Preservation (2014)

DECEMBER 15, 2017

GENRE: SURVIVAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

As a big fan of Chris Denham's previous film Home Movie (an HMAD book entry, even!), I spent a while looking forward to what he did next. But post-daily HMADing I lost track of a lot of those one-time guys that impressed me, and therefore somehow I didn't even realize his next film was not only on Netflix, but a couple years old at this point. Doh! Of course, if the film was better it probably would have been on my radar, so I chalk up my being late to the party more to the fact that no one had thought to recommend it or even mention it to me (though once I found it I think I remembered Sam from Shudder saying something about watching it ages ago) than me just being out of the loop. Still, it's no fun to be reminded once again that I can't keep up as well as I used to - why is this forgettable movie making me feel old? Screw you, Preservation!

To be fair it's not a "bad" movie by any means - it just didn't do anything I hadn't already seen in other movies, and again - my input isn't as exhaustive as it used to be, so someone who IS keeping abreast of all the films that pop up on Netflix and its peers might even find less to be surprised about here. The best surprise happens in the first few minutes, when we see a pair of brothers driving off to the woods, talking about their dad and letting us know how different they are (one brother is into silly internet videos, the other doesn't even own a phone!). They're talking for a few minutes before we discover someone else is in the car with them: the wife of the cell phone-loving brother, played by Wrenn Schmidt, who I liked a lot on Outcast and was happy to see showing up earlier than expected. Given the brothers' subtly dysfunctional dynamic I was thinking maybe Schmidt would be playing someone they met up with in the woods and perhaps fought over while they battled whatever terror awaited them, which might give the film some interesting angles (i.e. one brother letting the other come into harm's way to better his chances of getting together with this lovely woman), but nah. Like most of the movie that followed, nothing about the dynamic is either novel or even integral to the narrative, because even my 3 year old could tell you who'd be the first to die and who'd be the only survivor out of this trio.

Ah, but the killers might be unique, right? Wrong again, and I'll have to spoil their nature so skip this paragraph if you want to be surprised. At first our obligatory woodsman murderers wear masks that conceal their identity, with Denham choosing his angles carefully so as not to give anything away. But near the end of the second he lets us in on the secret - the trio of killers are actually teenagers, DUN DUN DUN! For casual horror fans this might be mindblowing, but a lot of us have seen Ils (Them), and therefore we've already seen this movie set in a house instead of the woods. We've also seen Eden Lake (which was in the woods to boot), which never tried to hide the nature of our heroes' tormentors, and also had the inspired twist on Last House on the Left's third act to add some more flavor. Here, the killers are teens and... well, that's about it. Nothing else really changes once our character(s) discover this. Even when it comes to fighting back, there isn't any debate or even much hesitation. In fact, the two most excessively violent acts against the killers occur after the hero in question has realized how young the antagonists are, with any delay being more of a "Can I kill this person?" kind of thing rather than a "Can I kill this CHILD?" one (which perhaps would have had more ambiguity if the character hadn't already dismissed the idea of hunting earlier in the film). And when you add in standard self-defense protocol, there really isn't anything shocking about it - it's just another mild-mannered vacationer being driven to kill a woods-dwelling psychopath in order to survive.

It doesn't help much that all three characters are fairly stupid. The brother is a war vet who can figure out how many attackers there are and what direction they came from/where they are headed from the way the grass and branches on the ground are bent, and can make a weapon out of found materials within seconds - i.e. a badass who can handle himself. Yet at his first opportunity he inexplicably turns his back to his attacker after subduing him with a few hits, opening himself up to what could have been an easily preventable attack. His brother and sister-in-law both do the same thing in other scenes (and every time, they pay for it) but at least they could chalk it up to being naive in such situations - how the hell did this guy survive the war if he is capable of making such a rookie mistake? It would have been way more interesting/exciting if he did everything exactly right and managed to get killed anyway, to suggest that even a trained soldier couldn't survive these dudes let alone our yuppie other heroes, but when he is taken out primarily because he's a dumbass, it doesn't really do much of anything except give the movie one less character to worry about. It also quickly kills the chance that he snapped and is doing this himself, which his brother believes is indeed the case - even if it wasn't actually believable (to me anyway) they could have milked the idea for a while, rather than kill him off almost as soon as the idea was introduced.

