Classic Movie Review: Child's Play (1988)

Child’s Play (1988)

Directed by: Tom Holland.

Written by: Don Mancini & John Lafia & Tom Holland.

Starring: Catherine Hicks (Karen Barclay), Chris Sarandon (Mike Norris), Alex Vincent (Andy Barclay), Brad Dourif (Charles Lee Ray/Chucky), Dinah Manoff (Maggie Peterson), Tommy Swerdlow (Jack Santos), Jack Colvin (Dr. Ardmore), Neil Giuntoli (Eddie Caputo).

 

It's kind of odd that Chucky has become such a horror movie icon in the 30 years since Child’s Play. Watching the original film again – for the first time in years – I was struck by the fact that the film isn’t particularly good. Chucky is great and creepy of course – but everything around him isn’t very good at all. And the opening of the film – that features a human Brad Dourif as the killer Charles Lee Ray who we see running away, and then stumbling into the Good Guy dolls, and chanting some sort of ancient curse to move his soul into the Chucky Doll – pretty much undermines the entire first half of the film. And yet, Chucky himself is just creepy enough, just nuts enough, to make you want to see more of this killer doll. Don Mancini – who wrote this film, and would eventually take over directing all the sequels – has essentially made Chucky his life’s work – has really taken this killer doll to all sorts of strange places. This week, of course, comes the remake of the original – which Mancini isn’t involved in, since he didn’t want to remake the original – he wanted to keep doing the ever strange sequels he’s been doing for years.

 

But before all of that, was this weird 1988 horror film about a little boy named Andy and his doll who comes to life (I have to wonder if Toy Story was inspired by Child’s Play in a way – or is it really just a coincidence that they are two movies about little boys named Andy and their toys that come to life). It is basically a story of a lonely little boy – Andy (Alex Vincent) – who favorite show is the Good Guy Cartoon show. What he wants more than anything is a talking Good Guy doll – but his single mother (Catherine Hicks, who would go onto to be the mother on Seventh Heaven, just to screw with me years later) – cannot afford the full price, so she buys one from a vendor on the street. That one, of course, is the one inhabited by a serial killer we saw in the first scene.

 

For essentially the first half the movie, the film tries to toy with you – making you wonder if Andy really has gone crazy, or if Chucky really is talking to him. People around Andy – and the doll – keep turning up dead in strange ways. We only see these things from the victims POV – meaning we cannot be sure it’s really Chucky. It could be Andy gone mad. And yet – watching the film now, we know that’s true. We know it’s Chucky. And even if we didn’t have 30 years of Chucky movies behind us, we’d still know – because of that opening scene. It has no reason for being there at all unless Chucky is the killer. The scenes would be more effective if we ever, for a moment, really believed Andy may be a disturbed little boy killing people.

 

Once Chucky outs himself to Hicks – and the audience (by calling Hicks a “cunt” as she threatens to throw him into the fire – the film goes more into full on goofy killer doll territory – and gets a lot more fun. As the voice of Chucky, Brad Dourif goes wildly over-the-top here – which of course is saying something, since as the series progressed, he would go even wilder. Here, he’s still trying to be creepy, and not as outwardly jokey. Still, the images of a doll attacking people, it’s still kind of funny. I’m not sure the kills here are as memorable as they would get – they heavily rely on the images of the doll killing for the creativity factor here – and it works. It is kind of fun.

 

Still, it’s kind of odd to me that Chucky became a horror icon – perhaps not on the level of Michael Myers or Freddy Kruger, but certainly in the next tier. This first movie is okay – it could have been more effective had we not known from the start that Andy isn’t crazy – that Chucky really is a killer doll. It will be interesting to see how the remake handles this – the filmmakers behind that film cannot even pretend that audiences don’t know.

 

The credit for Chucky becoming an icon though really should go to Don Mancini – who has written all the previous versions, and directed the last three movies in this series, and has kept Chucky as a going concern, and in the public eye (at least for horror movie fans) for the last 30 years. He just kept pushing this series farther and farther – and while I’ve lost track of the series over the years (it’s not really my thing) – you have to respect that. This first film is fine – it’s okay, but had they just let the series go after this film, it would probably have been forgotten by now – much to the joy of my wife, who hates any doll that looks even remotely by Chucky, since seeing one of these films at a slumber party at far too young an age. That’s a legacy.