Child's Play 3

CHILD’S PLAY 3

With a plot that takes place eight years after the events of the previous installment, Child’s Play 3 finds Andy Barclay (now a teenager) attending military school.  In a prologue, Chucky comes back to life when the company that produces the Good Guys dolls fires up its old cobwebbed factory and some of Chucky’s blood gets into a vat of plastic being used for the first batch.  The soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray ends up in the first new doll off the assembly line, which winds up in the hands of the company’s CEO.  Chucky kills the corporate president and then somehow mails himself to Andy’s military school (presumably he coerced someone into wrapping him up and addressing the parcel).  A kid named Tyler intercepts the package and steals the doll.  Chucky realizes that he’s now in a new body and is free to try to transfer his soul into a fresh victim, and he sets his sights on young Tyler as a potential host.  He also wants to kill Andy as revenge for the events depicted in the first two films.  Mayhem ensues as Andy comes face-to-face with his old nemesis. 

Child’s Play 3 is a watchable sequel that boasts some memorable death scenes.  The school’s barber meets a particularly brutal end at the hands of Chucky.  The finale takes place in a carnival spook house, and the interior sets thereof feature some visually arresting designs and props.  This entry in the franchise features more humor than the previous two installments and ends up being the weakest link in the series thus far.  Perhaps the laws of diminishing returns have set in as this third film about a killer doll gets underway.  It’s an entertaining yarn, but it’s not as engaging as parts one and two.   

Child's Play 2

CHILD’S PLAY 2

A fun sequel that opens with the charred remains of the Chucky doll being cleaned up and rebuilt by the company that makes the Good Guys line of toys, Child’s Play 2 finds Andy Barclay placed with foster parents (Phil and Joanne Simpson) while his biological mother undergoes psychological evaluation.  Another foster kid (a teen girl named Kyle) also lives with the Simpsons.  A toy company executive makes the mistake of placing Chucky in his car, and Chucky forces the fellow to drive him to Andy’s new neighborhood.  Chucky infiltrates the foster home and poses as Tommy (an identical doll that was already in the house).  Mayhem ensues when Andy realizes that Chucky’s back, still trying to transfer his soul into Andy’s body.  Chucky murders the Simpsons and attacks Kyle.  The third act takes place in the toy factory that makes the dolls, where Andy and Kyle have a series of climactic battles against the antagonist.

Child’s Play 2 includes some creative death scenes (a particularly gruesome one involves a factory worker on a conveyer belt where the doll eyes get installed) and explains the loose ends from the first film (the two cops who witnessed Chucky’s rampage deny the story told by Andy and his mother, probably so they can keep their jobs).  I’m quite curious to watch the third film in the series to see how Chucky returns yet again given his fairly definitive destruction at the end of this installment.  While not high art, Child’s Play 2 is an entertaining eighty-minute popcorn horror film that delivers some dark humor along with plenty of scares.  I look forward to the further adventures of Chucky, the doll with the soul of a serial killer. 

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.   

Solstice

SOLSTICE

Co-written and directed by Dan Myrick of Blair Witch Project fame, Solstice (released in 2008) follows a young woman named Megan whose twin sister Sophie died of apparent suicide at a Christmas party.  The June after Sophie’s death, Megan heads with some friends (Christian, Zoe, Alicia, and Mark) to an isolated house owned by her parents for a week of rest and relaxation.  En route, the group stops at a general store, and there Megan meets Nick (a clerk who gives her a free copy of Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to news about flying saucers, spontaneous human combustion, and the like).  Megan studies an article about communicating with the dead, which is allegedly easier to do on and around the summer solstice (which conveniently is just a couple of days away).  Megan later returns to the store and invites Nick over for dinner, thereby creating a love triangle with Christian as the third party.  Nick facilitates an impromptu séance prompted by Megan’s insistence that she’s been sensing Sophie’s presence since arriving at the house.   During and after the séance, Megan has quick flashes of visions that make no sense to her.  She ultimately sees a particular location in the woods that she passed through while jogging, and she insists that the group head out there and dig (she’s convinced that it’s where Malin, a little girl who went missing in the area in the past, is buried).  Turns out Megan’s exactly correct, and the discovery of the corpse prompts a confession from one of Megan’s friends (I won’t spoil which one) about a dark secret involving the confessor, Sophie, and Malin.  The confession neatly ties up all the loose story ends just in time to prevent the plot from seeming disjointed. 

