Child's Play

CHILD’S PLAY

A 1988 film that has aged well and remains entertaining and scary, Child’s Play opens with a cop (Mike) pursuing a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray down a city street.  Ray shoots the lock on the door of a closed toy store and heads inside.  Mike follows him and mortally wounds him with a bullet.  Ray touches a friendly-looking red-haired doll and utters a mystical incantation with his dying breaths.  Lightning crashes down into the store, and (as the viewer learns later in the tale) Ray’s soul passes into the doll.  A single mother named Karen Barclay later buys the doll from a street vendor for her six-year-old son (Andy).  While Karen works late that night, her friend Maggie babysits Andy.  Soon the doll (known as Chucky) ambles around the apartment on his own after Andy goes to bed.  Chucky strikes Maggie in the forehead with a hammer and sends her plummeting out a kitchen window.  By coincidence, the lead police officer on the case is Mike from the prologue.  Maggie’s death, chalked up as an accident, is only the beginning of Chucky’s rampage.  He seeks revenge on Eddie (the partner in crime he had during his life in a human body) for abandoning him the night Mike shot him in the toy store.  Chucky talks Andy (who insists to others that Chucky is alive and not just a doll) into taking him to Eddie’s crash pad, where Chucky uses the oven to fill the place with gas.  When Eddie fires his gun, the hideout explodes.  Authorities take Andy away for psychiatric evaluation when he continues to insist that Chucky speaks to him.  Karen takes the doll home and realizes with horror that she never put the batteries in, yet Chucky has been saying things such as “I like to be hugged” in her presence (the mechanized toy is supposed to utter a few stock phrases).  Karen threatens to throw Chucky into the fireplace unless he speaks, and (at the midpoint of the story) the doll reveals his true nature to her as it spews nasty language and bites her arm.  Chucky flees the apartment, and Karen attempts to tell Mike what happened.  Mike assumes she is lying but later comes around to her point-of-view when Chucky attacks him in his car in a particularly harrowing sequence.  Karen and Mike set out to locate the killer doll.  Chucky, meanwhile, has his own agenda and visits the man who taught him the secret of soul transference to learn how to get back into a human body.  The fellow tells Chucky that he must utter the incantation and take over the body of the first person he revealed his true nature to after becoming a doll, thereby sending Chucky on a mission to take over the flesh of young Andy.  Eventually all the main characters end up back in Karen’s apartment for a climactic showdown in which Chucky nearly succeeds in transferring his soul into Andy’s body.  Despite being burned in the fireplace and shot repeatedly, the doll just keeps on attacking.  The good guys ultimately triumph, at least until the first sequel.

Directed and co-written by Tom Holland (the auteur behind the original Fright Night), Child’s Play takes a premise that could easily seem silly and milks it for maximum suspense and frights.  There’s ample humor to balance out the chills (in Andy’s introductory scene, he prepares breakfast for his mom by burning toast, dumping a huge clump of butter on it, and adding sugar to an overflowing bowl of brightly-colored cereal).  Chucky is a memorable and singular antagonist who grows increasingly horrific as the story progresses and his features become more pliable and human-looking.  I didn’t expect to enjoy this movie as much as I did, but I’m now eager to plow through the other entries in the franchise.  I’ll never look at a doll in quite the same way again.