn't do nearly enough to dispose of him. For the first act-and-a-half fter Sarah is murdered, we mostly either see Chucky sitting around innocuously, often in a rocking chair in the living room, or disappearing and suddenly popping up in expected places, like when he disappears from the living room, only for Alice to find him in the bathroom, or later in the night, when Alice and Jill are looking everywhere, only for him to suddenly show up on the living room couch next to a sleeping Ian. Aside from the moment where we see him put rat poison in one of the bowls of chili (and even that's done with just a shot of his arm sprinkling it in), the only movements and sounds he makes onscreen are his mouth moving and his Good Guy voice. However, like with Andy in the first movie, we see that he's saying things to Alice that only she hears, some of which turns out to be really unsettling to her mother. And following the moment where Nica is stuck in the elevator with him when the power goes out, Alice and Barb discover a mysterious stab wound on her right leg. It builds nicely up to the point where we finally hear Brad Dourif's voice for the first time, when Alice, scared of the storm, throws the bed-sheet over herself and Chucky, telling him that she's scared; he laughs evilly and responds, "You fucking should be." From there, he begins murdering everybody in earnest, to the point where it comes down between him and Nica.

If Chucky, despite his murderous tendencies and general douchey personality, had become maybe a little too likable in the previous two movies, this film more than corrects that, as it reminds us of what a truly evil bastard he is. Right before he kills Barb in the attic, she worries for Alice and he tells her, "Alice is mine. Now she knows... there is no God!" We truly see what he means by this when it's revealed that he has Alice hiding somewhere in the house, under the pretense of playing hide-and-seek, and at the end of

the movie, he tracks her down to her grandmother's home and prepares to play "Hide the Soul" with her, telling her that nobody would ever suspect a little girl like her of whatever he has planned. After killing Barb, he proceeds to torment Nica, at one point trying to suffocate her in the garage with exhaust fumes, and makes her look like the killer in Ian's eyes. This leads to him later using her wheelchair to knock Ian to the floor and, before chopping his bottom jaw off with an axe, in front of a helpless Nica, tells him, "Say hi to

the little woman for me... Maybe not." And while Nica does manage to fight back, he pushes her through the railing and down into the foyer, leaving her barely able to move. That's when Chucky reveals that this is far from a random attack but rather, one that goes all the way back to when he was Charles Lee Ray. Blaming Sarah for his death as a human and rebirth as Chucky, he says of his finally murdering her the night before, "Took me 25 years but, believe me, it was worth the wait." He goes on to cruelly brag about the death and pain he's caused over the years,

saying, "Since then a lot of families have come and gone: the Barclays, the Kincaids, the Tillys." On the subject of Andy Barclay, whom he calls, "A whiny little bitch," he says, "I killed his childhood." And he then goes back to his having caused Nica's paraplegia, telling her, "And the truth is, I killed you 25 years ago too, didn't I, Nica? You haven't been living. You can't call this living. You've just been on life support. Time to pull the fuckin' plug."

A very nice surprise is how this movie lets us see Charles Lee Ray for the first time since the original movie's opening, with Dourif getting to do more than just provide Chucky's voice (despite the heavy makeup and wig they had to put on him to make him look the way he did in the original). And we also learn that he was all the more twisted than we originally imagined. Besides being a voodoo-practicing serial killer, he developed an infatuation with Sarah Pierce that led him to murder her husband,

abduct her, and try to create his own family with her, little Barb, and the yet to be born Nica. The flashback scene where Ray plans to go pick up Barb from the daycare and Sarah detains him until the cops arrive, lying to him that she wants him all to herself, is genuinely unnerving. First, it's because he brings her flowers and asks if she likes them in a manner that comes off as kind of dorky and insecure. Second is how insistent he is about "family time" and tells her, "That's a selfish fuckin' attitude for a mother to take,"

when she acts as though she doesn't want to share him with the children. He then asks if she's going to keep him away from the baby when she's born, saying, "That would be very hurtful to me. And you wouldn't wanna see me get hurt, would you?" When Sarah is slow to answer, Ray more intensely asks, "Would you?", twice more until she gives him the answer he wants to hear. Shortly after that is when the police arrive outside and Ray comes off as genuinely distraught, yelling, "You told them about us?!", to which Sarah retorts, "There is no us!" Enraged, he

angrily asks, "Why? Why would you want to destroy this family?", and she tells him that he destroyed her family, before spitting in his face. Taking out the red-bladed knife that was Chucky's main weapon throughout much of the original movie, he says, "I told you, I've always had a thing for families, especially kids," before stabbing into her pregnant belly. This makes Chucky's satisfaction in finally killing Sarah and ruining Nica's life, as well as the pride he takes in all the other families he's destroyed, all the more unsettling and gets into what an unapologetic evil character he truly is. 

If you're hoping for some great Chucky one-liners, you're going to be disappointed, as his truly sinister portrayal here doesn't call for it. He does have a couple, with the most impactful being when he tells Barb, "You have your mother's eyes. And they were always too... fucking close together!", right before he kills her, as the former is revealed to be the first thing he said when he met her as a little girl, but this time, he's really not meant to make you laugh. As I've said, the way he tortures Nica during the third act, creepily

saying, "I'm gonna get you," in a sing-song voice, murders Ian in front of her, and rubs in her face what he's done to her and her family, is ungodly cruel. But Nica doesn't go down without a fight. She uses what she knows about completion anxiety to get under Chucky's skin, suggesting that it's an extension of why he never killed Andy Barclay and why it took so long for him to finally kill Sarah. Still, despite the temporary advantage it gives her, this is the first movie where Chucky undeniably triumphs. By the end, he's nearly wiped out the Pierce family, Nica has

been blamed for his crimes and is institutionalized, and he tracks down Alice, kills her grandmother, and prepares to possess her. The only bit of justice is in the post-credits scene, and even then, the next film shows just how little it meant in the long run.

