Dir. Ronny Yu (1998)
Chucky finds a woman that is the perfect candidate... to be murdered and have her soul transferred into another doll.
As I've said in my other reviews of the series, I'm a huge fan of the Child's Play franchise as a whole. The first three films are great slasher movies, with varying levels of quality but a pretty consistent balance of entertainment throughout. The fourth film in the series, however, is a seismic shift in the attitude of the franchise, a much less serious, and much more modern, attempt to revamp the series in a way that appealed to a younger audience and utilized genre tropes and classic throwbacks to make a badass updated entry that would help the series stand the test of time. For sequels, you don't get a whole lot more refreshing and entertaining than this.
A police officer rescues Chucky (Brad Dourif) from lockup, taking him on a visit to see his girlfriend Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly). Unfortunately for him, Tiffany is only interested in the Chuck, who dated Charles Lee Ray when he was still alive, and she quickly murders her living boyfriend and steals Chucky for herself in an attempt to raise him from the dead. Chucky has his own interests, happily performing the ritual himself to transfer Tiffany's soul into a doll of her own. The pair are a match made in hell, turning their attention to the local town filled with high schoolers (including an early role from Katherine Heigl) as they go on a spree to rival the worst of Bonnie and Clyde.
The updated direction of the series is helped along by a phenomenal performance from Tilly, and the new look Chucky has become perhaps even more iconic than his original appearance. Bride of Chucky takes its inspiration from Bride of Frankenstein as much as it does earlier films in the series, a bold decision and one that works perfectly for the new direction Mancini has chosen. Chucky's transference of Tiffany into her doll takes place in a beautifully done scene featuring a bathtub and a television with James Whale's classic, an unsubtle nod to the film's inspiration but one done with a love that I'm sure comes from Mancini's own life as a gay writer in Hollywood.
Bride is clever and well done, with some stellar gore, excellent performances from its main cast, and an interesting plot that hearkens back to films like Bonnie & Clyde and Natural Born Killers. Tilly and Dourif are the main drivers, of course, but Heigl and co-star Nick Stabile are fantastic as well. The soundtrack for the film is a mix of late 90's metal, most notably from brothers Rob Zombie and Spider One's Powerman 5000, and an uplifting score that feels out of place but somehow fits the film perfectly. The animatronics are phenomenal, an upgrade from an already impressive blend of puppetry and robotics from the previous films in the series. All of this adds up to a fantastic film in its own right, all the more extraordinary from a series that was clearly losing its steam.
Bride's sense of humor is a bit less refined than its predecessors' but more purposeful, the rebrand of the franchise fully embracing the fourth film as a horror comedy slasher rather than just a slasher with some funny one-liners. There are more jokes than there are kills, and Bride is a harbinger of horror films to come in the early years of the 2000's. The Child's Play franchise was already fun over quality, but Bride ratchets that way up and creates one of the most enjoyable sequels of any slasher series. There's plenty of violence for horror fans, but there's a lot more to it than that, and the fourth film in the series easily stakes its claim as the best one yet.
Who this movie is for: Slasher fans, Horror franchise buffs, Mickey and Mallory Knox
Bottom line: Bride of Chucky is perhaps the only time you can say that the fourth film in a slasher series was the best of the bunch. It's a fantastic film, funny without trying to hard and containing enough blood and guts to make 90's slasher fans happy. It revived the series in a major way, completely revamping the attitude of the franchise and paving the way for the next two decades of the series. It's hard to believe they would have gotten another four films and a television series without this entry. It also features Katherine Heigl calling someone a midget, so there's that.