There is one slightly unique thing about it though: cell phones work! True, the hero's phone is only used for a different cliche (the workaholic whose phone will of course ring when his wife's already complaining about how he's always working), but at least the idea that they could call for help should the need arise gives it something. But most of the cell use is for something else: the killers use them to communicate even when standing right next to each other (yep, it's the horror movie version of a sight gag from Clueless, 20 years ago), letting us into their heads a bit as they never speak (with one pointed exception I won't spoil). It's through the phone that we see they're fans of a shooter game, giving us an entry-level "It's just a GAME to them!" motivation for their crimes and letting us know that they're not off-the-grid rednecks. I mean, it's fine, but I've seen it before in earlier movies, so I'm baffled that out of the entire crew no one told Denham that someone had beat him to the punch. Granted, horror movies have always borrowed liberally from one another, but the key is that they usually offer variations or tweaks that give it is own personality. The only time we get that here is in the final scene that briefly returns us to civilization, where most of these films end in the woods.

Obviously, I doubt Denham sat down and said "I'm going to do the same thing people have already done but add a short epilogue!", but I had to wonder (frequently) if he was aware of those other films (in particular Eden Lake, since this film has a port-a-potty scene that recalls that film's sewage moment). I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he hasn't, or otherwise he probably would have done more to distinguish his film from those (and no, adding a brother to the usual couple doesn't count). Even the (more) recent Killing Ground - which I did not care for - spent some time with the villains in their normal day to day life and also had the flashback structure to make up for its generic story (once again, people in the woods being murdered by locals), which is the sort of wrinkle(s) that could have benefited this film. I certainly don't need to be blown away by every choice in a horror film, but I would like something to remember about it in a few years (months?) if someone were to ask about it, especially when it comes from someone I know is capable of delivering. I can't see that happening here; my biggest takeaway is that the main guy was the lead "actor" in LA Noire and it was weird to see him in the flesh instead of the robotic Uncanny Valley version I'm used to (I know he was on Mad Men as well but I never watched it, so LA Noire is my main go-to for the guy. Deal with it!).

A filmmaker friend of mine frequently uses me as a sounding board about horror ideas, asking if this or that idea has been used in a movie, and I can't help but wonder if this should be standard protocol for the genre: ask around a bit and make sure you're treading new ground, and if you're not but really want to make that film, find ways to rise above the older competition. You don't need me to tell you that there are more horror films than any other genre, due to their "cheap to make" nature and, with all due respect, less discerning target audience making them easy to lead into profit. As a result, this means there are more copycats - intentional or not - and thus it's more likely that the great idea you have has been done before. There's no reason that a similar film can't be made, naturally, but again - it would be beneficial to everyone if the film had a few ideas of its own, especially in the survival sub-genre where the plots tend to be thin and the mortality rate is usually higher than slasher films (how often do you see two or three people get away from hardcore killers on a mountain range?), which makes them much less suspenseful than they ought to be as it seems like there's a rule that all but one of them has to die. I mean, look at the "Die Hard in a ______" sub-genre - the location changes, the villain's complicated plot changes, the stakes change, etc. There's room to make it your own, even if the basic concept is the same. With these kind of movies, the concept is pretty much all there is to it, reducing the ability to make it your own. Ironically, Home Movie STILL stands out as an anomaly in the found footage sub-genre, and maybe I was expecting too much here, thinking that he'd be able to really put a stamp on these films. Alas, it's watchable and well made (the scenery is gorgeous), but there was not a single point in the movie where I was wondering what might happen next. If you haven't seen the films I mentioned, I'd recommend starting with this stripped down version and then check those out, pretending they came later and wanted to improve on the basic idea.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Little Evil (2017)