While his static doll form looks really good, and as much as I liked going back to the classic design, Chucky looks really strange the first few times we see him in action. In fact, is it me, or does he actually look Asian?! Now, that could be written off as a result of the thick layers of rubber he had applied to his face to cover up his scars, but it's still off-putting. However, once that stuff is removed, he looks a whole lot better, coming off as much more menacing than he looked in Seed of Chucky, likely due to a combination

of both a tweaking of his design and the way in which he's lit. Surprisingly, he doesn't bleed in this film; instead, he only expels stuffing when Nica stabs him during the climax, which goes against a long-established aspect of the mythology, especially since the merger between his soul and the doll has appeared permanent since Bride of Chucky. Some may also call foul on the moment where Nica knocks his head off during a fight early on and he simply puts it back on and keeps going, but as we saw in the original Child's Play, he managed to function fairly well with his head

shot off there. And even though Glen chopped his head off, along with his other limbs, at the end of Seed, with blood spewing everywhere (which doesn't happen here), that clearly didn't end him there, either, given the very last scene. So that, I can let slide, but Don Mancini does mess around with the mythology in more egregious ways, as we'll get into.

Nica learning Chucky's history and Barb peeling away the excess rubber to reveal the scars are the first major signs that Curse of Chucky does indeed follow the previous movies, and further confirmation comes near the end, when Officer Stanton steals Chucky away to bring him to an unknown buyer, only for his throat to be slashed from behind by none other than Tiffany. It turns out that she's working with Chucky and mailing him to various people he wants to knock off. Next, she sends him on his way to Alice's grandmother, having a memorable back-and-forth with the postal worker: "Three-day, two-day, or overnight?" "Overnight. It's extremely urgent." "Fragile?" "Surprisingly not." "Approximate value?" "Well, my mother always used to say you can't put a price on love." "Under $250, then. Would you like to insure the package?" " Oh, that won't be necessary." "It protects you and it protects the recipient." "I doubt that." "Perishable goods? Live animal?" "Just put 'other.'" Throughout it all, it's clear that Jennifer Tilly still gets a kick out of this role, and it's always great to see her in it.

But the biggest surprise was the post-credits scene, which featured the return of not only Andy Barclay for the first time since Child's Play 3, but also Alex Vincent reprising the role for the first time since he was a young kid. After he didn't appear in either Bride of Chucky or Seed of Chucky, and only got a passing mention in the former, I figured Andy's story ended with the original Child's Play trilogy. But here, we learn that he's not only not in jail but he graduated from Kent Military School, is living a normal life in an average apartment, and keeps in touch with his mother, who seems to have finally gotten out of the mental institution. And while Chucky arrives at his home to finish him off like he did the Pierce family, it turns out that Andy was ready for him, as puts a shotgun in his face, tells him, "Play with this," and blows him away.

Notably, this is the first Chucky movie that was shot digitally rather than on film, and while I'm usually not the biggest fan of that visual aesthetic (though it does vary from one movie to another), I think it's used very well here. It has a muted color palette, with a lot of contrasting between the whites and the blacks during the few daytime scenes, which goes well with the tone and acts as a prelude to how dark and shadowy it gets for much of the story. That's where the movie's visual aesthetic really shines, as Don Mancini and

cinematographer Michael Marshall create a very palpable haunted house vibe with how dark and shadowy the interiors of this old, Gothic house are for much of the story, as it's often lit by little more than a single light source, such as candlelight during the dinner scene, the projector when they're watching home movies in the living room, a single lamp or light fixture, or the glow of a computer screen. There are many times where the power goes out for long stretches, resulting in a spooky mixture of light blue

and dark shadows, with the only lighting coming from either a character's flashlight or the lightning outside. The moment where Nica is stuck in the elevator with Chucky sitting in her lap is especially effective, as they're both in silhouette and you're just waiting for Chucky to do something, and the same goes for the scene in the attic where Barb eventually gets it. And the moment where we first see Chucky speak to Alice as she hides from the storm underneath the bed-sheet, again with the only light coming from her flashlight, is probably one of the creepiest shots of

him in the whole series, as are the shots of him sitting in the dark in the dark and the close-up of his face when Barb pulls away the rubber to reveal the scars. The few times we get away from the house, which is whenever we're following Officer Stanton, those scenes have a bluish look to them that really gives off a feeling of it being very damp and cold, which it apparently was when they were shooting up in Winnipeg. And finally, speaking of Stanton, the scene near the end where he gets killed by Tiffany looks color-graded to resemble the opening scene in Bride of Chucky, a touch that I appreciate, being a fan of that movie.

