Every October there are a ridiculous amount of horror movies dropped on home video and at your local theater. Most of them are garbage, but sometimes one or two films are perfect if you want to have one hell of a scary night during Halloween season.
Curse of Chucky, available now on Blu-ray, is surprisingly one of those films. Part reboot/part sequel, this new Chucky movie is ridiculously original and legitimately scary. Who knew I would one day be recommending a Chucky film? Life takes you to some weird places.
Don Mancini, writer of all the Chucky movies, writes and directs this feature. He reintroduces Chucky through a new family, and he makes the scariest Chucky movie since the 1989 original. After the first film, Chucky became sort of an entertaining parody. He was a foul-mouthed doll, but how scary can a doll really be? Only the first film really captured the terror of the idea. This new feature does the same.
Along with rebooting his franchise, Mancini has also honored the original films. He ties this one in with the rest perfectly, and there’s an after credits sequence that Chucky fans will cheer.
This particular film follows a young woman named Nica (Fiona Dourif, the daughter of the actor supplying Chucky’s voice, Brad Dourif). She is bound to a wheelchair and living with her mother when they receive a strange package that has a Good Guys doll in it. They chalk it up as an accident and move on with their lives. That is until Nica’s mother is found dead. The rest of the family comes to mourn her, and strange things begin boiling. Nica begins to suspect it may be the unexplainable doll with a questionable past.
Curse of Chucky takes place almost entirely in one house, and that really works to its advantage. The confined setting allows Mancini the director to flourish. He creates some pretty unique homages to the classics (including a Hitchcock tribute) and manages to use the environment to build a scary movie out of a goofy concept. Believe me when I say that this movie will definitely win over some naysayers and Chucky skeptics. It won me over. This is built for Chucky fans and non Chucky fans, and it somehow pleases everybody.
It’s surprising to note that Curse of Chucky went straight to home video. The movie has above average writing, acting, directing and is a horror movie that probably would have done quite well at the box office considering how un-scary many movies are today. Most rely on gore above legitimate fear. Mancini keeps it old school by focusing on the latter.
Special features in the Blu-ray combo pack include a gag reel and director’s commentary among other features. The pack also includes both the theatrical and unrated cuts of the movie.
Curse of Chucky is one of the better straight to video films of the year and one of the better horror films of 2013. Oh, yeah and Chucky’s back, and he’s funnier and scarier than ever. Kudos Mr. Mancini. Kudos.
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