Weird Movie Wednesday: Child's Play 2019 Review!

               "Hi, I'm Chucky. Wanna play?"

Good afternoon, weirdos. Welcome to a special Weird Movie Wednesday because today we are going to review 2019's Child's Play. I took my sibs out this last Monday to take in the horror and see for our selves what there was to see. Overall, I was only slightly disappointed with this one. It wasn't as scary as I was hoping and ultimately felt like there was a missed opportunity with this remake. However, watching Chucky being voiced by Mark Hamill was kind of rad and the movie had its funny moments, so all was not lost. Plus, the direction the film makers took seemed to me as an homage to 1988's Child's Play early beginnings. I have my suspicions. So don't you worry, we are going to dive deeper into this remake, but as always I will be spoiling pivotal scenes and plot points from the movie so Spoiler Alert! Let's do this.

Let us begin where any story does, in the beginning. We have a wonderful setup as company Kaslan pitches their new high tech Buddi dolls to the world. These dolls can do anything and everything, including entertaining the whole family with educational games and programs, they can watch your baby, call and set up a Kaslan smart car to pick you up and so much more. They are the best dolls ever. Then we zoom on over to Vietnam, where the dolls are being made to man who is caught day dreaming on the job. His boss sees him and reprimands him on lazing about on the job, telling him to finish the doll and get out. He is fired. The man, angered by this series of events decides to mess up the doll he was apparently coding, disabling its safety features. He then packages it up, sends it off, and commits suicide. It was a pretty graphic way to start the movie and definitely sets the mood for the horrors to come...or does it?

We now come in on Karen Barclay, who is putting in some rough hours at the local Zed Mart. As you can imagine, the Buddy Doll is everywhere she looks. She can't even get away from the doll when she returns to her new apartment she shares with her son, Andy, who is watching lude Buddi videos on his cellphone. Andy is a lonely boy who is hard of hearing and having a hard time adjusting to the move to Chicago, making friends, and dealing with his mom's boyfriend, Shane. Karen, noticing her son's struggle decides to get a Buddi doll for his birthday, convincing her boss to give her one of the dolls that has been returned. When she gives it to him he is kind of disappointed. He feels he's a little old for dolls (that's what I thought, too, but it makes sense, trust me). But he kind of warms up to it and tries to put it together, hooking it up to the cloud and giving it a name. Andy wants to call his doll Han Solo but the doll insists on being called Chucky. For no reason, once so ever. The pair bond and even though Chucky glitches out a whole bunch, he helps Andy make friends and this is where things get "Spooky".

While Andy is hanging with new friends, Falyn and Pugg, watching one of my favorite horror movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Chucky see's the delight on the children's face from the violence on screen. He thinks that to make them even happier he should do the same and grabs a kitchen knife to make a run for the kids. They aren't scared at first but become so after they see that Chucky doesn't plan to stop. Andy disarms the doll and scolds him for wielding a knife. This isn't Chucky's first outburst either as he has tried to hurt Andy's cat for scratching him. He doesn't want anything bad to happen to Andy but because he is glitched out he can't seem to compute that violence is bad. He thought it was just a game because before this Andy was training Chucky to torment and horrify his mom's boyfriend, Shane. He did this with ease, by the way. The doll is so ugly he could scare even the most harden horror fans.


The next day, when Andy returns home he finds his cat dead. Chucky has killed him for hurting Andy. Distraught, Andy takes care of his fury friend and punishes Chucky for what he has done. However, Chucky doesn't like this separation and continues to torment Shane. Repeatedly calling Shane names and spooking him around every corner, Shane confronts Andy, thinking it is him who is controlling the doll. His outburst and verbal abuse towards Andy angers Chucky, so Chucky decides to do something about it...to make his buddy happy. That night, after Shane leaves and returns to his real family (that's right, Karen is just his side piece. It gets better when two little girls run out the front door to greet their daddy (at this part I was really happy that he was gonna get it)). Its late at night so obviously it is the perfect time to take down the Christmas lights. Wrapping the lights around his body, he is barley alarmed when his ladder starts to move under him. Thinking its only raccoons, he continues with his chore when it happens again and he goes down, breaking his legs on impact. Scrambling, he struggles to crawl through his watermelon patch(?) towards his phone when Chucky switches on tiller and, when he is almost caught in the machines blades, Chucky stabs him repeatedly and cuts off his face, just like in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. 