DECEMBER 13, 2017

GENRE: COMEDIC, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

There aren't a lot of movies about evil children that I dislike (hell, it's hard to even disappoint me), and as Tucker & Dale was one of my favorite movies of the year I saw it (2010, though it was delayed for a bit and didn't come out until the following year if memory serves) I was eagerly looking forward to Eli Craig's followup, Little Evil. The premise seemed like a winner, basically a comedy version of The Omen (or a more supernaturally driven Problem Child) but with the always great Adam Scott in the (step)dad role (bonus, my beloved Evangeline Lilly as the child's mother), with the added bonus of Craig proving that he's able to wring plenty of laughs out of well-worn material while also adding some creative tweaks and even satisfying the "horror" part of the horror-comedy blend. Alas, the film simply didn't work for me; I barely ever laughed and found even less to enjoy about the storyline itself, which despite its R rating (for language only, as it turns out) is shockingly toothless and rarely steps outside of Omen's narrative. So it's The Omen but not scary or funny, basically - what's the point?

I'd be very curious to extend some benefit of the doubt to Craig and read the original script that was sold to Universal a few years back (Uni is not involved with the final version, which was released as a Netflix exclusive), as it seems like they had to chop some things out that maybe their non-Universal budget couldn't handle. For example, the film starts incredibly awkwardly, with a pointless flash-forward and some talk about Scott and Lilly's wedding being a disaster long before we see some brief footage of it from the videographer (Dale himself, Tyler Labine, in one of the film's few good scenes), making it feel like the film's first 20 minutes were excised/reworked. I could be wrong, but either way it puts the audience at a disadvantage for no good reason, and the flashforward spoils one of the film's central mysteries, which is whether or not Lilly's character was evil as well or if she genuinely didn't think anything was wrong with her son. There are other things throughout the movie that feel "off", such as a clown Scott rents for the kid's birthday party - they keep making a big deal about how he did a bad thing by hiring this particular guy, but we don't see him hiring him (when it's too late to care anymore he finally mentions that he just found the guy online), making it all feel like the punchline to a joke with no setup.

The other weird thing is that it keeps building up reveals to certain characters, like the kid's real dad or a hunter named Gozamel who will help them, seemingly setting up some stunt casting for these brief cameos. But no! They're just random guys! I mean nothing against the actors, but when you keep mentioning someone in an irreverent comedy and build up their first appearance, we're kind of trained to expect them to be someone that will make us laugh when we see them. Maybe Will Ferrell is the legendary hunter, or the child's father is an A-list "serious" actor from some previous devil movie having a little fun with his legacy (Gabriel Byrne would have scored the most points from me, obviously). The movie does indeed feature a few notable quickie roles (Sally Field as a child services agent, Clancy Brown as a priest who believes the end of the world is coming), and Scott's stepfather therapy group is rounded out by familiar TV stars like Donald Faison and Chris D'Elia (who scored the film's biggest laugh, in my opinion), but their appearances aren't really built up in any way. Again, it's just kinda "off", like they took the movie out of the oven before it was done baking.

Curiously, the film's wiki page notes that they didn't reshoot anything and it had a fairly brief schedule, so I can't help but wonder if it was one of those things where they rushed it into production to secure a certain actor (Scott has his own show on Fox, so I'm guessing his schedule was packed) and they simply didn't have time to rework things, let the actors fuck around to secure better improv takes, etc. I mean, the movie is definitely a comedy with supernatural elements, not a traditional "horror-comedy", so if it failed as a story that'd be almost forgivable as long as I was laughing a lot. The recent Ghostbusters update is a good example - I laughed a lot at the movie, so I at least enjoyed watching it the one time even though the story/villain were dogshit. Little Evil doesn't benefit from the same thing; I swear I only laughed I think five times throughout the movie, and I'm not exactly hard to please when it comes to comedy, especially this particular kind (irreverent/ironic/random). This is the kind of movie that seems tailor made for my sensibilities (killer kids! Dad stuff! Evangeline Lilly in a sundress!), but it just never came together for me.