While Mancini had already shown a distinctive style and undeniable skill at filmmaking with Seed of Chucky, he proves very adept at it with Curse, opening the movie with some big, lovely establishing shots of the outside of the Pierce house and the surrounding countryside, and later revealing that Sarah has been murdered that night by having Nica come downstairs and cutting to a shot of blood pooling across the floor, gradually reflecting her in it. The opening credits sequence is one of the series' most wonderfully simplistic, panning back from Nica

calling for help in the foyer, past Sarah's corpse lying on the floor in the dark, to a shot of Chucky sitting in a rocking chair in the living room, The camera slowly revolves around him as the credits play out, transitioning from night- to daytime in the process, and coming back around to show Sarah being taken away in a body bag and Nica giving a statement in the background, before slowly zooming in on his face. When the family first arrives, there are several shots of Chucky still sitting there in the background, like the looming threat that he is. Mancini also shows a

penchant for high-angle shots, like one of Alice holding Chucky when he first says, "I like to be hugged," several such shots of the foyer, and of the dinner table when everybody sits down to eat. The whole scenario involving the poisoned bowl of chili is, without a doubt, the most well-shot and constructed scene in the movie, and a contender for the best in the whole series. It's downright Hitchcockian, as we see Chucky sitting there the whole time that Alice is helping Nica prepare the chili, and once he's left alone in there, we get a shot of

his hand pouring the poison into one of the bowls. Nica almost comes in on him doing this, but is momentarily distracted, giving him time to go back to seeming inert. Then, the camera goes in tight on the poisoned bowl of chili, allowing us to make out the sprinkles of poison amid the mozzarella and oregano, and after shots of the bowls being placed on the table, again ending on the poisoned one, the camera pulls back to a rotating overhead shot of the table, as everybody walks in and takes their seats, building

suspense as to who's going to end up with it and also making it hard to figure out who sat where (if you keep your eye on the bowl, you can figure it out, but the first time you watch, you'll likely get distracted by the camera movement and the commotion of everybody coming in). There are several false alarms, and the tension is punctuated by the camera circling around the table and close-ups of people putting the chili in their mouths, until at one point, it slowly goes

towards Father Frank, who doesn't look so good and who is starting to sweat profusely. That's when he excuses himself and leaves, eventually leading to his death. It's just well-done all around, and is a perfect example of Hitchcock's "ticking bomb" principle of suspense. And we also get the expected shots from Chucky's POV here and there, as well as a new angle on it with the nanny-cam that Ian hid in his overalls, which we see the footage and live feed from right before Ian's death.

There are also some skilled uses of editing in the film, like how Nica researching Chucky's history is inter-cut with the buildup to Jill's murder, reaching a crescendo when Nica clicks on a link to a photo of Charles Lee Ray at the moment that Jill is electrocuted to death. The lights all throughout the house flicker as Chucky evilly watches Jill fry, Barb starts to realize there's something wrong, and Nica is horrified to recognize Ray as the strange man at the family cookout in the home movies, his image on the computer showing a lot of static due to the power

surge. Later, when Nica awakens Ian and tells him of the murders, there's a silent (except for the score), slow-motion sequence of the two of them running downstairs to the garage that actually works nicely, despite how cliche this technique can be. And finally, I like how, even though the flashbacks of when Ray met Sarah's family and abducted her are in black-and-white, some aspects of the scenes are in color, like the yellow flowers he brings her and the red mark on his knife's blade. I also like how the shots from the

original Child's Play's opening are done in the same style, with the toy-store's exterior neon sign being in color, and also how there are some enhancements, like the lightning above the store when Ray when puts his soul into the doll and the shot of the doll being augmented with its eyes turning blue and its pupils dilating.

While the Chucky movies have never exactly been known for being epic in scope (although the climaxes for some have been very big setpieces in and of themselves), Curse is definitely the most insular and claustrophobic one to date, with about 85 to maybe even 90% of it taking place within the Pierce house. The setting is definitely an inspired one, as the house is an isolated, two-story Victorian building that's just a few steps down from a mansion and whose architecture gives the movie a nice Gothic feel. What's especially impressive is how, while the

exterior is an actual house in Winnipeg, all of the interiors were built by production designer Craig Sandells at the Manitoba Production Center and functioned in the same manner you see in the movie, as a massive, two story interior space. The downstairs area has a massive foyer that, along with steps to the second floor, houses the elevator that Nica has to use to get from one floor to the other; a fairly elegant living room that was where Sarah did her painting and artwork; a kitchen and rather elegant little dining room; and the bathroom, where Alice first meets

Chucky. The second floor is mostly full of various bedrooms and closets, and the attic is the expected dark, spooky, cobweb-covered area filled with all sorts of items that have long since been put up there for storage. While not exactly filthy or rundown, the house's interiors are a tad on the unkempt side, with the paint and wallpaper looking quite faded and peeling, and it's so old-fashioned that every door requires a key to actually lock it, as well as eat dinner by candlelight. In fact, the electric lights they have are

so dim when they do work that, if it weren't for Nica's laptop and cellphone and Sarah, at one point, telling her that she DVRed a TV show, you'd think they were living with no modern luxuries whatsoever. The only truly modern part of the place is the garage, where Nica is trapped and nearly suffocated in one scene. But more than anything else, the house acts as a huge cage that Nica has been stuck in for a long time. It becomes even more so when the storm knocks the power out and she's unable to make the elevator work, either when she's stuck inside or when she really needs to use it. And, of course, the house is just a great setting for Chucky to prowl around in, with many different places for him to hide.

For the most part, Mancini plays down the voodoo mythology, only alluding to it for the first time during the flashback when Charles Lee Ray became Chucky, the latter saying, "But I knew a way to come back." But as I mentioned earlier, he does continue to mess with it, such as in how, again, Chucky doesn't bleed like he has before. The most egregious diversion, though, is in the final scene before the credits, where he finds Alice and, after tricking her into playing "Hide the Soul," begins the Damballa chant in order to possess her body. It was established in Bride of

Chucky and carried over into Seed that Chucky and anyone else now needed the Heart of Damballa amulet to possess any human body they choose (ostensibly because, by this point, Ray's soul had been in the doll so long that the merger was permanent, but as I said in my revamping of those reviews, there are still holes in that theory), which he clearly doesn't have here. Also, as was made clear from the very first movie, he can otherwise only do the soul transfer with the first person he revealed his true identity to, which resets every time he gets a completely new body.

