Rabid Reader's Reviews

Release Date: October 3, 2017

In Cult of Chucky, Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif) has been sent to a medium security asylum for the criminally insane after extensive therapy to accept the idea that she killed her family and not a Good Guy doll named Chucky, as she’d claimed. When people at the asylum start dying, is she to blame or is Chucky back?

Cult of Chucky is the seventh film in the Chucky series.

I had seen one of the Chucky films before watching Cult of Chucky. Probably Child’s Play released in 1988 as my cousin rented it from the video store (blast from the past, right?) for one of our teenaged marathon movie nights. Alex Vincent, the original Andy Barclay from the first film, is back and looking remarkably like a young William Shatner. The movie opens with Andy on a disastrous date with a young woman that finds him going home alone and sharing a joint with and then torturing Chucky’s mostly destroyed but still animated head. The scene shifts to Nica who is in what looks to be the asylum from American Horror Story where she is receiving electro-shock therapy and living in a ward set up that looks right for a WWI combat hospital. It seems the deciding factor to move her to the very white, very modern, very clean medium security facility is that she will be confined to a wheelchair.

Dr. Foley (played by fabulous Canadian actor, Michael Therriault) has convinced Nica that Chucky is a construct of her guilt for killing her family. Dr. Foley is the sort of man who would mansplain mansplaining. When Angela, a woman who thinks she’s dead (played brilliantly by Martina Stephenson Kerr), tells Nica that Chucky has called and said that he’s coming for her, Nica tries to warn Dr. Foley but he’s still convinced that the possessed doll is a symptom of her psychosis. When the guardian of Nica’s niece (Ms. Valentine played by actress Jennifer Tilly) visits to tell Nica that her niece has died, Nica is left broken. She brings her a Good Guy doll as a memento of her niece. Nica has a full mental breakdown and tries to kill herself by cutting her wrists only to wake up with her wrists sewn up and “Not So Fast” written in a pool of blood.

Cult of Chucky has A LOT of plot improbabilities (one of the characters punches a guard in order to be confined to the asylum … I think that night they’d be in the county jail. There are a lot of realities the movie doesn’t bother to address and doesn’t hesitate to breach but, to be frank, I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was. Chucky’s ability to be in multiple places is explained early on and the deaths are somewhat spectacular. Though the movie makeup and CGI is strong with this one (the falling, broken glass from a skylight was slowed for affect and flawless), there is a throwback feel to the days of the first Chucky movie and other classics like Leprechan. The movie is delightfully campy and the Chucky doll is sarcastic and, at times, unsure. He is written as sarcastic but just generally a villain that delights in blood, gore and death. The dialogue wasn’t always a credit to the quality of actor featured in the film. Some of it was very stock and there were moments that seemed like plot points that wound up not going anywhere.

That I enjoyed this movie doesn’t mean that I’ll seek out the rest of the Chucky movies. There will clearly be an eighth installment as Cult of Chucky ends with something of a cliffhanger and I may watch that but, generally, it was fun in the moment but probably not binge-worthy unless you have a cheesy horror movie addiction.

Cult of Chucky is available as a DVD, Blu-ray and on Amazon Instant Video.

Amazon U.S.   Amazon U.K.   Amazon CA