My Shudder Pick of the Month is the Spectacularly Silly 1990 Slasher Sequel Child's Play 2
As I write this, there’s a day left in the Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas poll to determine which horror franchise I will write about after I finish my deep dive into the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Final Destination has gotten off to a surprising lead.
The only franchise with even a distant shot at beating the Rube Goldberg for Goths series is Child’s Play, one of my all-time favorites. They may be major players in the horror world, but Halloween, Saw, and Friday the 13th are lagging far behind
There’s a pretty good chance that Final Destination will win the poll yet I nevertheless chose to begin my Friday morning by watching Child’s Play 2. Why? I’m very happy with how my Substack is doing, and a lot of that has to do with me executing my ideas in a timely and consistent fashion.
That hasn’t always been true of all of my creative endeavors (such as this particular website, alas), but I’m in a good groove at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas because I’ve been working ahead on my lowbrow franchises project, and I’d love to have a few entries logged before I begin my next epic jaunt through horror history.
I’ve also wanted to watch Child’s Play 2 because I love the franchise yet I’ve inexplicably never seen the second or third entry. With anyone else, that would not be inexplicable. Child’s Play’s first two sequels did not receive glowing reviews. They were ignored at Osca time.
Yet I’m very happy that I devoted eighty-three silly, painless minutes to filling the Child’s Play 2-sized and shaped hole in my cinematic education.
That’s because I realized early in the viewing that I want to be a completist, not just when it comes to the horror franchises that win the polls here at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. I’m going to watch every entry in every major horror franchise in existence.
That should keep me occupied for a few decades.! There’s just something about completing a massive, exhaustive project that appeals to my neurodivergent brain. I wrote a 500-page book about every song on every “Weird Al” Yankovic album, along with write-ups of every episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season of Comedy Bang Bang, as well as lengthy dissertations on The Complete Al, UHF, and Weird: The Al Yankovic.
I just finished The Fractured Mirror, where I write about EVERY narrative American film about movie-making released in the past century, or at least 99 percent of movies that fall into that category.
I also vowed to watch every episode of Saturday Night Live to celebrate its upcoming 50th anniversary, but that proved to be way too much even for me.
If Child’s Play doesn’t win the poll, I’m still going to watch and write about all of the entries just for fun. I want to gain the kind of wisdom that can only be acquired by experiencing all of the films in the iconic series about a psychotic Cabbage Patch Kid and his decades-long posthumous murder spree.
I’m fascinated by the crazy twists and turns the series has taken. When cute li’l Alex Vincent played Andy Barclay, the adorable moppet Chucky terrorized in Child’s Play and Child’s Play 2, he never could have envisioned that thirty-three years later, he’d still be playing Andy in a whole new medium, only this time he was an alcoholic sadist whose brain had essentially been broken by his traumatic experiences with a killer doll.
For Vincent to return for a critically derided but commercially successful follow-up, his nemesis Chucky needs to somehow return after meeting an unfortunate end in Child’s Play.
Writer Don Mancini, who was present at the very beginning and remains in charge of the franchise, devised an impressively idiotic pretext for bringing Chucky.
In quite possibly the least realistic development in the history of film, the bigwigs at Good Guys are worried about bad publicity from one of their dolls being intimately associated with murder they inexplicably decide to rebuild Chucky to illustrate that there’s nothing physically wrong with him, so they ostensibly are not to blame for the misdeeds attributed to him.
This is not unlike Deep Blue Sea, where scientists decide that the problem with sharks is that they’re not dangerous or as cerebral as they could be, so they made the easily avoidable mistake of making sharks super-intelligent.
Spectacularly misguided doll doctors/scientists rebuild their most lethal product. That predictably goes awry when a power outage results in a surge of electricity, bringing Chucky back to life.
It’s the most ridiculous slasher resurrection since a dog peed on Freddy Krueger’s grave, bringing him back to life, in the 1989 docudrama A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: This Time a Dog’s Urine Brings Him Back.
This might seem implausible, but a young Neil Degrasse Tyson served as the film’s science advisor, and he said that it’s extremely common. In fact, it apparently happened to a close friend of his: several times.
The risen Chucky then ends up in an automobile with a yuppie toy executive played by a young Greg Germann of Ally McBeal fame. Mancini knows just how ridiculous this all is and plays it with a goofy, campy touch.
It would grow more extreme and outrageous with its fourth and fifth entries, but the franchise got silly very early. Child’s Play 2 is a horror-comedy as much as a conventional slasher movie. The great comic character actor Gerrit Graham, of Phantom of the Paradise, Used Cars, and The Critic cult fame, is weirdly wasted in the oddly thankless role of the dour, disapproving patriarch at a foster home where Andy is sent to live because his mother is institutionalized.
Graham has a distinctive comic energy that’s nowhere to be seen in a central role that gives him very little to work with. Wikipedia claims that Graham beat Charles Grodin for the role, which made me laugh out loud. I cannot say for sure but I am going to say for sure that Charles Grodin was never interested in acting in a Child’s Play sequel. There was never any danger of him mixing it up with Chucky the same way he squared off against a figure of equivalent, if not greater evil, Clifford, in the film of the same name. Grodin fucking retired because he was so bored and unchallenged by acting. I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where he’s frantically calling his agent to see if he could get him an audition for the role of Phil Simpson in Child’s Play.
Graham is indeed a character actor of note, but he is not Charles Grodin.
Speaking of character actors of note, watching Child’s Play 2 made me appreciate anew the genius of Brad Dourif’s mesmerizing voice turn as Chucky. Dourif’s voice, the expert character design and puppeteering, and Don Mancini’s writing combine to create the illusion that a smirking chunk of plastic for children is sentient, evil, and possessed by the sinister soul of a deranged serial killer with a flair for voodoo.
We should not believe Chucky. He should be preposterous, ridiculous, impossible. Apparently, he was just that in a cut of Child’s Play, where Dourif played Charles Lee Ray, but Chucky was voiced by legendary character actress Jessica Walter.
This cut of Child’s Play where Walter voiced Chucky tested so poorly that the filmmakers went to the unusual extreme of removing Walter’s voice track and replacing it with Dourif’s, who was initially unable to perform the role because he was working on Mississippi Burning and then Spontaneous Combustion.
Dourif channels his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest costar Jack Nicholson, particularly in Jack Torrance mode, as Chucky. He makes the preposterous shockingly real and visceral. He’s an evil fuck, but he’s also darkly funny and oddly charismatic.
He should be a figure of pure camp, but he’s genuinely scary as well, though I was strangely mortified when he mockingly referred to him as “little dick.” It’s one thing to be a serial killer and an enthusiastic practitioner of voodoo. It’s another to talk about a ten-year-old’s dong. That is just inappropriate.
Chucky terrorizes Andy because he wants to possess his body. He warms up by murdering the people around him before a climax in the Play Pals factory, where Chucky meets another violent, albeit temporary, end.
Child’s Play 2 is a very silly movie, fully cognizant of its own ridiculousness. It’s pretty fucking stupid but a lot of fun all the same.
It’s a groaningly arbitrary sequel with no reason to exist beyond the sizable amount of money to be made from turning an overachieving sleeper hit into a money-making franchise.
Child’s Play 2 leaves plenty of room for improvement. Thankfully, as far as the franchise is concerned, things will only get better, more inspired, and, somehow, even sillier.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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