Since we don't know if the bodies he and Tiffany got in Seed were their original ones from Bride repurposed into movie animatronics or were new ones altogether, things were already up in the air on that front. And while Chucky was apparently killed at the end of Seed, only for part of him to somehow end up at Glen and Glenda's birthday party to attack the former, even if he was actually dead but got brought back again (like I mentioned, he's never had trouble with decapitation before), that doesn't help with the

issue with Alice, since the first person he revealed himself to in this case was Sarah. I tried to throw it a bone and say that it works because the chant's words sound different, but I think Chucky is just pronouncing them more accurately. Moreover, Alice hasn't "assumed the position" that Chucky made Andy and Tyler get into, and the chant's effects don't seem as destructive as they were in the past (which the flashback even reminds us of). Again, it's just Mancini incorporating but also twisting and otherwise dismissing this mythology he's always hated, and it's only going to get worse in the next film.

As much as I love the callbacks to the original Child's Play and the way it enriches Charles Lee Ray, and Chucky by extension, I do have some issues with it. For one, while it does make Ray more twisted than we originally knew, it also, for me, doesn't quite ring true with the character of Chucky as he's long been established. Honestly, would a voodoo practicing killer like Ray be so concerned with trying to insert himself into a family in order to play father and husband? I know that serial killers are seriously mentally-ill and depraved, and would probably be

deluded enough into thinking this could work out, but, more to the point, I don't feel that description fits with how Ray/Chucky has always been depicted. Rather than being truly psychotic and disconnected from reality, Ray, both in human form and as Chucky, comes off to me as just an evil, manipulative bastard who uses everybody around him and tosses them aside, in one way or another, when they can no longer do anything for him (Dr. Death, Eddie Caputo, Tiffany, etc.), and also kills people because, as he

declared in Seed, it's simply the path that he's chosen for himself. That does point to a personality disorder, making him a narcissistic sociopath, but it doesn't necessarily make him completely deluded and not know fantasy from reality. Thus, when he yells, "You told them about us?!", when he sees the police arriving, it doesn't feel like something he would say. And though we don't get to know her that well, I don't see what's so special about Sarah that he would've been infatuated enough to kill her husband and try to take his place. 

This scenario also causes some continuity errors when you try to contextualize it with what's been established before. Since I already mentioned him, I have to ask where Eddie Caputo was during all this. Although Mancini said in an interview promoting Curse that, because he felt Eddie was a character few people knew about and thus, he didn't feel obligated to include him (though he would acknowledge him in the TV show), the fact that Ray was not only angry enough to immediately seek revenge on him but also seemed downright distraught by his betrayal suggests

a kinship between them, so it's weird for Eddie to not be here. Maybe he was waiting outside in the car for Ray when the police showed up?  Fine, but even then, Ray says he's going to go pick up Barb at the daycare center when the police arrive, while the opening in the original Child's Play looks like it's taking place very late at night (something that the movie itself confirms with a background news report). And where was Tiffany in all this? Did she not know that her boyfriend was living this double-life behind her back? Were they on the outs at the time? Maybe but,

mysterious ring left behind or not, I find it weird that Tiffany thought Ray was intending on marrying her if that was the case. Getting back to Sarah and her family, it seems like Ray would've had trouble being welcomed at a family cookout, given how, by the time he was killed (which doesn't seem to have been too long after that cookout in the home movies, given how Barb said their father died just two weeks before Nica was born and Sarah looked like she was going to pop at the get together), he was known throughout

Chicago as the Lakeshore Strangler, with Grace Poole telling Joanne and Phil Simpson that he murdered a dozen people (I find it hard to think that people would know his name before knowing his face). And how did Sarah manage to contact the police when he was keeping her gagged down in the cellar of his hideout? (This itself is contradicted by a flashback in the TV show, where Tiffany is shown to have ratted Ray out to Detective Mike Norris after they had a spat. And before you use that as an explanation here, I doubt Mancini had that in mind at the time he wrote this.)

Finally, Nica makes a good point when she questions why it took Chucky 25 years to finally get back around to killing Sarah and wiping out her family. If he blamed Sarah for betraying him and getting him killed the way he says he does, why wasn't she high on his immediate hit list along with Mike and Eddie shortly after he became Chucky? I guess you could argue that getting back at Mike and Eddie were more immediate concerns at the time, and then, he learned about how he was merging with the doll body and needed to get out before it became permanent, so he

now obviously had other, much more important, priorities to settle, but I do find it strange that he didn't at least go after Sarah first. She really should've been his first target before Eddie and Mike. I know I'm being extremely nitpicky here and I shouldn't take this stuff so seriously, but I really don't. Like I've said many times before, it's just fun to discuss stuff involving lore.

One thing that really terrified me about the Chucky movies going direct-to-video was that they would cheap out and do Chucky completely digitally. Fortunately, the only CG shot of him in the whole movie is when he's walking down the attic stairs towards Nica; other than that, he's again brought to life through good old-fashioned animatronics and puppetry. What's interesting is that, after having taken over from Kevin Yagher in Seed of Chucky, Tony Gardner and his team would, this time around, have to create several different stages of Chucky's

appearance, similar to what Yagher and his team did on the first film. In all, we see him in three different phases: when he's got "makeup" on to cover up his scars, when said scars are fully exposed, and his inert, innocent-looking Good Guy form, which we really haven't seen since Child's Play 3. As is customary for this series, the animatronic work has again improved, with Chucky looking all the more expressive and emotive, and the full on animatronic versions were made to be much more mobile here than in the past.

