To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Up next; Bride of Chucky…
With Curse of Chucky being released this coming Monday (read my review here), Countdown to Halloween will be looking at everyone’s fourth or fifth favourite slasher villain: Charles Lee Ray aka Chucky.
However, this is one of the movie’s biggest problems – it came out at a time when every slasher movie wanted to be Scream. As mentioned back in the 2013 Evil Dead entry of Countdown to Halloween, we talked about how filmmakers will remake scenes from original movies but miss the point of why they were the way they were. With the Scream knock-offs of the late 90s, it was usually clumsily dropping in references to slasher films or obviously pointing out horror cliches. What they usually missed however is that Scream made these references and observations for a reason – it all tied into the plot of the movie and character motivations. In the case of Bride of Chucky, the opening 5 minutes has nudge-nudge-wink-wink sight-gag nods to Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Creepshow and Texas Chain Ssaw Massacre for no reason other than they want to show its audience that it’s a self aware comedy. It’s so horribly forced and contrived that it stops being clever and just becomes unfunny, painfully obvious and utterly pointless.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.