Face-Off: Curse of Chucky vs. Cult of Chucky

CULT OF CHUCKY is another installment that takes place entirely within one location, in this case the medium security psychiatric hospital CURSE heroine Nica has been sent to four years after the events of the previous film. It’s a cold, clinical setting located in the middle of the cold, snow-covered countryside, so you’ve got both white rooms and white light blasting through the windows. In addition to being a visually unique setting, it also allows for unique characters, off balance people who allow the film to strike an off balance tone. It’s tough to tell what’s real and who can be trusted in this place.

Struggling to recover from the events of CURSE and having taken the blame for Chucky’s actions, Nica is very troubled in this film. So much so that she even attempts suicide early on, and has to be saved by Chucky so he can torment her some more. Nica’s fellow patients include an old woman who thinks she’s a ghost, a testy arsonist, a man with multiple personalities (Nica doesn’t figure that out until after she has had sex with him), and a woman who killed her child and now believes Chucky is her baby. There’s also a kindly male nurse, and a not-so-kind doctor who may well be a sexual deviant. Most interesting is the return of the series’ original hero, Andy Barclay, now an adult but still on a mission to stop Chucky’s reign of terror. With the team of Nica and Andy after him, you might think Chucky is screwed, but he has some tricks up his sleeve.

Chucky is surrounded by crazy people in this movie, and he seems to get a kick out of it. He interacts with the old lady who thinks she’s already dead, he plays along with the woman who treats him like her baby, he marvels at the creepy doctor, and he keeps Nica alive because her death isn’t part of the plan. Along the way he finds time to ponder compressed air. It’s easier to take your time when there’s more than one of you, and there is more than one Chucky here. In the end we’re shown the sight of three Chucky dolls hanging out and talking to each other. This is a scheming Chucky who’s just enjoying himself, and enjoying his own company.

CULT has some nasty, twisted, and sometimes gross kills in it. There’s a beautifully shot decapitation by falling glass, several uses of a drill, and a head brutally crushed under a high-heeled shoe. The most likeable character in the film gets the most painful and prolonged death, while another character gets killed in a way I never expected to see – willingly letting Chucky stick an arm in her mouth and down her throat.

Somehow Chucky is stalking the halls of Harrogate Psychiatric Hospital and killing people while Andy has Chucky’s severed, living head saved in his cabin so he can torture it occasionally. How can Chucky be in two places at once? Really, he can be in as many bodies at once as he wants to be now, since he learned a new spell from a voodoo website. That’s a major new twist for the franchise and it’s explained in the most flippant way possible. Beyond allowing multiple Chucky dolls to interact with each other, the possession twists also bring a tragic end to a character we cared about and set up a potential sequel that would be very different from any previous Chucky movie.