Also, thanks to improvements in digital erasure, the puppeteers were able to be more loose and not worry about hiding cables and other equipment, and to make use of rod puppet versions of Chucky much more frequently than the full animatronics. Although I don't think the latter always looked the best onscreen. For instance, when Chucky is chasing Nica down the hallway shortly after the stairway shot, the way he's moving and his posture look a bit awkward, as it does

when he runs at her several times. And as per usual, there are moments, often quick glimpses and overhead shots, where he's portrayed by a little person; in fact, this time, it's Debbie Lee Carrington, who subbed for Tiffany in the previous two movies. This, sadly, would be the last Chucky movie she would be involved in before her death in 2018.

While the next film would seriously up the gore quotient, Curse of Chucky is about on par with Seed, which means that the amount of bloodletting is still plentiful. While Sarah's death happens offscreen initially, the large amount of blood lets us know it wasn't pretty, and late in the film, it's revealed that Chucky stabbed her in the stomach with scissors. Father Frank seems like he's going to have a fairly bloodless death from eating the poisoned chili, but then, he gets into a car accident that leads to his throat getting stabbed into by jagged pieces of steel, and

when they're removed, his head comes clean off, spewing blood everywhere. Jill's death is probably the least effective visually, as the CGI burns that appear on her face when she gets electrocuted don't look that great. Barb's is much more satisfying, as Chucky stabs her in her left eye, which then comes bouncing down the stairs towards Nica (and is stepped on by Chucky), before Barb herself comes tumbling down at her sister. Ian's death is on par with Father Frank's in terms of goriness, as Chucky chops off his entire lower jaw. While Nica doesn't die, obviously, she

does take a lot of abuse, including a painful-looking knife wound on her leg that Chucky inflicts when they're stuck in the elevator together, an axe in her leg later, and her hands get badly sliced during the final confrontation, with her having to grab the knife by the blade and wrench it out of Chucky's hands (that's the kind of image that makes you wince). Officer Stanton's death from getting his throat slashed by Tiffany is about as gory as when she did it to Officer Bailey at the beginning of Bride of Chucky, and we learn that Chucky murdered Alice's grandmother offscreen by strangling her with a plastic bag, a la Mattson's death in Child's Play 2.

While the filmmakers did, thankfully, opt for animatronic and makeup effects for the most part, the movie isn't completely free of visual effects. The most egregious instances are that one moment where Chucky is CGI and the digital burns on Jill's face, as well as some bad-looking digital rain in one shot and the obviously CG pool of blood that reflects Nica at the beginning; otherwise, said effects are kept to a minimum and are used rather subtly. For instance, the bead of sweat that runs down Father Frank's forehead when he starts to become ill is digital, and there's also the unique color-grading within the black-and-white flashbacks, as well as the enhancements of the lightning effects in the footage from the original Child's Play. 

The movie's slow-burn nature means that a good, long while passes with few major sequences or setpieces, very different from many of the previous ones. After Chucky is delivered to the Pierce house, Sarah, put off by the doll's sudden appearance, sticks him in the trash. It cuts to that night, on an exterior shot of the house, when Sarah suddenly screams inside. Waking up upon hearing it, Nica goes to check on her mother, only to find she's not in her bed, and her meds are still on her nightstand. Nica then takes the elevator

downstairs, only to find the foyer and the nearby living room completely dark, and gets no response from her calls. She turns on the light, and sees her mother lying in a pool of blood in the foyer. Frantic, she calls the police, while in the living room, Chucky sits in the small rocking chair, looking innocent enough. The next day, after Barb and her side of the family arrive, Nica is reunited with Alice, telling her that she has a surprise for her. But when she looks, Chucky, who was still sitting in the rocking chair, is

nowhere to be found. Alice then says she has to go to the bathroom, and Jill goes with her, followed by Ian. As the two of them wait outside the door, Alice locks it and does her business. Suddenly, the shower curtain across from her seemingly moves by itself. Getting up, she slowly walks over towards the tub, rather spooked by the movement, but when she pulls back the curtain, she finds Chucky sitting on the edge. Now delighted, she asks him his name, then reaches for him. She's startled when he suddenly does the same, causing her to scream. Hearing her outside, Ian and

Jill frantically scramble to try to open the door, the latter using a nail file to force the key out of the keyhole's other side. They fling open the door, only to find her standing there, holding Chucky, and happily saying that he nearly scared her to death.

After Alice first walks into the living room with Chucky so everyone can see, we get into the preparation of the chili, with her assisting Nica. Chucky sits at the table throughout all of it, watching Nica, very aggressively, chop up some tomatoes, as well as the two of them preparing to bring the bowls out to the dining room table. When he's left in the kitchen alone, he makes his move, pouring the rat poison into one of the bowls. Once Nica comes back into the kitchen, she's puzzled to see Chucky sitting in

the floor next to the table rather than in the chair like he was before. She also notices the cabinet to her right is open but doesn't think much of it and closes it. Following that comes the suspenseful buildup to whoever will end up eating the poisoned chili, with Ian initially seeming like it's him when he stops and says, "Oh, my God," a couple of times, before complimenting Nica on how great it tastes. Shortly afterward, Alice suddenly makes an uncomfortable face, and when asked what's wrong, says the chili

tastes funny. Barb, however, makes her continue eating and the sequence goes on, until we see that Father Frank looks ill and is beginning to sweat profusely. Feeling sick, he excuses himself, saying he has an appointment at the church, and says, "I'll see you all in the morning, at the cemetery." Once he leaves, everyone wonders what went wrong, while Alice walks with Chucky over to the window and they watch Frank drive off. In the next cut, we're at the scene of the accident, where Officer Stanton arrives and is led over to Frank's car, where he's

trapped by the torn up steel around his neck. Shocked at the sight of this, Stanton orders the firemen to remove the steel and get him out. When they do, he severely bleeds out from his neck, before his head leans back and falls completely off his body, the stump of his neck spraying blood.

