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![]() 'Bride Of Chucky' Embodies The Ultimate, Plastic Surrender To The Dictates Of Pop-Culture. By Stacey Richter OCTOBER 26, 1998: IF THERE WAS any doubt, it's now official: Pop culture has become a fully self-sustaining, self-consuming entity, like a snake devouring its tail. Movies are now permitted to base all of their subject matter, references and humor on other movies and television. In a way it's a relief. What was this art imitating life/life imitating art crap about anyway? Why not surrender to the soothing, circular hypnosis of pop culture?
Chucky's girlfriend is a bridal Tiffany doll who inherits her inky soul from a human, goth sexpot named Meg (Jennifer Tilly). Meg was the girlfriend of Ray, the real-life killer who apparently came to inhabit Chucky's wee plastic frame in horror flicks of old. I know it's hard to pay attention to this, but this is a sequel and continuity is important, so listen up: Chucky doesn't like Meg, so he kills her with, of course, a television (it's playing Bride of Frankenstein) which he tosses in her bath water. It's too bad, because Tilly's Meg is easily the best part of Bride. Watching her taunt, coo and flirt with a big plastic toy is very...engaging. Well, at least with her dead, there's one more evil doll to do what killin' needs doing. So then the plastic paramours go on a cross-country killing spree, like "Bonnie and Clyde, or Mickey and Mallory," we are told. I am not making this up. A screenwriter named Don Mancini made it up, and I'm fairly certain that's not his real name. Mancini wrote the scripts for all the Child's Play movies, a dubious achievement he at least has the grace to make fun of. Most everything in Bride of Chucky is tongue-in-cheek; the violence, especially, is rendered ridiculous. Tiff and Chucky debate the stylishness of various murder implements, finally deciding to kill a weird old police chief (John Ritter) with a spray of nails, which unfortunately doesn't quite do the trick.
Killer dolls should embody the rage of sweet things, of good little girls or mousy secretaries who always agree to work late. Without children, animated dolls lose their primal terror. Chucky isn't very scary. Some of the murders are creative and graphic, but he's not a scary doll. He's actually sort of cute, in an evil way. The only really terrifying trait Chucky has left is that inevitably, no matter how thoroughly he's killed, there's a good chance he'll come back to make us endure sequel number five.
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