Countdown to Halloween – Child’s Play 3 (1991)

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.

The fact that Child’s Play 2 exists is proof enough that Universal wanted Child’s Play to become a franchise. Chucky was a popular enough character to make it worthwhile, but more importantly there was a space open that needed to be filled. 

By 1991, the Friday the 13th series was now in the hands of New Line after the hugely disappointing Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, and they had also announced they were killing off Freddy Kruger for good in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. Not only that, but the plans to breathe new life into the Halloween franchise floundered after the poor receptions to Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers and the series wouldn’t return to the big screen until Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995. There was a gap in the market, and Child’s Play could the the franchise to captalise on it.

However, there were two big issues that stopped Child’s Play’s chances of success – and neither of them was the quality of the movie.

Having said that, it’s not like Child’s Play 3 was ever going to break the mould of the slew of sub-standard slashers of the late 80s and early 90s. It wasn’t doing anything new or different to its competitive franchises and it certainly feels like the laziest movie in the series with little ideas and no originality – just Chucky chasing Andy in a new location, ignore previous movie plot elements and treading water until the credits roll. It’s not a terrible movie and there were a lot worse slasher films out there at its time of release, but Child’s Play 3 is a pretty paint-by-numbers experience.

The new location is Kent Military School, where Andy has been sent following Chucky’s murderous spree from the previous movie. It had been 8 years since the showdown in the factory, and Good Guys (now rebranded Play Pals) is relaunching the once successful line of toys with the bad press of Charles Lee Ray behind them. Little do they know however that they have once again rebuilt Chucky so that he may track down Andy to finally finish their game of ‘hide the soul’.

Child’s Play 3 does have some good moments and the characters are interesting enough, but it’s plagued with tired set pieces, a boring story and lazy attempts to explain the movie’s mythology. It takes the Child’s Play 2 approach of ignoring ideas set-up previously and just makes stuff up as it goes along. However, the character of Andy is expanded upon in an interesting fashion as the now tortured 16-year old who was once the infamous 6-year old that claimed a doll tried to kill him. The movie often delves into ideas of how this would affect him in his teen years and, to the credit film, it almost succeeds. Slasher movie survivors are an interesting concept and, outside of the Scream series and the Tommy Jarvis trilogy in Friday the 13th, no other franchise really attempted this with any degree of success.

But, as mentioned earlier, there were two rather large elephants in the room that stopped this mundane film from ever becoming something bigger.

During the trial of the 10-year old murderers of James Bulger in 1993, it was claimed that part of their attack was based upon a scene from Child’s Play 3 with the prosecution raising that one of their fathers had rented the movie a few months before the crime. While these claims were thrown out and the connection has never been proven (Jon Venables was not living with his father at the time and was not a fan of horror movies), the controversy tainted the film and the franchise attached to it. During interviews on the press tour of Curse of Chucky, Child’s Play creator Don Mancini was still very cagey in talking about the trial and his movie’s involvement and, despite the movie’s poor box office return, this might have been the reason why he took the series in a new direction for the 1998 follow-up, Bride of Chucky.

However, it wasn’t just the trial that stopped the Child’s Play franchise in terms of success. As aforementioned, the box office return of Child’s Play 3 was very poor and the critical and public view on the movie was just as terrible. Which was down to one simple fact: the slasher sub-genre had run its course.

As mentioned at the start of the article, the key slasher franchises of the 1980s were either coming to an end or showing signs of stopping, and this is because the money they used to make wasn’t there anymore. The market had become flooded with imitators and knock-offs with every slasher starting to look the same. Movie goers simply got tired of seeing the same thing again and again. The genre needed something new and Child’s Play 3 just wasn’t it. Even if the movie had been more than sub-par, it still probably would have been the end of the series as it currently was.

As a movie, Child’s Play 3 is nothing special and Mancini has stated publicly that he was out of ideas after Child’s Play 2 making it his least favourite of the series. But as a turning point in the franchise, it’s a very important entry as the next movie would turn away from horror to focus on comedy – a turn that we’ll look at tomorrow….

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.