Luckily, it did have a few bright spots that kept me from giving up entirely. The aforementioned scene with Labine as the pretentious wedding videographer was pretty funny; his chemistry with Scott was solid and it earned my first real laugh of the movie, where Scott seemed more concerned with the guy's lack of a tripod than the fact that his wedding was destroyed by a tornado that might have been caused by his Antichrist stepson. Craig gets some mileage out of Scott's fellow stepdads treating the whole "Antichrist" thing as yet another common issue stepdads have to deal with, and I liked that Craig worked in nods to other creepy kid moviess (Poltergeist, Children of the Corn, Rosemary's Baby...) without turning it into a ZAZ-style parody film. Plus I was happy that the devil really was involved, and that they didn't go the cop-out route and chalk every weird thing in the movie up to paranoia. Then again, Netflix spoils the happy (and lame, and like most other things in the film, clunkily established) ending with one of the screenshots that accompany the film's page (the ones that scroll past while you're reading the plot info), so it seemed like they didn't even want the audience to be surprised by anything.

Oh well. I watched the trailer a while back and was a bit concerned that there weren't any laughs, but I was hoping it would just be one of those deals where the trailer can't quite sell the movie's tone (and thus laughs) in the traditional way (one of my favorite comedies, Drowning Mona, doesn't have a funny trailer either). Alas, the trailer was dead on - the gags just keep falling flat for a variety of reasons, and while the kid is good there's not enough genuine menace for it to work as a black comedy either. It's just kind of there, leaving talented performers stranded and showing none of the spark that made Tucker and Dale such a winner. Hopefully I'm right and it just wasn't made under the best circumstances, and Craig can come back to my good graces with the next one. Until then, I trust someone can satisfy my evil child itch, comedically or otherwise? I can't just keep watching my Cathy's Curse blu-ray.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Satan's Blade (1984)

DECEMBER 8, 2017

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Even if I've heard nothing good about it, there is no slasher film from the golden era that I would refuse to see, and it's also the only kind of Blu-ray I will still blind buy, because good or bad I know I'm more likely to revisit something like Satan's Blade than a big budget action movie I enjoyed in theaters but haven't thought about since (that said, I still bought the last Fast & Furious movie even though I know I can't bring myself to see the crew let Jason Statham come to the family BBQ after he killed Han). But my friend Matt gifted me this one last year, because he figured it would be up my alley and shares my passion for seeing/collecting slashers from this particular era - alas I only now got around to finally seeing it, which makes me sad. If I'm not someone who will drop everything to make time for a random early 80s slasher, who am I?

So in a weird way I feel better that I didn't like it all that much; if I had this perfect gem sitting around for a year or so I'd kick myself for all the time I could have spent tweeting my praise (see: Cathy's Curse, which I have been championing before I even had Twitter to do it!). It's not unwatchable or anything, but the lows greatly outnumber the highs, and so it kind of exists in that middle ground where it's not actually good, but it's not insane/inept enough to watch for a laugh (like Sledgehammer) either. You can find more of that sort of thing on the bonus features, like the 30 minute interview with the director where he shows off a few props, the VHS cover, a Fangoria issue the film was covered in, etc. - all while standing up at a camera aimed at the chair he was sitting in when the interview began, so you spend most of the time looking at his mid-section and also his wife (?), who is still seated and looks annoyed. If whoever shot/edited the bonus feature made the film, we might have something for the "WTF" crowd, but alas.

