#The seed of chucky movie#
#The seed of chucky series#

Likewise, many of the horror nods in Seed of Chucky are underused. But once the basic gag is out of the way - Tilly is a fading actress who 'dolls herself up' to get a part - the film keeps repeating itself until the concept is neither funny or interesting anymore. Jennifer Tilly has a lot of screen presence, and film fans will nod approvingly at all the references to Bound (her break-out role with the pre-Matrix Wachowskis). There's always a certain amount of pleasure to be mined from actors playing themselves and taking the mickey. The film isn't pretentious in this regard per se, but it makes disappointingly little out of both its premise and material. Where Craven directed with intelligence, giving the audience both gore and clever subtext, Mancini is content to go for something much more basic and yet pass it off as being clever.

While his writing skills are not in doubt (at least on the first Child's Play film), he does not have the directorial skill to pull off something so self-referential. The biggest problem facing Seed of Chucky is that Don Mancini is no Wes Craven.

#The seed of chucky movie#

While not as scary as the original, it managed to be both a successful postmodern exercise and a compelling horror movie in its own right. Craven's meta-horror explored the boundaries between the characters and the actors that played them, nodding toward the films' often fanatical fanbase and poking fun at the absurdities of the film industry. On a narrative level, Seed of Chucky is trying very hard to be Wes Craven's New Nightmare, one of the best instalments of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The horror genre, like fantasy and sci-fi, relies heavily on the suspension of disbelief: without an audience investing in the characters and their situation, a horror film cannot be scary. Deliberately deconstructing a story, or drawing attention to the artificiality of a given situation, can have the effect of undermining the audience's emotional attachment.

Playing the postmodern game is a gamble in any genre. Seed of Chucky attempts to carry on where Bride left off, but is far less successful, being ill-thought out and poorly directed.

#The seed of chucky series#

By abandoning outright horror in favour of self-aware, postmodern horror-comedy, the series successfully embraced its goofier elements and turned them into something disturbingly memorable. The Child's Play franchise seemed to have run its course when Child's Play 3 went straight-to-video, only for Ronny Yu's Bride of Chucky to give it a new lease of life. Even with partial returns to form along the way, these sequels inevitably ended up retreading old ground, even in franchises that didn't start from the top. The original Nightmare on Elm Street, Hallowe'en or Friday the 13th were so definitive in their own ways that any sequel couldn't hope to improve upon them, aside from addressing certain technical issues. Rappers Eminem and Big Pun contributed tracks to the score.Horror franchises are invariably subject to the law of diminishing returns. The gore is extreme though, including eviscerations, beheadings, melting flesh, and other raunchy business that makes its R rating well-earned (no true Chucky fan would have it any other way, of course). In sum, this is one crazy sequel it's got a refreshing lack of morals, a light heart, and a clever script with a lot of great insider jokes for buffs. Of course it's hard when there are so many deserving targets around, including John Waters as a scuzzy paparazzi. Meanwhile, the child of Chucky is horrified by the violent murders its parents are so fond of committing and, with a little help from a 12-step book, tries to help them kick the homicide habit. Jennifer Tilly shows up as herself, and she's great-hamming it up as a floozy actress so desperate for the part in rapper Redman's latest film that she lures him home for a casting couch tryst, with hilarious (and fatal) results. Eventually it (one never learns its exact gender) escapes to Los Angeles to revive mom and pop, whose doll corpses are being used for a movie based on their previous killing spree. Apparently Chucky and his equally murderous bride, Tiffany (voiced by Jennifer Tilly), had a child, which has grown up in a cage as part of a heavy-metal ventriloquist act in England. Everyone's favorite plastic slasher doll, Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif), returns for a fifth installment of this popular horror series.