Look. Refusing to have optimism for horror remakes is like playing blackjack and asking for a hit at 12. Platinum Dunes taught us all to never trust the dealer, so when news of the Child's Play came out without the involvement of Mancini or Dourif, the only sane move was to expect the worst.
I also harbored perhaps too personal feelings about this, since Child's Play was the only horror franchise to scare me growing up. This can betraced to me running into a frankly fucking terrifying cardboard display of Chucky at the local rental place, but from about 1989 to sometime in the mid-90s when I watched Child's Play 2 and realized how actually non-frightening the series is, i refused to even approach the 'Cs' of the horror section. This isn't to say I'm a passionate fan of the series, but like DOOM 2016, I was all raring to go about calling this film a big piece of garbage horror.
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| i mean you're five and you see this towering over you, how are you supposed to react |
And while I wasn't hilarious off base as I was with DOOM, Child's Play 2019 is...good. Not great, but the quidessential 6.5/10 film, something that manages to barely crawl through a significant number of missteps and questionable plotting decisions to end up at something I did not really regret watching.
I've put this review off far to the point that everyone that was going to watch this movie has seen it, so there's no real point to a plot summary, right? (or uh SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT OBVIOUSLY) Everyone's already made the fucking Treehouse of Horror joke and the "oh it's 2019 and you're making a horror movie about a killer app uh real fresh" observation, shut up please. I've never believed that the setup to the horror really matters, but how the horror expands on that setup while also having some form of entertainment. And for a majority of the film, Child's Play does this actually pretty well, charting a course through the sweet spot of remake ocean where it's not just a brainless retread while also not going so far off the reservation you have to call Adult Protective Services to explain that The Wicker Man walked out the back door with just a pair of diapers on.
A large credit to this goes to Mark Hamill. Obviously my incredibly wrong tweet was primarily meant as a joke, but I didn't really have much hope that Hamill was going to do much with this role aside from use it as a way to buy a smartphone that let him write tweets about President Orange Man using just his brain. But he makes it work?
A movie about a killer doll is going to be carried by the killer doll, and Hamill's Chucky is enough of a different creature from Dourif's that it lowered my defenses pretty quickly a few minutes into the movie. At least at the start, there's no overt guile or maliciousness to Chucky, just a lonely doll latching onto a lonely kid, and then suddenly the shitty boyfriend to the kid's mom is decapitated in a watermelon patch in a...*reads script* Chicago suburb. Is that a thing?
Most reviews I read about the movie bemoaned the first half of the film as slow and plodding, but I actually found it to be a sort of charming/creepy journey, platonic Fatal Attraction while occasionally talking about apps. Had the film carried this aesthetic forward I probably would have enjoyed this film much more, but for whatever reason, the whole murder motivation of "Andy is my best friend, and nobody hurts my best friend" gets boringly twisted and modified on until he's just another goddamn generic murder doll. I know it's inherently ridiculous to bitch about a killer doll's character, especially one spurned by the "turn dial to EVIL" conceit, but it feels like a pretty wild evolution of Chucky's intelligence to start out by repeating curse words to straight up grasping the concepts of "blackmail" and "maniacal ranting over store VA systems."
Another weakness in the movie's second half is the introduction of my least favorite horror thing: the Spunky Kid Club. I hated this shit in The Goonies, I hated it in The Monster Squad, I hated it in IT, I'm sure I'd hate it in Stranger Things if I ever bothered to watch it. Feel free to attribute a relatively non-socialized childhood to it, it is a bias and after 20 years of feeling like this it is likely never going away. So when I saw the trailers to Child's Play and saw the snippet of Andy with his Very Ethnically Diverse Crew holding weapons with the voiceover of WE HAVE TO STOP HIM, I was very nervous I was going to be held hostage by the powers of friendship once again.
So it was with much relief that I can say that that particular part in the trailer was very much a red herring likely designed to draw in you Stranger Things normies. That group of friends is in the movie to a substantial, but they are almost a total non-entity in terms of affecting the plot, aside from occasionally pissing Andy off to the extent that he does a dumb thing. While it's a little irksome that we have to be subjected to yet another "tuff gurl that doesn't take guff from smelly boys" trope, it's comforting that the movie didn't fall down that particular rabbit role. Still, if the whole subplot was completely disposable, I have to question why it was even important to even make Andy have friends, especially since one of the interesting aspects of the first few Child's Play entries was that the original Andy was an incredibly weird child even before Charles Lee Ray entered his life. I get that this movie wanted to differentiate itself from those originals, but making a central character...less unique doesn't seem to be the best way to go about it.
At the same time, do you know what one of my favorite horror things are? It's big explosive gore finales! Nothing is so wonderful a capstone to my stupid horror brain as an over-elaborate series of kills. I've stated before that Wishmaster is my guiltiest of pleasure, and a large part of that is the fantastic finale in the art gallery. So imagine my hope springing when a constant in every Child's Play review is the hyping up of a big finale scene! The excitement was through the roof! Finally, I could point to something besides Cabin in the Woods as a mainstream example of what I was talking about and not have to attach a ten minute side rant about how I actually didn't like Cabin in the Woods!