While the family is watching old home movies on the projector, Alice comes in to say that Chucky's missing again. Barb tells her to go to bed, adding that Jill will find Chucky; at the same time, Nica decides to finally learn where the doll came from, but finds that the main phone is out due to the storm and she has no signal on her cell. Upstairs, Jill looks everywhere for Chucky, when Alice sees him run by the bedroom doorway in the mirror. Aggravated when she says, "There he goes!", Jill heads downstairs and first looks

in the bathroom. At first not seeing anything, she then sees the shower curtain move, and slowly walks towards it. Pulling it back, she finds nothing in the shower, and sees that it was moving because a window behind it was open. She closes said window, only to get a scare when the storm violently blows it back open. She closes it again, and then heads into the kitchen, where she runs into Barb... and the two of them start making out. As they do, neither of them notice that one of the knives hanging up on the wall is

now missing. Meanwhile, Nica reenters the living room to see that Chucky is now sitting on the couch next to Ian, who's asleep. After talking with Ian when he wakes up, Nica opts to take the doll up to Alice. She gets into the elevator and begins riding it up to the second floor, with Chucky sitting on her lap. And then, before they reach the floor, the power goes out and Nica is stuck sitting there in the dark. Calling for help and not getting an answer, she presses the alarm button and, again, calls for help. Hearing her in the kitchen, Barb reluctantly breaks off her make-out

session with Jill and goes to help her. Sitting in the dark, Nica is startled by the sound of metal clanging... and then, suddenly, the power comes back on and Chucky's head has turned all the way around to look at and laugh at her. After being thoroughly freaked out by this, Nica quickly gets out of the elevator when it reaches the second floor. She's met by Alice, and when she talks to Chucky, he turns his head all the way back around. Barb comes upstairs and, while she and Nica have a quiet but heated discussion about the latter's well-being, Alice finds the stairs leading up to

the attic. Barb calls her away before she can go up there, and when she rejoins them, Alice sees that Nica's leg is bleeding from an apparent knife wound. While Nica sees to it, Barb takes Alice to bed. After she says her prayers, Barb leaves her alone in the bedroom with Chucky. Downstairs, Nica learns from the delivery company that the doll came from an evidence depository, while Alice becomes frightened by the storm and pulls the sheet over both herself and Chucky. Switching on a flashlight underneath it, she tells Chucky that she's scared, and that's when he speaks in his real voice for the first time, telling her that she should be scared.

After Nica checks in on Alice, and is startled by Jill, she heads back downstairs while Jill prepares for bed, not seeing the movement in Alice's bed behind her. Nica looks up info on Chucky and finds links to various homicides, as well as sees a newspaper clipping about Andy Barclay and an article about Charles Lee Ray. Jill, meanwhile, after stripping down to a bar and underwear, sits on her bed and gets out her laptop. Using a webcam, she starts flirting with Barb, as she sits up in bed in her room, with Ian

sleeping right next to her. As she turns her head away to put her wedding ring on a nightstand, Chucky pops up behind Jill's bed. Barb looks back at her laptop monitor's screen and sees a glimpse of him running off to the left. Thinking it's Alice, she tries to tell Jill in a manner that doesn't wake Ian up, but Jill misunderstands her hand motions and thinks it's still part of the flirting. Barb then whispers, "She's up," but Jill still doesn't get it, and doesn't yet see Chucky standing at the foot of her bed. At the very moment

that Nica clicks on a link to a photo of Charles Lee Ray, Jill sees Chucky, who kicks over a bucket on the floor that was collecting water leaking from the ceiling. It runs across the floor and hits the electrical outlet that Jill's laptop is plugged in, sending an electric surge throughout the house that also slowly electrocutes her to death. Chucky watches her slowly fry, as Barb's computer loses the webcam feed and Nica's computer also shorts out. The power then goes out completely, but not before she recognizes Ray as the strange man in the home movies. After Jill falls

onto the floor, dead, Chucky comments, "Women. Can't live with 'em... period," then laughs. (Yeah, not one of his best one-liners.) He leaves the room and heads down the hall towards another door. Barb then gets up and goes to see what happened with Jill, while elsewhere, Officer Stanton decides to drive out to the Pierce house to see if they know anything about Father Frank's death.

