Despite being
roasted to a crisp in his last escapade, Chucky rises from the ashes after
being reconstructed by a toy factory to dispel the negative publicity surrounding
the doll.
Back in one
place, Chucky tracks his prey to a foster home where the chase begins again
in this fiendishly clever sequel to the enormously popular original.
"Shut up and drive before I kick your fuckin'
teeth in."
- Chucky |
A cute kid's doll
is once again the unlikely home of Charles Lee Ray, notorious serial killer,
again feeding off of the surrealism created by seeing a kid's doll screw
it's face into expressions of the purest rage and spouting all manner of
profanities. By now, Ray is becoming more and more desperate to get out
of the body of the doll, because as we were informed in the first film,
if he spends too much time in that body he'll gradually become more and
more human until one day he'll be stuck in it forever. Needless to say,
Ray's a lot more interested in starting life over as a 6-year-old (and
who wouldn't?) rather than spending the rest of his life as a plastic doll.
Although, given
that he becomes more human the longer he is in that body, how human will
he eventually become? Will he ever reach full human-hood? My guess is that
he'll gradually approach being a real human being in a sort of half life,
where he gets closer and closer and closer but never actually gets there,
kind of like computer generated actors. There is currently much talk about
how close computers can ever get to animating convincingly real people
into the movies, and the leading theory seems to be something akin to my
theory of Chucky turning human. He'll always get closer but he'll never
get all the way there.
At any rate,
Andy's mother has landed in a mental institution and Andy has been taken
in by a foster family with appropriate mental vacuity to be a horror movie
surrogate family. When Andy becomes frightened and runs through the house,
his foster father grabs him and says, 'Rule #1, no running in the house!'
OK, 'dad,' but not even when I open a closet and find myself confronted
by the doll that landed my mom in the nuthouse and almost cost me my life
and my very soul? My God, man, what the hell is this guy doing with a Good
Guys doll in the house in the first place? It's difficult enough trying
to figure out why it's even there WITHOUT having to watch this mental giant
grab Andy by the arm and ask him what on earth is the matter.
There are some
funny moments in the film, such as when Chucky smashes the head of the
innocent Good Guys doll, buries it, and takes its place in the house, and
my favorite, when Chucky is later addressed by a doting adult, Chucky responds
by saying in his cute doll voice, 'Hi! I'm….Tommy!'
The stockholders
in the Play Pal corporation are distressed over the suffering that the
company has endured due to the negative publicity of the events of the
first movie provide the premise for the movie's rather impressive finale.
In order to generate a more positive image for the company and the doll,
they have decided to reintroduce it into the market. The original Chucky
doll was collected by the company and examined by toy-makers, who decided
that there really was nothing truly wrong with it, it was not really a
demon-possessed toy, so they decided to melt it down and remake it. Why
they didn't just throw it away I'm not really sure, but who cares. Waste
not, want not, I guess.
At any rate,
Chucky comes back in a fresh plastic body (too bad he can't be transferred
to a human as easily as he can be transferred from one doll body to another),
and once again resumes his quest for Andy's soul. I've heard complaints
about why Chucky had to go after Andy and couldn't just find a bum on the
street or something, but you'll remember in the first movie, the conditions
of his plastic entrapment stated that he could only transfer into the body
of the first person that he revealed his identity to once he was inside
the Chucky doll.
Nevertheless,
even though the first sequel in the Child's play series comes dangerously
close to falling into that sophomore sequel chasm of falling flat because
of obviously feeding off the success of its predecessor without having
much of anything to add to the story, Child's Play 2 escapes into
the world of moderately acceptable horror sequels, kind of like Psycho
II, which had no hope of matching its predecessor but at least was
able to justify its own existence.
I think it's
easy to be put off by the conclusion of Child's Play 2, but I was
pretty impressed with the toy factory setting, if only because it created
such a great atmosphere for Chucky to make his hunt and Andy and his foster
sister Kyle to try vainly to escape. There was some pretty clever stuff
in the final act of the film, not including, however, the scene where Kyle
and Andy run around completely lost, making the factory seem like a maze
by editing together a lot of clips of them clearly running around the same
corner half a dozen times or so. A bit trite, but nothing compared to my
biggest gripe of the film, which is the final scene, one of the goofier
things that I've seen on an otherwise at least moderately competent horror
movie.
Odd for a movie
to try so hard to live up to its expectations and then belittle itself
with something like what I'll just call the air hose scene. I do, however,
think that the movie was successful and good enough to deserve a better
DVD than it got.
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- Months
of preparation went into creating the "new" Chucky. Since it took nine
puppeteers working in perfect synchronicity to operate the doll, every
move had to be worked out so that nine people could coordinate their efforts
and hit their marks.
- At the end of the movie when Chucky is remade in the toy machine
there is a hand visible as the credits roll.
- Filmed in Chicago, Illinois.
- In order to make Chucky's speech more realistic, specific scenes
were shot at eighteen frames per second instead of twenty-four. Kevin Yagher,
the dolls designer, said, "That way we have a little more time to sync
up our facial movements to the words. Then the film is speeded up to match
everything else, and we're able to get the tough letters, like 'F' and
'B', much more realistically.
- Child's Play 2 was filmed on a budget of $13,000,000 and
grossed $28,501,605 in the USA.
- Every scene with an animated Chucky required a "hiding place"
under the floor or somewhere off screen where nine puppeteers could huddle
together for hours at a time, joysticks in hand.
     
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