Obvious big spoilers, but holy shit what a disappointment. You'd think the setup of there being a homicidal doll able to connect to every electronic device in a big box store would lead to an absurd bounty of gore riches, but here's all the ways people die in this ARMAGEDDON OF MADNESS:
1- chucky knives a guy inside a suit.
2- a flying drone slices someone with its propellers
3- a bear chucky somehow mauls people with its claws
4- repeat kills 2 and 3 like five more times
Watching this in the theater crushing, to say the least, and kind of a metaphor for the movie as a whole. Child's Play is an honestly strong remake concept strengthened by strong performances and production value, but time and time again the ideas introduced are never followed through with, so that by the end of the film we're left with generic, tropey conflicts that resolve exactly how you expect them to go. It's honestly a shame, but at least Child's Play gave me some Big Thinks.
You know what didn't give me any Big Thinks?
The best things I can say about this movie are that it does a really good job making you feel like a small brained reptile waiting for something to happen, and it is definitely the second best Alexandre Aja movie about killer things in water.
The movie is about a daughter and father in a flooding basement that is infested with crocodiles. Sure, there's some ancillary character building about these two characters, but it is some bald-faced perfunctory bullshit. During a scene where the two characters reminisce about the daughter's competitive swimming days, a good half of the theater got up to use the bathroom, as though the movie was summoning a gestalt intelligence into the audience so that we all instantly knew nothing interest was going to happen for about five minutes.
To be fair, I don't mind that the movie can't hardly wait to get straight to the crocs and various setpieces. A less confident director would no doubt have whipped up some godawful subplot where every fifteen minutes or so we have to watch a scene of another family member trying to reach the Croc Basement. This movie almost immediately sets you up for the coming eighty minutes, and that's great.
What's not fine is that the coming eighty minutes are just kind of all right. I alluded to Piranha 3D above, I reviewed it before and I stand by that review that it is a really fantastic underwater killer movie. Part of what made it work was paradoxically that the movie had absolutely zero respect for any of its characters, so guessing who was going to be skeletonized was sort of fun. I'm probably not spoiling anything to say that from the very outset it is boringly obvious that we are not going to see any substantial chomping of either of our family members in Crawl, and boy oh boy did this drain the tension from the film. I'm not some bloodthirsty boi demanding his TRIBUTE, but in a movie like this, if we know that the worst our heroes will suffer from will be some psychologist bills from treating moderate jump-scare-itis, all that we're going to be waiting for is some dopey secondary flesh sacks to roll in for their inevitable demise.
They do show up, but even here it's just so unsatisfying. A lot of people have made jokes that the film feels like a higher budgeted Syfy original, and to an extent that's true, but even the shittiest Syfy creature features can space out deaths better than Crawl did. We just get two concentrated doses of random shitheads bumbling into the water and going OH NOOO CROCSSSS and then dying in ways that made me check the internet after the film finished to see if it really was rated R. The deaths aren't bad to the level of say, the average Syfy original "shark touches a person and they turn into a water balloon filled with blood," but gore is...kind of an Aja thing? It was still enough to make the family that had brought their four year old daughter into the theater to leave, so maybe my standards are too high?
And yet, despite that and the obvious plot armor of the two main characters, as long as the film stays in the crawlspace, it's still pretty okay! Aja does a strong job of immediately blocking out the various part of the basement, so if you're paying a degree of attention you are able to place where everyone, scaley friends included, are at any given time. The film almost has some...heh...high tension at certain spots.
Then they (spoilers again but if you saw a single ad spot for this movie you already know what coming) get out of the basement and everything goes to shit.
Have you ever played a video game where you spend the entire time struggling against a single villain, the Prime Bad? You and the enemy engage in a game of cat and mouse, slowly learning each other's motivations, but eventually you triumph. And then, in that moment of glory, the game slowly shuffles forward holding a stack of papers, telling you that no, actually, there was a PRIMER BADDER behind your enemy, and actually the game is not done yet because you have like two more boring dungeons to get through before you face some guy that wasn't even mentioned until you defeated your sworn enemy?*
It is one of the clunkiest, goofiest things to happen in a video game and it somehow happens in Crawl. As opposed to the confined, claustrophobic aesthetic of the rest of the movie, now suddenly we're ping-ponging across rooms and streets while crocodiles are launching into windows like Taliban sleeper agents. The whole final sequence only lasts for about ten minutes, but it felt longer than the rest of the film for how bizarrely it clashes against everything we saw before.
Still, if you like the whole concept of killer reptile creature features, it's not like we're living in some sort of cinematic herpatological golden age where we can afford to be picky. Just, uh, take a word of advice and leave once they get out of the basement. Pretend the dad has to box Leatherface from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to escape and then they get gay married. I don't know. The world is your oyster, except the oysters now have teeth.
*: we call this the okami shuffle, or the far cry 3 fandango
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