That said, it has its own identity, thankfully. For starters half of the will-be victims are adults (the two men are lawyers, in fact), and there are two groups with minimal intersecting. It mostly takes place at a "ski lodge", where there are the lawyer dudes and their wives, and then five college girls in the adjacent cabin, so the killer is able to take out the group in one cabin while keeping the others from noticing/caring/going into a panic in the other. And when I say cabin I mean "Suburban Townhouse", because that's what it resembles; for a cabin, there's a distinct lack of coziness to the two domiciles - I mean their bedrooms have linoleum flooring and cement walls, which doesn't exactly sell us on the setting. If you fast forward over the exterior establishing shots you'd probably wonder why all of the neighbors didn't hear the ruckus once the killings finally begin in the film's final 30 minutes, as the idea of being isolated never really comes across. Worse, pretty much all of the killings are indoors as well, which not only minimizes the potential for chases (a key part of a slasher film), but their ill-fit makes the climactic scenes awkward where they should be tense. The homes are fairly small, so the actors have to behave unnaturally in certain scenes, like when the killer smashes a window and grabs one of the women and it somehow takes like 20 seconds for her husband to get there when she was only like ten feet away. He also looks puzzled when she screams, as if she was too far away for him to see what was happening, but based on the layout of their two positions, he should be looking right at her! Also, I'm pretty sure they just slightly redressed one cabin to make it look like a second, as the layouts seem identical and they have the same shitty paintings and tapestries on the wall (albeit in different places), so it can be a bit disorienting, while also keeping the film visually flatter than it should be.

(That said, the Blu-ray is presented open matte when it was intended to be masked down to 1.85 or whatever, so you see the boom mic a lot and lots of unnecessary headroom. Use your TV's zoom feature if you can!)

The pacing also hurts it. The killer has very little presence outside of his (again, chase-free) kill scenes, so after the opening scene kills it's like a full 45 minutes of horror-free tedium, save for one of the film's few bonkers highlights, where an old lady with a broken arm tells about some spooky legend. The rest of the time we're just watching people go in and out of their cabin to go fish or ski (we don't see any skiing footage), or drink without doing anything crazy. Hell, the male lead actually rejects the younger ski bunny girl who is hitting on him, prompting a five minute discussion about how much he loves his wife instead of a sex scene that could have resulted in a kill right when the movie could have really used one. This is followed by an endless sequence where the guy goes back to his lodge to have sex with his wife (after another long talk about how much he loves her), intercut with scenes of the spurned ski bunny walking around the woods. And if you're thinking we're watching this because it will end in her death, guess again, as all parties survive the sequence. In fact she's the closest thing the movie has to a Final Girl, making her one of the rare ones whose primary character trait is wanting to bang another woman's husband.

The kills aren't worth the wait, either. They didn't have the money/skill to do anything interesting, so it's mostly like a shot of the killer's knife swinging and then a cut to the victim holding the spot where they got hit, with blood dripping out from a pack they're probably squeezing in their hand. As for the killer himself, due to the (not particularly successful) attempt at a whodunit angle and the fact that no one involved seemed to understand that the cliches of slasher movies were there for a reason, he has no mask or anything, we just see his hand or leg or whatever during the kill scenes. This is probably why the box art promises a demonic thing that kind of looks like a Lego Bionicle (Tahu, specifically), as the titular blade wasn't enough to entice anyone, I'm sure. Final Exam (another maskless killer, though he still had a physical presence) at least had the creep silhouette thing instead of showing off their bland guy and/or lying outright.

Basically the only reason to watch the whole thing is to get to the insane killer reveal. Not his/her identity, because that's kind of obvious, but why they did it, delivered in a speech that appears to be overdubbed from someone's living room even though the scene takes place outside. It's the sort of moment you wish the movie had more of, because it's got that "holy shit what were they THINKING?" appeal that is very much missed from most of the rest of the movie. I even watched it a second time to see if it was just my mood or whatever, but nope, it just didn't work for me. Someday I'll go nuts like Rivers Cuomo did when he tried to find the scientific formula for the perfect pop song, but I will try to solve the mystery of why some of these inept indies delight me so much while others just leave me bored. I don't know if there is a specific thing to pin it on, but I sure as hell know I'll have fun trying to figure it out. Until then, I'll keep this in the collection out of habit, but against the odds described at the top I don't see myself revisiting it again (on the flipside, I'm watching Disconnected again today for the dozenth time), though I might pull it out to show someone the insane interview.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Cult of Chucky (2017)

