Child's Play

Review

Child’s Play (1988) is a staple of 80s slashers which ended up revolutionizing the killer toy genre and creating one of the most iconic horror villains known to man. Despite the series falling into the wacky and absurd by the fourth and fifth films, the original Child’s Play was a very serious horror which utilized suspense and a strong feeling of the uncanny valley to horrify it’s audience.

Child’s Play is about a young boy who is obsessed with Good Guy dolls who receives one on his birthday. The doll in question was bought by his mother from a peddler in the alley behind work and little does she know that it’s possessed by the spirit of the Lakeshore Strangler, Charles Lee Ray. From the first night, Chucky begins causing issues and killing people and the police assume that it’s Andy lying about his doll. Eventually, Chucky realizes that he’s turning mortal in his doll body so he has to transfer his soul into Andy’s body but when he tracks down Andy, Chucky is stopped by Andy’s mother and the homicide detective.

I think one of the biggest strengths of Child’s Play that isn’t really talked about is the incredible pacing of the movie. In my opinion, horror movies, especially slashers, from the 80s have the most dogshit pacing compared to any other era or genre. This is because they spend an hour building up suspense with nothing happening, then people start dying in the last 30 minutes, and then in the last 15 minutes we’re finally confronted with the killer and have the final girl circuit, and bam we’re done. I just gave you the plot run-down of both Friday the 13th and Halloween and lots more less popular, more generic slashers. All this to say Chucky doesn’t have a lot of downtime for suspense. The audience knows the doll is alive from the start, he’s killing people within like 15 minutes of being onscreen, and we see his full body moving around and killing people about 45 minutes in and from that point on we basically don’t stop seeing him.

Another strength of this movie is Chucky himself. Brad Dourif does an incredible job voice acting him, despite this being a more serious movie he’s still pretty funny in a way that isn’t tonally jarring. Apart from Brad Dourif’s performance, the Chucky animatronic is so genuinely impressive. Each moving part of the animatronic required an individual puppeteer to work and the full doll required at least ten puppeteers to achieve the fluid movement it had in the film. Seeing the doll in movement is absolutely beautiful and the movement is just off enough that it causes this disturbing uncanny valley effect which makes just watching Chucky move offputting on its own.

The human actors are also very impressive, I have no major notes. Alex Vincent’s performance is especially impressive as an extremely young child actor with lots of lines throughout the movie. The fact that he’s still working on Chucky projects is so like cute because you can tell that working on this movie was one of his formative experiences that he looks back on fondly.

I really appreciate the more serious tone of this film because if this series had started off as silly as it can be nowadays I don’t think it would have cemented itself so firmly in the cultural consciousness. It also makes the series as a whole more impressive as it can balance having very serious films like the original and Curse of Chucky with extremely silly films like Seed of Chucky and still have them all feel like they’re part of one continuous canon.

Overall, I feel like this movie deserves to be the classic that it is and I think the continuity it managed to achieve is genuinely impressive, being one of the only horror series without a major reboot or alternate timeline. Chucky has to be one of my favorite horror characters, so I’m so glad that his original film is so impressive and great which is more than I can say for some other horror icons.