The next morning, Andy finds Shane's face stuck to a watermelon in his bedroom. Horrified, he moves fast locking Chucky in his closet and calling his friends. They decide to wrap up the melon head and take it to the dump. This plan back fires big time when Karen A) finds the kids home when they should be at school and B) carrying a large package. Thinking quickly and not logically, Andy tells his mom that this is a gift to Doreen, a lady who lives down the hall and just so happens to be the mother of Detective Mike Norris, who has befriended Andy in the beginning of the film. They give her the package together and Andy manages to convince her not to open it until his birthday. When he returns from that painful encounter, he and his friends decide its time to disassemble Chucky and throw him in the dump, too. It was a hard thing for Andy because they had, in fact, become best friends. But this terror could go on no longer. They take him apart and dump him down the garbage shoot, however Chucky is rescued by none other than the creepy building repairman. He decides to repair the doll and sell him on eBay. He's all about that dollar bill. Chucky then is brought back to life in a Frankenstein esq rebirth. Fortunately for us, Chucky puts an end to this creeps life while he is oogeling Karen on a secrete camera in her apartment. His death is pretty rad, albeit a little over the top. He is sliced and diced, eventually ending up dangling from the pipes under the apartments over an active table saw. Because Chucky can control any Kaslan products, including thermostats, he cranks up the heat. Eventually, he can hold on no longer and falls to his death by blade. Chucky then manages to package himself back up and give himself to another kid in the building, just to keep an eye on Andy and stop anyone else who gets in his way.

At this point, Andy has already had his suspicions on his neighbors new Buddi doll and gets in a confrontation with the boy while at the Zed Mart. It is here that Chucky reveals just how far he is able to go by relaying videos of Andy on the stores TV's and talking through his hearing aid. After the boys duke it out, Andy makes off with the boys phone to spy on Chucky on the Buddi app. That night, while Andy is watching, Chucky kills Doreen via Kaslan smart car. I should also add that Andy has managed to take back the severed watermelon head from Doreen's apartment before it had a chance to decompose. Anyway, he is able to control the car and scares her a little before slicing her up. Andy, even more terrified than before goes to his mom with this information, telling her that he saw the whole thing on the phone he stole. She goes to return the phone, convinced her boy is crazy and leaves him alone to be tormented by Chucky through all the Kaslan products in Andy's house. He destroys the TV and his mother decides to take him to work with him, where it is the opening night of  Buddi 2 and we know that some crazy stuff is about to go down. Crazy stuff does go down indeed. Mike, who has since learned about his mothers death and has been investigating the death of Shane since they found him faceless in his watermelon patch, proceeds to handcuff Andy just as Chucky has slit the throat of a Buddi clad store manager. Then all of the Kaslan products come to life to take out as many people as possible. All in the name of friendship, because if he can't be Andy's friend, no one can. Through twist and turns, Andy manages to escape his cuffs and almost get out of the store with his friends. However, Chucky has kidnapped Karen and lures Andy to him by using her as bait.


In this final scene, Karen is strung up by her neck to a crane lift. As in most horror movies, Chucky reveals his motives to Andy in a grand fashion then makes his attack. Andy is able to overpower the doll and save his mom. They are saved by Mike, who we thought died earlier in the mall. Then, after composing herself, she rips off the head of the doll. The movie ends with the creator of Kaslan making a statement, saying that Kaslan takes no responsibility for the actions of the one doll and recalls all of the dolls until further notice, perhaps making more room for more movies for this new franchise.