Walking down the hallway towards the foyer, Barb sees a small figure go around the corner. Thinking it's Alice, she rounds the corner herself, only to find Chucky sitting at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the attic. Walking up there and seeing the door to the attic wide open, Barb thinks Alice is hiding up there and yells that she's not in the mood for games. Because the power's out, Nica is unable to use the elevator, and when she tries to tell Barb what she learned about Chucky, it causes a misunderstanding

that leads to a nasty argument between them. Barb, holding Chucky, stomps up towards the attic, yelling for Alice. Nica, unable to get anybody else to help, as Jill is dead and Ian is sleeping with earbuds, and with still no cellphone service, has no choice but to slowly crawl her way up the stairs. Up in the attic, Barb searches around, holding a flashlight in one hand and Chucky under her other arm. There's one nice moment here where Chucky, unbeknownst to her, glares angrily. Barb then decides to search the doll for

the nanny cam Ian said he hid in the overalls, only to be horrified when she finds and pulls out a large butcher knife instead. Setting the doll down, and putting the knife right beside him, Barb spins around when a rocking horse behind her suddenly starts creaking back and forth. Chucky reaches for the knife, while Barb wanders off. She's startled at the sight of a rat in the corner, and is doubly freaked out when she backs away and finds Chucky sitting behind her. Realizing he's moved from where she put him, she then looks closer at his face and sees some edges

within the plastic. Peeling them away, she reveals the scars and stitching behind the latex. When she puts her hand near his mouth, he bites at her, causing her to fall to the floor and drop her flashlight. Dropping down, he takes out his knife, rushes at her, and backs her up against a support beam. He then completely removes his disguise and, after declaring that Alice belongs to him now, stabs her right in the eye.

Having reached the second floor, Nica hears Barb scream and crawls over to the stairs to the attic. She crawls up a few stairs, when she sees the door open. Something comes tumbling down the stairs and, when it reaches the bottom, it turns out to be an eyeball. Shocked at this, Nica then sees a figure stagger into the doorway, before tumbling down the stairs at her. Catching the figure, she sees it's Barb, missing her left eye. Screaming, Nica pushes her aside, as she's now dead, and then sees Chucky at the top of the

stairs. After creepily saying her name, he walks down the stairs, wielding the knife. Nica quickly scrambles over to a nearby closet, where there's a spare wheelchair, and climbs into it. Chucky reaches the bottom of the stairs, squishing Barb's eyeball, and chases Nica down the hall and around the corner. Nica goes to Alice's room, only to find her gone and Jill dead on the floor. She then desperately heads down the hall towards Barb and Ian's room, screaming for the latter, as Chucky follows after her. Getting through the door and locking it, she rolls over

to Ian and wakes him up, telling him that Barb and Jill are dead and she can't find Alice. She also tries to warn him about Chucky but he ignores her and runs out of the room, towards Alice's room. Finding Jill's body there, he picks Nica up, carries her downstairs, to her main wheelchair, and the two of them head to the garage, not seeing Chucky watching them from the shadows. Once in the garage, Ian leaves Nica by the car, while he goes back in to try to find Alice. Again, she warns him not to go near Chucky, but he dismisses her and heads back into the house and searches everywhere for Alice.

Nica then hears the door close behind her and, as she makes her way around to it, Chucky gets into the car and turns the ignition on. Nica then finds the door locked, and looks to see Chucky sitting in the front seat. He revs the engine, filling the garage up with carbon monoxide, as Nica futilely yells for Ian, who's heading up to the attic. Unable to open the door leading into the house or the actual garage door, she goes for a nearby axe. She uses it to smash the driver side window, forcing Chucky to dodge the shrapnel, but when she reaches for the key, he takes it out of the

ignition and literally swallows it. At this point, Ian comes running back in and, finding the garage full of exhaust fumes and seeing Nica wielding an axe, demands to know what's going on. Nica insists it was Chucky, who's sitting there like a normal doll, and Ian, clearly thinking she's gone insane, takes the axe away from her. Realizing what he's thinking, Nica tries to convince him otherwise, when she grabs at her chest, as her heart condition begins to act up. She pulls out a syringe and hands it to Ian, telling him to give her an injection. Instead, he moves back from

her, as her vision begins to blur and she falls over while losing consciousness. As she does, she sees Chucky watching from inside the car. She awakens back inside, with Ian, having tied her to her wheelchair, demanding to know where Alice is. When she, again, tells him it was Chucky, Ian puts duct-tape over her mouth to keep from listening to her, as he checks to see what the nanny cam recorded. Starting with the footage of him first putting it within Chucky's overalls, he goes through it all, trying to

find Alice, thinking he's seeing her carrying the doll around. He sees a shot of Barb and Jill making out in the kitchen, then fast-forwards through Chucky ending up on the couch next to him, him and Nica talking, and Alice coming to collect him from Nica earlier. He then stops on footage of Alice hiding in some sort of closet, telling Chucky, "They'll never find me in here, Chucky. This is the best game of hide-and-seek ever," followed by Chucky exclaiming, "Just keep your fuckin' mouth shut!", and a shot of his

hand closing and locking the door. Upon seeing this, Ian switches it to the camera's live feed and sees it approaching the doorway to the very room that they're in. Seeing it herself, Nica struggles to get free, when Chucky shoves her and her wheelchair at Ian, knocking him to the floor. Chucky walks in, wielding the axe that Nica had earlier, heads over to Ian, and kills him by slicing his lower jaw off.

Cackling, Chucky turns around and tells Nica, "Your turn." However, Nica manages to free her hands, as Chucky runs at her. Raising her legs up, he jams the axe into one of them, and then tries to pull it out. Not feeling any pain, Nica rips the tape off her mouth, says, "My turn," and backhands him across the head, knocking him to the floor. Pulling the axe out just as he gets back up, she swings at him, managing to knock his head off. His headless body collapses to the floor in front of her and Nica, setting the axe in her lap, rolls over to a nearby drawer, pulling out

something to wrap around the bleeding wound on her right leg. Behind her, Chucky's body gets back up on its feet, grabs his head, and reattaches it to the stump of his neck. His head snaps back around into place, as she turns and sees what's happened. He quickly rushes at her from behind, grabs the back of the wheelchair, turns her around, causing her to drop the axe, and rolls her out the door and towards the foyer. He pushes her through the railing and she falls to the floor down below, as her wheelchair smashes to bits. As she lays there, blood pooling out from the wound

