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'Bride Of Chucky' Embodies The Ultimate, Plastic Surrender To The Dictates Of Pop-Culture.
By Stacey Richter
IF THERE WAS any doubt, it's now official: Pop culture
has become a fully self-sustaining, self-consuming entity, like
a snake devouring its tail. Movies are now permitted to base all
of their subject matter, references and humor on other movies
and television. In a way it's a relief. What was this art imitating
life/life imitating art crap about anyway? Why not surrender to
the soothing, circular hypnosis of pop culture?
The epitome of such surrender is Bride of Chucky, the
fourth in the Child's Play series of horror flicks. I missed
the first three Child's Play movies (without regret, despite
the adage that what you regret in life are the things you didn't
do); but I have managed to gather that they concerned themselves
with a demonic and evidently unstoppable killer doll known as
Chucky. Chucky was infused with the soul of a "multiple murderer"
via voodoo ritual and so lives to kill, and kill again. After
three rounds, the Chucky cycle had become a bit tired, so this
time he's been resurrected as a parody of his former self. This
Chucky is a fun guy, and his new movie is a bizarre, silly cross
between a Saturday Night Live sketch and a real horror
movie.
The results are sort of interesting. Unfortunately, I can't endorse
Bride of Chucky as a fine piece of entertainment; but it's
a good movie to sneak into after paying to see another one at
the plex. Twenty minutes of this would be plenty. Particularly
if you can manage to catch the 20 minutes containing the sex scene
between Chucky and his bride (a real doll), which gets into full
swing after Chucky reveals to his honey that he's "anatomically
correct."
Chucky's girlfriend is a bridal Tiffany doll who inherits her
inky soul from a human, goth sexpot named Meg (Jennifer Tilly).
Meg was the girlfriend of Ray, the real-life killer who apparently
came to inhabit Chucky's wee plastic frame in horror flicks of
old. I know it's hard to pay attention to this, but this is a
sequel and continuity is important, so listen up: Chucky doesn't
like Meg, so he kills her with, of course, a television (it's
playing Bride of Frankenstein) which he tosses in her bath
water.
It's too bad, because Tilly's Meg is easily the best part of
Bride. Watching her taunt, coo and flirt with a big plastic
toy is very...engaging. Well, at least with her dead, there's
one more evil doll to do what killin' needs doing. So then the
plastic paramours go on a cross-country killing spree, like "Bonnie
and Clyde, or Mickey and Mallory," we are told. I am not
making this up. A screenwriter named Don Mancini made it up, and
I'm fairly certain that's not his real name. Mancini wrote the
scripts for all the Child's Play movies, a dubious achievement
he at least has the grace to make fun of. Most everything in Bride
of Chucky is tongue-in-cheek; the violence, especially, is
rendered ridiculous. Tiff and Chucky debate the stylishness of
various murder implements, finally deciding to kill a weird old
police chief (John Ritter) with a spray of nails, which unfortunately
doesn't quite do the trick.
The police chief, you see, is chasing down his fetching niece
Jade (Katherine Heigl), a teen bombshell of whom he is unnaturally
protective. But Jade loves Jesse (Nick Stabile), and the two decide
to run away together to avoid that meddling chief. They take the
dolls with them because--well who cares why. They take the dolls,
and before they know it, everyone in their path ends up dead.
Each teen begins to suspect the other of being psychotic, which
is sort of cute, but I think Mancini made a mistake by making
Bride of Chucky a teen movie. He's obviously trying to
cash in on the success of the Scream series, with the self-conscious
references and the bland teen sex-tension, but it seems to me
that the true scary nature of killer dolls comes from their association
with children.
Killer dolls should embody the rage of sweet things, of good
little girls or mousy secretaries who always agree to work late.
Without children, animated dolls lose their primal terror. Chucky
isn't very scary. Some of the murders are creative and graphic,
but he's not a scary doll. He's actually sort of cute, in an evil
way. The only really terrifying trait Chucky has left is that
inevitably, no matter how thoroughly he's killed, there's a good
chance he'll come back to make us endure sequel number five.
Bride of Chucky is playing at Century Park (620-0750),
DeAnza Drive-In (745-2240), El Dorado (745-6241),
Foothills (742-6174), La Vista 4 (746-1823) and
The Loft (just kidding) cinemas.
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