Solstice features some shocking and chilling images (a couple of times a spirit manifests as a black silhouette with red eyes) and is relatively entertaining for yet another entry in the ghost(s)-want-to-communicate-clues-to-the-protagonist-and-reveal-the-truth sub-genre (Stir of Echoes is a superior variation on this type of tale).  At times Megan is a passive protagonist while elsewhere in the plot her actions drive the story (like when she trespasses in and explores the house of Leonard, a seemingly creepy recluse who lives across the lake).  Solstice seems for a long while like an uneven project that has switched MacGuffins mid-stream (Megan starts off wanting to communicate with her dead sister and ends up more interested in the missing local girl), but the final few minutes wrap up all the narrative threads neatly.  Solstice kept me hooked not through clever dialogue or memorable characters (the film unfortunately lacks those elements) but through the need to know what would happen next and how the various mysteries would pay off.  A plot-driven (rather than character-driven) movie that gradually parcels out the backstory about Sophie’s death through a series of flashbacks, Solstice will keep you guessing about what twists and turns the story’s spine will take from scene to scene.  I enjoyed this project more than I expected to and recommend it.

Red Victoria

RED VICTORIA

A low-budget indie film that features innovative and realistic special effects, Red Victoria follows a somewhat snooty intellectual screenwriter named Jim as his agent railroads him into penning a horror script.  Jim, who has utter disdain for the genre, finds himself mentally blocked every time he sits down to work on the project.  He finds unwelcome inspiration when a woman named Victoria magically appears in his bed one night.  Victoria is an articulate but undead individual who sometimes looks like a zombie but can alter her appearance at will to appear normal.  She informs Jim that she’s there to serve as an editor on his horror screenplay.  Soon she tries to act as a muse by murdering people in Jim’s presence beginning with a psychotherapist and then moving on to the pool maintenance man, Jim’s agent, and others.  Jim develops a love-hate relationship with Victoria and recruits a friend to research ways to vanquish this particular type of spectral entity.  The friend procures a special dagger that, if used on Halloween, will reportedly do the trick and get Victoria out of Jim’s existence for good.  Will Jim succeed in ridding himself of Victoria, or will he remain haunted forever?  Watch this fun comedy/horror hybrid to find out.

Red Victoria looks and feels low-budget except for some astonishing special effects.  At one point a severed arm on a coffee table that looks at first like a cheap plastic prop springs to life, flips over, and points at something.  Victoria’s entrance scene, when she manifests as a badly-decayed corpse with empty eye sockets, is jaw-dropping.  Such moments of visual ingenuity are peppered throughout the plot, which is rather clever if one suspends one’s disbelief enough to overlook certain details and questions (I’m not sure how Jim disposed of the various bodies that piled up on his property).  Available on DVD through Amazon, Red Victoria is a singular movie that’s worth checking out this Halloween season for some laughs and chills.  The tone of the project begins weighted more toward comedy than horror but grows more serious as the story progresses.  An entertaining look at a writer who meets and becomes largely controlled by a murderous personification of his inner muse, Red Victoria runs just under ninety minutes and may well entertain genre fans in search of a unique horror/comedy tale.  I heartily recommend this memorable look at one man’s rocky journey to crank out a horror script.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH

The only film in the Halloween franchise that does not revolve around the masked killer Michael Myers, Season of the Witch follows a doctor (Dan Challis) as he investigates the murder of one of his patients alongside the victim’s daughter (Ellie).  A gas station attendant brings a rattled individual (Ellie’s father Harry, who clutches a Silver Shamrock brand Halloween mask) to the hospital.  Challis hears the man say “they’re going to kill us all,” and later that night a robotic individual in a business suit shows up and murders him.  A nurse’s screams awaken Challis (who by then is napping in the staff lounge), and he pursues the assassin to the parking lot (where the killer gets into a car, douses himself with gasoline, and sets himself on fire).  Challis encounters Ellie first at the hospital (when she shows up to identify Harry’s body) and later in a bar.  Together they set out to figure out who killed Ellie’s dad and why.  Following their only lead, they head to the Silver Shamrock factory in a small community known as Santa Mira and check into the local motel.  Posing as bulk buyers of masks, they end up on a guided tour of the factory in the company of the Silver Shamrock CEO (Conal Cochran).  Ultimately Challis uncovers a nasty conspiracy involving ancient Celtic magic melded with modern technology and a plan to murder millions of children on Halloween night.  To describe the plot in any greater detail would mean getting into spoilers best experienced by actually watching the film.

Featuring an outstanding score composed and performed by John Carpenter & Alan Howarth, Halloween III (written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace) is an under-appreciated dark tale with a disturbing finale and some gruesome death scenes peppered throughout.  There’s a tense prologue that runs about nine minutes before the audience meets the protagonist, and in this opening Harry runs for his life while pursued by Silver Shamrock operatives.  While Challis is not an especially memorable lead character, the story itself is quite chilling despite a few flaws (I’m not sure why the antagonist opts to explain much of his plan to Challis instead of just killing him outright).  Season of the Witch (released in 1982) does not feel dated except when characters use pay phones instead of cells.  Frightening and well-shot by director of photography Dean Cundey (who also worked on the first two films in the franchise), Halloween III deserves a serious critical reappraisal in the present day (apparently fans were outraged upon its initial release by the absence of Michael Myers).  It’s a singular and original movie that boldly jeopardizes children (one kid even dies in a disturbing scene), a taboo in modern filmmaking.  I’m delighted that this project is now available on a Blu-ray packed with bonus features (including two commentary tracks), and I’ll likely watch it at least once more this fall.  If you can overlook the “trick” of a Halloween film with no Michael Myers, you’ll be in for a treat.

The Sleeper

THE SLEEPER

A recently-produced movie that was released in 2012, The Sleeper is a period slasher film set mostly in 1981 (aside from a brief prologue in 1979).  The plot follows Amy, a sophomore in college who gets invited to a party at a sorority house that is plagued by weird phone calls from a whispering fellow who sometimes giggles and cries.  The caller manages to systematically pick off the sorority sisters throughout the course of the film via various methods (hammer to the face, gouging out eyes, and such).  Amy, the ostensible lead character, vanishes through much of the middle of the plot (she’s hanging out at a bar) while the killer does his thing.  Amy ultimately comes face-to-face with the antagonist, who chases her across a strangely deserted campus (apparently the filmmakers couldn’t afford to have extras in the background).  Amy coincidentally winds up in the murderer’s lair (an old storm basement in a campus building), where she finally takes some action by stabbing the guy.  An epilogue suggests that her ordeal might not be over.

The Sleeper features an excellent soundtrack that evokes the spirit of John Carpenter’s early scores, but unfortunately the script features bland and largely interchangeable characters, a boring protagonist, and a prolonged dance scene that does nothing but kill time.  The auteur behind this project (Justin Russell) does a fine job capturing the look and feel of an early eighties slasher (if I had watched the movie without knowing anything about its production history, I could easily have been fooled into believing it was an actual lost stalk-and-slash film from thirty years ago).  It’s a shame that the heroine is so passive (while the killer uses a hammer to smash open the door of a room she’s in, she cowers and cries instead of actively searching for a weapon).  The dialogue is plain and expositional, and there’s no explanation about the killer’s identity or motivation.  For a much more engrossing story about sorority girls in jeopardy, check out the original Black Christmas from 1974 (not to be confused with its 2006 remake).