Directed by Hong Kong's Ronny Yu (The Bride With White Hair, Warriors Of Virtue), Bride Of Chucky is a trippy, wigged-out return to an era in which horror films concentrated more on manufacturing colorful, franchisable villains than impressing audiences with witty, self-referential dialogue or smarmy post-modernism. Which is not to say that Bride Of Chucky isn't smarmy or self-referential in its own right. It is, in fact, packed with allusions to other horror films and scenes like the one in which Chucky explains to the film's bland cute-teen protagonists (Nick Stabile and Katherine Heigl) that if his story were a film, it would be so complicated that it would require at least three or four sequels. But whereas films like Scream and Urban Legend withhold the identity of their killers as long as possible, Bride Of Chucky understands that people don't go to Child's Play films for their clever dialogue or carefully constructed character arcs. People go to Child's Play to see Chucky do his thing, and, by golly, Bride Of Chucky gives audiences enough Chucky to satisfy even the most hardened Fangoria subscriber. In previous films, Chucky's action was limited largely to killing many people and uttering the occasional one-liner. But in Bride Of Chucky, Chucky is the film's most complex and dynamic character: He may still be stuck inside the body of a children's doll, but that doesn't prevent him from smoking pot, getting married, having domestic squabbles, and having sex, while still finding time to kill a large number of people. But while previous Child's Play films downplayed the comic aspects of having the mind of a serial killer occupy the body of a doll, Bride Of Chucky owes more to the early bad-taste epics of Peter Jackson than it does to earlier Child's Play films. Bride Of Chucky is pretty fucking stupid, but it's also oddly effective in its sheer audaciousness and contempt for good taste. It probably won't win a lot of converts, but for Child's Play fans, horror geeks, and stoners, it should seem like manna from heaven.