Poll Position: Child's Play (1988)

This week's poll was a closer race than last week. Child's Play took an early lead. Drag Me to Hell started to gain on it, but never quite caught up. Thus, today I watched a toy doll attack people in a murderous rage. I'll be honest, I always thought the idea was pretty stupid, but I remember it was a fairly popular title back in the day, and so I figured I'd leave it up to you guys, even if I wasn't super thrilled to see it. I fully expected some of the worst effects, and probably a kid in a bad costume to fill out the roll of Chucky, the killer doll. Was it everything I expected, or did this little guy surprise me? Hit the jump to find out.


The story is fairly simple, but that's OK when it comes to slasher/thriller movies. Charles Lee Ray is known as "The Strangler" and has been accused of several killings. The movie starts off with the cops hot on his trail, ending in a bloody shoot-out in a toy store. Little do they know, but Charles, AKA Chucky, has quite the passion for black magic and voodoo. He swears revenge, and as he lay dying, he grabs a "Good Guy" doll and casts his spell, bringing down lightning on them and successfully transferring his soul into the doll. Chucky finds his way into the home of single mother Karen Barclay, and her son Andy as a last minute birthday gift. I don't think I'd ever want to celebrate my birthday ever again after what happens next.

Charles Lee Ray performs his voodoo!

There are both good things and bad things about Child's Play that make it a mixed bag for me. First of all, let me start with what it says on the movie's cover. It says "Excellent Special Effects!" right on the cover. Before I started the movie, and even well into it, I kept thinking to myself "You mean for '88". But then Chucky really comes to life! Even now I was impressed with how Chucky moved and animated. He even had almost perfect lip-syncing with his voice! It seems to be mostly animatronics, but there could have been some stop-motion in there too on occasion, but to be honest I wasn't really sure how they did it. I was right about them having a few scenes with a kid or a little person dressed up as Chucky, but there didn't seem to be very many instances of that. Which is good, because it looked pretty goofy.

Chucky & Andy, friends 'till the end!

While the effects actually did impress me, on the other side of the coin were all the people. There wasn't a single good bit of acting from any of the human cast. Chucky actually did pretty good, which credit can go to Brad Dourif who did the voice acting, and appears shortly at the start as Charles Lee Ray. Other than Dourif though, the acting was awful! The kid, Alex Vincent fluctuated from squeakingly annoying to flopping around on the floor frightened. I know tripping and falling on the ground is a cliché in movies, but I've never seen it done so much in one film. The adults didn't fare much better.

Pictures do no justice to the expressive movements of Chucky's face

Something that surprised me was how little blood and gore were in this movie. Only a few people die, and you pretty much never see anything when they do. Similar to how the main villain is a child's doll, the attack sequences often took on nearly comedic properties, like when the detective has to keep jumping up in the seat of his car because Chucky is trying to stab him, through the seat, in the ass. I wish they had just gone all out and really made Chucky more of a killer. Sure he had that unstoppable quality of not really being able to hurt him, and he'll just keep coming, but he is still just a doll. And for a killer, he wasn't really all that good at killing people.

Child's Play definitely ended up being better than I thought it would be, but it still fell a little short of being a great horror film. I know there are more films in the series, but I doubt I'll investigate any further into the adventures of Chucky. The movie pretty much rides the coat-tails of the great special effects work to make Chucky come to life. This is probably a good example of practical effects being at their peak advancement before CG started getting introduced shortly into the 90s. Even so, this would still be a pretty hard film to recommend, but I'm glad I can finally say I saw it.