Flickering Myth

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Countdown to Halloween – Bride of Chucky (1998)

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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.


When Child’s Play 3 failed to wow audiences and critics in 1991, it seemed as though Charles Lee Ray would be dead an buried for good. The slasher sub genre continued to slow down with hugely disappointing movies like Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and the incredibly stupid Leprechaun starring Jennifer Aniston. However, in 1995 A Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson would release a movie that would breathe some much needed life into the genre.

Scream was the movie slasher fans had been waiting for. It was smart, edgy, funny, relevant and was so self aware of its genre without being an overt spoof of it that it connected with audiences on a massive scale. The movie was cliched, but it was supposed to be cliched. It was obvious, but it was supposed to be obvious. But, just like Halloween, its success did bring in a slew of immitators, knock-offs and carbon copies that would flood cinema screens in the late 90s and early 2000s – and one of those was Bride of Chucky.

Directed by future Freddy vs. Jason helmer Ronny Yu, Bride of Chucky is the first movie of the franchise to accept the wacky nature of the antagonist and attempt to be a comedy movie with some horror elements. Getting a horror comedy right is a very difficult task and it’s fair to say that most endeavours fail in either not being funny enough to be a comedy or not scary enough to be a horror. And while Bride of Chcuky is certainly one of the better ones, it still struggles to be anything more than “okay”.

Having retrieved his broken body parts from a police evidence locker, Charles Lee Ray’s former lover Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) sows Chucky back together and resurrects him. It’s not a blissful reunion however as the two get into a fight which leads to Tiffany’s death – but not before Chucky uses his voodoo magic to transfer her soul into another doll. Now the two must work together to find the bones of Charles Lee Ray and get their souls into new bodies in the form of runaway couple Jade and Jessie (Katherine Heigl and Nick Stabile).

In the A Nightmare on Elm Street documentary Never Sleep Again, Yu talks about how he learnt to “have fun” with the monster and not take it too seriously – which is quite clear from the obvious pop culture references, over-the-top deaths and wacky plot. Not to mention the weird puppet sex scene.

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.


Bride of Chucky is not without its merits and the voice work from Jennifer Tilly and Brad Dourif is a lot of fun. Dourif has always embraced the madness of a talking killer doll and Tilly sounds like she’s having the time of her life as the female half of this double act. The movie fails incredibly on being a self aware romp, but it succeeded in creating a horror power couple that has stood the test of time in Chucky and Tiffany – not to mention the most popular design of Chucky. Heigl and Stabile are simply “there” throughout the movie and it’s kind of hilarious to see them get out-acted by two puppets.

As horror comedies go, Bride of Chucky is far from the worst and after the laziness of Child’s Play 3, it at least feels like Don Mancini was trying this time round. Ronny Yu does a good job of holding an audience’s attention for the duration of the runtime, even if the obvious jokes and references let him down. The ‘post-Scream reek’ holds the movie back, but it certainly is one of the better entries in the franchise. And while it doesn’t 100% fail on being a horror comedy, it’s 2004 follow-up Seed of Chucky certainly would…

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.

Originally published October 19, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.

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