Seed Of Chucky finds the absurdity in the familial dysfunction of possessed demon toys
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The Last Exorcism Part II has us thinking about other movies about possession.
Seed Of Chucky (2004)
The 1989 sleeper hit/cult classic Child’s Play attempted to make a tiny children’s toy named Chucky (voiced by the great character actor Brad Dourif, who also played the serial killer that inhabits the toy’s soul) absolutely terrifying, with a surprising level of success. Two relatively straightforward sequels were much less successful, commercially and otherwise. In 1998, the surprisingly resilient franchise took an unexpected but very welcome turn toward camp with the Ronny Yu-directed Bride Of Chucky, a horror-comedy that introduced audiences to Chucky’s equally demonic bride, a black-hearted doll named Tiffany voiced by Jennifer Tilly.
2004’s Seed Of Chucky all but abandoned the series’ pretensions of genuine horror and unashamedly embraced self-parody with a giddily post-modern, meta-textual funhouse mirror of a narrative about an ill-fated production of a film about the Virgin Mary directed by Redman (playing himself) and starring Jennifer Tilly, who does double duty as both an unspeakably mean caricature of herself as a desperate, conniving schemer and as the voice of Tiffany. Seed Of Chucky’s suitably insane plot involves Chucky and Tiffany trying to inhabit the souls of Redman and Tilly when not coping with the responsibility of caring for sexually confused progeny Glen/Glenda (Billy Boyd), but it’s all really just an astonishingly silly, thoroughly fun pretext for mean-spirited and biting show-business comedy and gothic dark humor. Hell, the high priest of camp himself, John Waters, even shows up as a paparazzo to lend this kitschy delight his benediction. Seed Of Chucky strays so far from its origins that at times it feels less like a follow-up to Bride Of Chucky than a possessed-doll variation on Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, with the perpetually squabbling, hot-blooded Chucky and Tiffany standing in for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Availability: Currently streaming on Netflix and available on DVD through Universal.