The Child's Play franchise will go down as the best of the 80s slasher franchises that dominated pop culture once. Chucky has outlived & outclassed the likes of Freddy, Jason, Pinhead & the others. Only Leatherface stands next to Chucky as both had new films this year, but Child's Play has retained most of its first predecessor's charm, intelligence & horror credibility by keeping the voice of its creator. No, the Child's Play producers have gone a step further and given the auteurist credit solely to the writer by letting him direct. And Don Mancini has evolved into a formidable & singular talent. He's already one of the supreme directors of low budget horror IMO.
"Cult" follows the very strong "Curse of Chucky" from 2013 (the same year as TC3D hmm). That film was a pseudo-reboot that returned the film to its Urban Gothic roots as a serious mind-bending supernatural stalker film with a psychotic twist. That film was also built on Mancini's economical crafting of a vintage Hammer Studio-like atmosphere & VERY sharp social awareness and genre postmodernism & it was a much more successful experiment than the misunderstood and less popular Seed of Chucky.
Cult is not as successful as Curse, but there is so much to recommend. The plot is cleverly weaved, witty in its plot twists, surprisingly lyrical for a Chucky film and very hard to classify. Like Antonioni's Blow Up, the films of David Lynch & many European styled films, the main gimmick is perception. This is the most essential but underutilized theme in telling a story on film. Mancini has done his homework and even stretches it a bit. He makes some interesting comments about the nature of truth, reality, sanity, society & morality. The film works like an old school art film, not like a killer doll movie. In fact, there might not be enough Chucky for slasher fans. I think its an okay trade-off.
It fun to let the other characters in the Chucky myth basically drive the entire plot. Chucky becomes a Hitchcockian "McGuffin". He ties these vastly different perspectives together and represents different psychological traumas for them & that works best after 6 movies. These characters being the leads in different chapters all meeting for the first time. Very cool.
I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. It was more neat, bleak and open-ended than the previous endings. Even that is a twist on typical slasher sequel expectations. It leaves us in a new territory thats more abstract and gritty than anything in the other Chucky stories. I'm totally sold on Mancini's direction for the next film as its shaping up to be a very personal epic saga of his own demons & angels.
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