That's the end of the movie but this is the beginning of my low level rant. I want to begin with the tone of this movie and how I felt about it. While watching the movie I was (and still am, really) surprised to see the parallels between this movie and the original screen play of the first Child's Play movie. Originally call Blood Buddies, the screen play was about a young boy who makes a blood pact with his doll. There was no voodoo in this version and the doll was brought to life by the boys love and this blood ritual. The doll vows to defend the boy from anyone who tries to hurt him and that is how the blood is shed. It also was a satire on the Cabbage Patch Kid craze of the 1980s with the marketing of the dolls and their accessories. This movie is pretty much that but with no magic. I enjoyed the parallels, though and it was kind of sweet to watch Andy and Chucky bond over board games and the difficulties of being different. That's pretty much all I enjoyed with this one because other details kind of confused me. For instance, there was no real reason for the doll to want to be named Chucky so bad. He wasn't possessed by a crazed serial killer and really had no connection to the name. I was also confused by why all the characters in this movie was named directly after the characters from the original movie. There is no real connection between this movie and the original, either. The dolls aren't even named the same, so the only real parallel is the names. Honestly, they could have called the movie, doll, and characters anything else and it could be its own stand alone movie. We might have said "Huh, this is kind of like Chucky" and that would have been it. I would have rather that, if we are going to be honest. I think the movie should have been called Buddi and been done with that. I guess what I am really getting at is why didn't the filmmakers just make the movie loosely based off the original and not directly connected to it? I already know the answer to that one, so fans of the franchise would come and see the movie and that makes me sick.

The next thing that bugged me was the kills. As a horror fan, I enjoy the gore and this one really skimps on the blood shed. I will say that I was impressed with the creepy repairman's death but thought the others were kind of bland. The only stand out death reveal was Shane's face stuck to a watermelon. His death was kind of boring, otherwise but the reveal was rad. However, I did read somewhere why the deaths were kind of stunted and it has all to do with the other movies. This movie could not directly or indirectly recreate any kills from previous Child's Play or Chucky movies. Could you imagine how hard this must of been on the writers? The Chucky movies are notorious for original kills, how could anyone compete? Given this information, I am willing to acknowledge their attempts at originality in this one. A for effort guys, now if we could just do something about the movies and characters names.

This next thing I have to talk about is Chucky's face and some of the likability of the main characters. First off, I had serious issues with Chucky's new look. I really thought that maybe his ugly mug would have been explained in the movie somewhere, but it really wasn't. I mean, it was joked about throughout the film, but that didn't change the fact that he was a really really ugly doll. If I was a kid now and was looking at this doll I don't think I would be begging my mom for one. I mean would you? At least in the original movie Chucky looked like a doll you might buy. The other thing I wanted to talk about was Karen, played by Aubrey Plaza. I had heard some things about her not being a real likable character, but I think those people got it wrong. I thought she was good. Her taste in men may be crap, but she worked hard for her son and did everything she could to help him acclimate to his new environment. This leads me to Andy and the kid they got to play him. I thought he was good, too. He did spit a lot, but he's emotional. A whacked out doll is making him look crazy and this kids was good at portraying that. Finally, I would like to talk about Detective Mike, played by Brian Tyree Henry. I really liked his performance of Mike Norris, originally played by the devilishly handsome Chris Sarandon. Unlike Sarandon, this detective is really funny and a major mama's boy. I genuinely enjoyed his performance and really brought a bit of humanity to this once super tough police character.

Last but not least, let's talk about Mark Hamill. I thought his performance was solid. However, I wish they had shown a more maniacal side of Chucky, really allowing Hamill to show off his voice acting skills. I mean, the man plays the Joker for crying out loud, he could have done something really scary. Part of me wonders if he held back because of his Star Wars background, but I can go with the flow of his performance. I mean, I enjoy a innocent looking character who is more terrifying in the silence. Norman Bates, anyone?  All in all, it's not bad, but its not great.

That's all for today. If you have seen this one, then let me know what you thought. Do you share any of my opinions? Do you have any of your own? I mean, I didn't hate this one. It was definitely better than the Pet Sematary remake, if you ask me. Tell me what you thought, give me a follow or comment. You can follow me here and/or on my social media accounts. Until next time friends, stay spooky.