DECEMBER 5, 2017

GENRE: PUPPET, SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Universal has a weird knack for keeping series not only going longer than anyone would have guessed, but in some ways IMPROVING as they go on. The Fast & Furious series is only now starting to fall apart (largely due to the real life death of its main character), but in those sorry post-2 Fast days, who would have guessed that part 5 would be the apex of the series and that part 7 would gross over a billion dollars? Or that there would even BE that many sequels? Likewise, when Child's Play 3 came and went without fanfare, it should have been the end of the series, but they revived Chucky seven years later with Bride of Chucky and have continued to make new sequels that people eagerly look forward to (even demand), a far cry from some of its competition where sequels are made only to retain the rights to make more of them (cough, Hellraiser, cough). Cult of Chucky is the newest entry in this consistently surprising series, and while it doesn't quite hit the mark as well as the previous entry (Curse of Chucky), it's a more than worthy addition to the franchise.

Plus, to be fair, Curse was blessed with a bit of a handicap - no one was expecting "Child's Play 6" to be any good, especially when it was going direct to video (the others were all theatrical releases). But it turned out to be a terrific restart for the series, and it did so without "rebooting" or ignoring entries - what appeared to be a largely unrelated entry (or the dreaded "True sequel to the original" approach taken by pretty much every Texas Chainsaw movie) turned out to be very much tied in with the established mythology. When Chucky washed makeup off his face to reveal the scars on his face from his previous injuries, I got downright giddy in a film I was already very much enjoying, as it was a return to the original's suspenseful roots, and director Don Mancini was essentially making an old-school "Old Dark House" movie (complete with a fight over inheritance!) with Chucky standing in for the usual fake ghost or whatever. This time, we KNOW these films can measure up, so the element of surprise is diminished a bit.

At least, when it comes to the overall quality - its narrative is very much on par with the last few sequels, in that you probably wouldn't have guessed where the plot would go. At the end of the last film, Nica (Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad "as the Voice of Chucky" Dourif) was sent to an institution after being blamed for all of the murders Chucky committed there, while our favorite Good Guy doll got his head blown off by his old nemesis, Andy Barclay. When this one begins, we see Andy going on a disastrous date, then going home to forget his troubles with a beer and a blunt that he shares with... Chucky's disembodied head! Turns out Andy aimed a bit to the side, so while Chucky's looking pretty terrible he's still alive, and the two have a weird co-dependent "friendship" of sorts. Honestly I could have watched a whole movie of this, but before long we're off to catch up with Nica, who was just transferred to a minimum security institute and is seemingly starting to believe that she really did commit the murders, not Chucky. However, her psychiatrist wants to make sure she's really over her fear of the doll, so he buys one (from Hot Topic!) and introduces it to her and her fellow patients. But Chucky's soul is with Andy, so there's no way this one could be alive, right?

Well, if you're wondering what the title was referring to, now you have your answer. Seems Chucky found a way to spread his soul across more than one doll, and once that's established, the movie comes off almost like a Thing variant of sorts, as you're wondering if he's been able to possess any humans along with an increasing number of Good Guy dolls that have found their way to the hospital. Not only does this allow for suspenseful scenes that Chucky isn't even present for (her shrink is seemingly crazier than Chucky, something even the doll notes), but also gives Brad Dourif a chance to have a couple scenes where he talks to himself, as Chuckys argue over who gets to kill someone or whatever. The stuff with the psychiatrist can drag a little in spots, but it's offset by the other patients that he's in charge of, one of whom takes a liking to Chucky because she thinks it's her dead son (leading to what might be the series' first truly horrifying moment). Mancini has a knack for creating characters that are almost automatically interesting, allowing him to quickly get back to Chucky (or Nica, our hero) without having to spend too much time making sure we know/care about these new people. I particularly liked the orderly, Carlos (Zak Santiago), who in one brief scene tells us more about who he is as a person - both with dialogue and actions - than I've ever learned about the main characters in certain Jason or Freddy films. It's testament to both Mancini and the actors that we don't need Chucky on-screen every second to be invested in the story.

