Cult of Chucky (2017)
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Cult of Chucky Movie Review
Cult of Chucky is a 2017 slasher film directed by Don Mancini and starring Fiona and Brad Dourif. It’s a solid, but rather strange entry in the series.
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“A true classic never goes out of style“
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Chucky returns to terrorize his human victim, Nica, who is confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. Meanwhile, the killer doll has some scores to settle with his old enemies, with the help of his former wife. ‘Curse of Chucky’ was a surprisingly good reboot and this is a solid sequel to that much more straightforward movie. I appreciate that they went in a different direction here, but they still shouldn’t have taken such a drastic left turn.
Beloved by critics and not as much by fans, it is easy to see how the former would appreciate this movie while the latter would find it objectionable. In its style and approach, it’s much more of a psychological horror than a slasher comedy, which was a choice that did not fully pay off, though it did lead to some interesting moments.
There was too much of that doctors doubting their patients clichéd narrative here that bothered me. It felt repetitious. Couple that with a very slow first half and you’ve got an initially rather uneventful movie. But the unhinged nature to the second half was quite remarkable as we saw many different Chuckies all together in the same place with Jennifer Tilly also returning.
Fiona Dourif’s Nica is back and she’s a solid presence. She’s definitely a more interesting protagonist than Andy, who in this movie was ridiculously sidelined and his story never went anywhere, which was dumb and illogical. But Chucky himself is as funny as always, though this movie overall isn’t much of a comedy, which to me personally was a minus.
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Cult of Chucky is very well shot with some imagery being quite memorable and even artistic. That snow falling into the hospital room sequence was quite gorgeous and pleasantly strange. The weirdness is admirable here and quite unique, but more genuinely creepy and/or funny moments were needed to balance out all the strangeness.
Cult of Chucky is the strangest of the Chucky movies, which says a lot. Though the comedic elements here are quite sparse and the slasher scenes are also rare, the movie is memorable in its odd atmosphere and a unique emphasis on psychological horror instead of slasher comedy. The first half is slow and uneventful, but the insane and unhinged second half was a lot of fun.
My Rating – 3.5