To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Up next; Child’s Play 2…
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.
Child’s Play, like many other slasher movies, was never intended to be a franchise. In the documentary Slice and Dice: Slasher Movie Forever, director Tom Holland explains that he tried everything in his power to kill the Chucky character off, but the Studio Machine saw dollar signs in their eyes to create a series that could replace the likes of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween which were either coming to an end or were winding down.
As mentioned yesterday, there was a “controversial” article recently posted on FearNet that argued Child’s Play 2 to be the superior movie over its predecessor, which was met with some backlash from the Child’s Play diehards – a perplexing reaction because the article was 100% correct.
Like any good sequel, Child’s Play 2 expands and improves upon what was good about the first one. It’s not unfair to say that Child’s Play is a just-above average movie and is only recognised by the horror masses because of its entertaining protagonist, but Child’s Play 2 removes all mystery of ‘who the killer is’ and focus on what we want to see – Chucky being creepy, messing with people’s heads and killing anyone who gets in his way of transferring his soul into Andy. This may sound like an outlandish statement (and the two should not be compared), but Child’s Play 2 is the Toy Story 2 of the franchise – that is to say it’s a huge improvement.
With that said, Child’s Play 2 is not a great (or even good) movie. It’s incredibly flawed, even goofier than the original at times and the plot/character motivations are often muddled and confused. Set one year after the first movie, Andy Berkley is now with a foster family (after his mother didn’t return for the sequel) while the Good Guy Company puts Chucky back together to see if he really was alive so they can put him back on the market. With Chucky now back in one piece, he’s able to begin his quest to find Andy and finally get out of this doll’s body he’s trapped himself in.
Child’s Play 2 does what a lot of slasher movies of the 80s and early 90s did in simply ignoring plot elements and mythology set up in previous movies because it’s easier than working out a way round them. It was clearly set-up in Child’s Play that Chucky was on borrowed time to transfer his soul into the first person he revealed himself to before the doll vessel he’s using becomes completely human – and he failed in that endeavour. By the end of the movie, he was fully human as the final bullet that put him down was the one through his heart. The sequel just ignores this plot point with a simple, “new body, new rules” attitude just to facilitate the sequel. It is very, very lazy.
But aside from the laziness of the plot and Chucky’s incompetence in actually completing his main objective, Child’s Play 2 is still a better movie than the original. For starters, director John Lafia was actually interested in making a straight-up slasher movie and he makes a genuine effort in making Chucky scary (although the Chucky vs. Tommy scene is total wacky nonsense). Whether he succeeded in his attempts or not depends on your feelings towards Chucky’s design and him as a character, but the effort was there to make this killer doll a threatening force. Furthermore, after a very stilted performance in the first movie, Alex Vincent gives a much stronger showing here as the troubled Andy and he sells the terror of Chucky just as well as his adult co-stars. The design of the movie is also better and the Good Guy factory is a great setting for the movie’s climax, leading to some good chases whilst creating claustrophobic opportunities for the hero and villain.
As a series where the bad outweighs the good, Child’s Play 2 is possibly the strongest movie of the series, pre Curse of Chucky. The animatronics are better, the acting is (a little) better and the goofy tone of the villain is placed second behind genuine attempts at horror (the Chucky vs. Tommy scene notwithstanding). Why it isn’t as respected as the original will remain a mystery, but there is little doubt that Child’s Play 2 is the better movie.
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.
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 17, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
