A family movie

Noel Vera

Don Mancini is lucky enough to have written all five of his "Chucky"
pictures; that way he's retained control over his characters' story
arcs--given them a consistency of development and level of quality
you rarely see in other horror franchises.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for the rare
accident, the outsider brought in to breath fresh life into an old
story, even if it does little to the boxoffice. Nigel Kneale, he of
the "Quatermass" BBC TV series and film adaptations,
wrote "Halloween 3: Season of the Witch" for the Michael Myers
franchise, and it's easily the most bizarre (and to my mind most
interesting) of the lot--sinister corporate men, subversive
television commercials, outsized Halloween masks, long-distance mind
control. It's barely recognizable as a "Halloween" film (other than
the synthesizer score and scare sound effects), but definitely a
script by Nigel Kneale (just this side of comprehensible--you wonder
what re-writes were made along the way).

Going back to Mancini--he's quickly adopted a comic-horror tone for
his "Chucky" films, which when you think about it is probably the
only way to go. I mean--a killer doll; how scary can it be? You have
to watch out for your calves and ankles, sure, but…

As it turns out (and if you don't bring too much expectation into
the theater), his latest, "Seed of Chucky," is disreputable fun. The
credit sequence starts out with a fetus floating in a uterus, and
ends with a closeup of the fetus' wrist, marked "MADE IN JAPAN,"
setting a distinct comic tone for the picture. The baby is born;
it's given a joke moniker only parents high on drugs (or a guardian
who couldn't care less) would give, and performs somewhere in
England as a ventriloquist's dummy; it learns that it may have
parents, runs away from its puppeteer owner (shades of "Pinocchio,"
one of the many film and literary references in the movie), and
makes its way to Los Angeles.

Mancini breezes through the jokes and keeps the action going, which
is the only way to go; if he pauses to try make things more logical
(how does a dummy too dumb to know that "Shitface" is not a normal
name make its way to Los Angeles without being noticed?), the whole
thing would fall flat on its plastic face.

The dummy doesn't find its parents (they've been killed in the
previous installment); but it does find animatronic replicas of his
parents, for a movie being made to cash in on the "urban legend" of
Chucky. Which, as it turns out, is good enough; some voodoo
incantations, and Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly--who play Chucky
and his bride, Tiffany--are back and wreaking havoc (or at least
more havoc than is usual) in Hollywood.

Mancini may not have the advantage of being able to use truly outré
ideas, but he does manage the lesser feat of ringing fresh
variations on already familiar tropes: Chucky and Tiffany wave the
traditional butcher's knife, but also make creative use of wires and
axes, among other implements. They, however, may possibly be
eclipsed by their offspring, who has a way with hairspray and jars
of sulfuric acid--if it can only make up its mind what sex it is
(Chucky says it's "Glen," Tiffany insists it's "Glenda" (inside joke
re: Ed Wood); pulling down its pants doesn't help, as it has a
featureless plastic crotch (Chucky thinks it'll just sprout later
on)), and whether or not it's a killer.

Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky has always played the role with
maniacal glee; nowadays, with this fourth sequel, that glee is more
comforting than shocking, and is inflected with all kinds of middle-
aged angst--exasperation at his take-control wife; dismay over his
child's sexuality and insistence on its masculinity (Tiffany is more
open to the possibility that Glenda could be a Glen); suggestions of
a wayward eye ("She came on to me!" he tells Tiffany when she
catches him in a compromising position); and a libido that just
might be over-the-hill (looking for material to masturbate to, he
rejects the standard porn magazines and opts for Fangoria).

But familiar as Chucky and his Dourif-like voice may be to
audiences, the movie really belongs to Tiffany, and Jennifer Tilly.
As Tiffany's voice, Tilly does a wicked parody of a woman trying to
straighten out her psychotic family--she gives belated love to her
long-lost offspring ("Sweetface!"); reforms her addiction to
killing; and explains away the occasional relapse with a series of
clichés ("It's only a little slip," she says of an eviscerated
corpse; "Rome wasn't built in a day. Besides, he had it coming to
him."). Even better is Jennifer Tilly as herself, a former Oscar
nominee reduced to being star of a horror franchise--or, as she
herself so succinctly puts it: "Now look at me, I'm fucking a doll."
Tilly is as game as they come: she takes jabs at her Oscar
nomination, her extra weight, her one really worthwhile film (the
Wachowski Brothers' "Bound" (still their best work, I think), with
those notoriously hot lesbian scenes with Gina Gershon), and her
ostensibly slutty persona ("It's just an act. You think they would
offer me all those sexy movies if they knew I hadn't been laid in
over a year?"). She gets all the best lines--if they really are
lines, for all we know she improvised most of her dialogue--and she
gets the best motivation: to win the part of the Virgin Mary for a
major religious production being staged by rapper-turned-filmmaker
Redman (who meets an appropriately nasty end--take that, actor-
turned-snuff hack Mel Gibson!).

And as a little flourish, a garland to complement Tilly's already
delicious performance, Mancini throws in John Waters as an annoying
photojournalist (with his lanky limbs scurrying over walls and
bushes and into room corners he resembles a large cockroach), who
meets an equally appropriate end.

Not bad, not bad at all; after all is said and done, Mancini may
leave behind a body of work that won't exactly add to the glory of
world cinema, but won't be an embarrassing blight either, unlike
some horror franchises I can think of. Though I still can't help but
wonder: what if Nigel Kneale wrote a Chucky movie too…?

(First appeared in Businessworld, 12/3/04)

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