in her leg, Chucky makes his way down the stairs, wielding his knife. When he gets there, and Nica reveals that she knows he's Charles Lee Ray, Chucky proceeds to explain his motives for attacking her and her family. Following the flashback of his relationship with Sarah, his being chased into the toy store and passing his soul into the doll, and finally killing her the night before, he prepares to finish Nica off, when she accuses him of having completion anxiety, as well as attacks his manhood, mentioning, "It's very

common in males... You are a male, aren't you?" Now thoroughly mad, he prepares to attack, when the power comes back on. Nica quickly crawls for the elevator behind her, as Chucky rushes at her, slipping in the blood on the floor. She gets into the elevator and closes the door, when the juice goes off again just as she tries to activate the lift. With no choice, she has to hold the door shut, as he slices at her fingers, forcing her to then grab the knife's blade and jerk it out of his hand. She quickly grabs it and holds it up at

him, before challenging him. He slowly pulls the elevator door open and charges at her, yelling. He viciously attacks, scratching her face and biting into her kneecap, when she raises and brings the knife down on his back. After he stops moving, she pulls it back out, with white stuffing getting flung up into the air and coming down around her like snow. Things get quiet for a few seconds, when he suddenly pops up and laughs in her face.

At that moment, Officer Stanton arrives at the house. Getting out of his car and going up to the door, he yells for whoever is inside that it's the police, when he hears Nica calling for help. He quickly breaks down the door and finds Nica lying inside the elevator, with blood on her. Scanning around the foyer for an attacker, he looks up on the second floor and sees Barb's corpse lying there. Shocked at this, he looks back at Nica, noticing that she's holding a knife, while behind him, Chucky is innocently sitting in the rocking chair in the living room like before. The

movie slowly begins to wrap up, with Nica being sent to a mental asylum following her court date, and Stanton taking Chucky from the courtroom and out to his car in the parking garage. Not only is the setup for this scene and the look of it very akin to the opening of Bride of Chucky, Stanton, after making a cellphone call and leaving a message, glances at the black trash-bag containing Chucky and notices a small spot going in and out from his breathing inside. Before he can think to look, Tiffany pops up in the backseat and

slashes his throat open, laughing and commenting, "They never learn." After looking in the bag and asking Chucky who's next, she sends him to the home of Alice's grandmother, where he murders her and prepares to possess Alice herself. Right before the credits, there's a jump-scare with the grandmother suddenly rearing up and gasping with the plastic bag over her head. And after the credits, we see Chucky get delivered to Andy's apartment only to find that Andy was waiting and prepared for him.

This time around, the composer was Joseph LoDuca, who's best known for scoring the original Evil Dead trilogy, as well as Ash vs. The Evil Dead, and the Boogeyman movies from the 2000's. Obviously, he's no stranger to working on low budgets and tight post-production schedules (he also did the music for Bruce Campbell's movies, Man with the Screaming Brain and My Name Is Bruce), so it's not surprising that he was able to crank out some really good work on a movie as small-scale as this. Like Graeme Revell back in Child's Play 2, he came up with a fittingly sinister, yet playful leitmotif for Chucky, which, of course, is first heard over the opening credits and is played several times throughout the movie itself, such as when Nica is in the elevator with Chucky and when she and Ian are attempting to escape the house. It's a tune that LoDuca actually played on a broken piano, then digitally amplified, resulting in it sounding childlike, but also warped and eerie. When you hear it during the scene in the elevator, it sounds almost like the first few notes to the main theme to Suspiria, and when it plays again later, LoDuca creates a much harsher, electronic version. LoDuca would return to score the next film and he would bring this motif back as well, finally giving the series some musical continuity (ironically, when he scored the TV series, he recreated Revell's main theme for Child's Play 2). Aside from the main theme, my other favorite part of the score is played when we see the flashback to the original movie's opening, especially how it climaxes in a very epic fashion when Charles Lee Ray first becomes Chucky. I also remember the electronic theme that plays during the sequence when Chucky chases Nica down the hallway after killing Barb, which sounds like it was combined with the sound of a music-box, and this really eerie, otherworldly theme when Chucky starts doing the chant to possess Alice at the end. While not among my absolute favorites scores in the series overall, the main theme alone makes it worth it.

Even though it was expected to be complete crap, Curse of Chucky instead turned out to be a very pleasant surprise for fans, especially those who didn't care for Seed. Fiona Dourif proves to be a major standout amongst the cast of characters, and all of the actors do their jobs nicely, as well; the film is very well-shot and has many effective instances of atmosphere, especially during the nighttime interiors that make up much of it; the setting of the creepy, Gothic house is an inspired one; the pacing is a very

effective slow-burn; the animatronics and makeup effects are still on point; the score is quite good; and most of all, not only does Brad Dourif, once again, bring it as Chucky, but this film firmly reestablishes what an evil bastard he is, as well as gives us some new insight into when he was human and allows Dourif to do more than just voice work. However, the film's low budget, direct-to-video nature does pop up now and then, mainly in some not great instances of digital work. Also, as interesting as it is to learn more about Ray, what we do learn rather flies in the face of Chucky's established character, as well as causes a fair share of continuity errors that many purists will not like. Don Mancini also really messes with the mythology this time, which never sits well with series purists. And while I think it works well, some may be put off by how long the movie holds back on before letting Chucky run wild. But, overall, this was a much better flick than it had any right to be and proves that Mancini can make a truly effective horror film when he wants to.