But naturally, the film is at its best when it's letting Chucky do his thing. Dourif's as good as ever (his delivery of "I just CAN'T with this guy!" is an all timer in context, which I can't spoil here), and the animation is much improved over the previous film, where Chucky's face seemed to be completely different in some scenes. A behind the scenes clip on the Blu-ray shows that they are still using practical puppets with a number of operators for the facial expressions, so while there might be a few computerized "touch ups" here and there, he's still very much a practical effect and I'm never not appreciative of how well they pull it off (though I think the pre-CG Child's Play 3 remains the best he's ever looked). Since he's not just trying to play "hide the soul" every five seconds he's got more to do here than in many of the other sequels, and is up and about most of the time we see him as opposed to Curse, where the plot dictated that he remain still for a while. After the largely comedy-free Curse, Mancini seems to be dipping back into comedy at times (complete with a meta joke about Hannibal's cancellation - Mancini worked on the show), but the comedy largely works and is still nowhere near the level of the (horror-free) Seed of Chucky.

Chucky also really pops thanks to the film's visual style. As it's set in an institution, you can imagine that you'll be seeing a lot of sterile, nearly color-free environments, so when Chucky scampers down a hallway or someone carries him through the room, you can't help but zero in on him (another reason to be relieved that they do such a great job with the doll work). Mancini also peppers the film with diopter shots and split screens, and it doesn't take much effort to realize he's paying homage to Brian DePalma, which he admits to on the commentary (and in our interview!) and works remarkably well in the context of a Chucky film. As I was saying about the films being surprising, each one has its own flavor and style (remarkably, the three Mancini directed himself are the most varied), so you get a certain kind of film (in this case, the mental institution/psychological thriller movie) but now with Chucky, and so using these specific devices actually has two uses. One, it helps set it apart from the others, but the more important second one is that it gives the audience a bit of a subconscious shorthand to know what kind of movie Chucky is invading this time.

I do wish they had taken another pass at the editing, however. It's actually a few minutes shorter than Curse (the series' longest entry), but it feels a bit sluggish at times, even a bit repetitive in some cases. Indeed, some of the split-screen shots were created in editing (not the original design) in order to speed things along, and I can't help but wonder if that tactic could have been employed elsewhere. The climax is also a bit stiff compared to the others - there's big stuff happening to the characters (particularly in Nica's case), but visually it lacks oomph compared to the others. With Andy back it's easy to remember the big climaxes of CP2 (the toy factory) and 3 (the carnival), and here it mostly just amounts to a few people (and even Chucky) standing around talking. I don't need the hospital to blow up or anything, but a chase or something would have been nice; even if we've seen that sort of thing before it would at least send us off with a bit of an adrenaline rush. It's an unusual film in that the bulk of the "money shot" action occurs in the middle, so that coupled with the slight overlength deflates the movie a bit.

That said, the closing scene (along with the post-credits teaser) suggests a more female-driven followup, which I think would go over like gangbusters. Not to mention, given the current social/political climate, a "woke" Chucky movie might be kind of fascinating as long as Mancini and co. can successfully pair it with whatever new sub-genre they plan to ape next. I'm not a huge fan of Bride or Seed, but I know folks love them, and in turn Tiffany, so I'm sure they'd be happy to see her return after sitting these two out. I just hope they don't go full-blown comedy again; the little asides here were fine (though the shoutouts to earlier kills - "All actual examples!" - were clunky AF) but I'm far more impressed by their ability to make this goofy concept work in the suspense/horror mode. But whatever path they take, I know not to underestimate Mancini (and producer David Kirschner, who has also been around for all of them), so I eagerly await the next one - even if it means my sweet "Complete Collection" boxed set will be obsolete!

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

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