EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on August 4, 2019. 

This is the first Child’s Play movie made without the involvement of creator Don Mancini and actor Brad Dourif. Instead, Lars Klevberg (whose film Polaroid has been lost in the legislative downfall of the Weinsteins) directed from a script by Tyler Burton Smith (who wrote the video games Sleeping Dogs and Quantum Break).

Mancini has criticized the remake while understanding that rights holder Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer can do anything they want. When asked if he and fellow producer David Kirschner would be involved, he said, “We said no thank you, because we have our ongoing thriving business with Chucky. Obviously my feelings were hurt… And I did create the character and nurture the franchise for three decades. So when someone says, “Oh yeah, we would love to have your name on the film,” it was hard not to feel like I was being patronized. They just wanted our approval. Which I strenuously denied them.”

Instead of the supernatural origins of the past, this Chucky is a Buddi doll created by the Kaslan Corporation. This kind of tears out the most frightening part of the Chucky concept — a doll that somehow comes to life yet is consumed by pure evil.

The real problem starts in a foreign Buddi assembly factory, where an employee takes out all of the safety protocols before killing himself. That doll eventually makes its way to the home of Karen Barclay (Aubrey Plaza) and her hearing-impaired son Andy (Gabriel Bateman, who was also in Annabelle and Lights Out).

While Andy eventually gains real human friends, Chucky places his friend’s happiness above all common sense and restraint. Unlike the past, where Chucky is motivated only by his own concerns, here you can see how his lack of human understanding leads to all of the murder and mayhem. He doesn’t realize how a movie that the kids watch, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, can provide laughter and pleasure while real death leads to life-changing results.

This Chucky also has the ability to command phones, household objects, drones and cars, as well as command an army of the next line of Buddi dolls on the night they are introduced, which includes a positively harrowing bear version.

I was totally prepared to absolutely despise this film until I saw it in a new light. I wondered, what if Claudio Fragrasso somehow got his hands on the chance to make Child’s Play? The results wouldn’t be all that great, but they’d sure be fun. That’s what this movie aspires to. It’s certainly entertaining — any movie where the adulterous villain is scalped by a tiller in a watermelon patch while taking down Christmas lights and his face is skinned off and passed around as a gift or a child is sprayed right in the face by a store manager’s blood is going to be a winner in my book. But it could have been a totally different film with a totally different title and lead character without changing the story all that much.

But hey — Mark Hamill is awesome as the voice of Chucky and Tim Matheson shows up as Henry Kaslan, the head of Kaslan Industries. I laughed out loud a few times. And I’m not as married to Chucky as a slasher hero as I am to Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, Leatherface or anyone else. And let’s face — all of those characters have had some pretty bad movies in their history, too. This one isn’t as bad as any of those. Sure, Chucky looks like unfinished CGI, but you can’t have everything.

There’s also another Chucky movie coming out this year called Charles and Mancini has a TV series in development. Want to learn some more about killer dolls? Check out this list of ten evil dolls that we posted a few weeks ago.

Noelle Bye and Meredith Holland co-directed and co-wrote this movie with Roger Collins, who plays Kyle. The college in this film used to play a game in which players took a piece of paper from a box and learned if they were a killer or victim and acted according. The game ended in 1988 when one player went too far and killed eight students. The game has been illegal since then, but one person wants to bring in back and make it go viral.

This year, the game is going to get played in a theater on campus and live streamed for the whole world to watch. If you’ve seen Stage Fright, you know what’s coming. And despite its low budget, Chill takes the Satanic Panic role playing game mania, ads in some modern internet and isn’t afraid to get talky and have some backstory before getting to the killing.

While not all the acting is great, the filmmakers were smart about their script, the lighting and the kills. That’s what we’re here for, right? Chill is a real surprise, a solid effort that was a rewarding watch. Sometimes taking a chance on new slashers can pay off.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Four years after Curse of Chucky, Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) has been torturing the head of Chucky and Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif) has been trapped in a mental ward after being framed for Chucky’s crimes. At this point, she thinks that she was the killer and Chucky doesn’t exist. As part of a therapy group, each is given a Good Guy doll and before you can even think it, multiple people are somehow possessed by Chucky.

This is the seventh film in the series but director and writer Don Mancini is completely unafraid to change it up, having Chucky find a voodoo spell online that allows him to start his own cult of followers that he can use to take out his chosen victims. It even leads directly into the Chucky TV series, as that takes place two weeks after the end of this story with the series having Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany Valentine, Alex Vincent also back as Andy Barclay, Christine Elise as Kyle (who comes back from Child’s Play 3 to appear at the end of this to torture the Chucky head) and Fiona Dourif as Nica.

I went into a week of these movies and had the idea that they were only good until the second film but this series has surprised me. I’d say it might be the most consistent slasher franchise of them all.

Dustin Ferguson directed and wrote this assemblage of clips that tell a variety of slasher stories. Well, it’s really a homage — that’s the nice way of saying it — to Slumber Party Massacre, while also using clips from the director’s other movies Silly Scaries 2, Terror at Black Tree Forest and Escape to Black Tree Forest. Then, there are pieces of 7 Down by Tyler L. Schmid followed by big chunks of Abel Ferrera’s The Driller Killer, which is a fantastic movie and makes everything else in here look not that good by comparison.

I mean, yes, you can take public domain footage and make it the meat of your movie but should you?

I guess this was supposed to be a fake trailer for Slumber Party Massacre 4: It Runs In the Family, but I have no idea how all the other already made movies made their way in other than padding. Oh yeah — Devil Times Five also shows up as a trailer.

The audio is all over the place. Film quality varies. And you wonder, how is this on Tubi?

I think Dustin is a talented guy but he’s also the filmmaker whose Rattlers 2 was 70% Rattlers. I’d really like to see him make a great movie instead of ten alright movies in a week. And he should stand on his own instead of taking old footage or trailers. It compares and contrasts to his own films and he’s way too good to do that. I say this with hope and good intention.