You Can't Keep a Good Guy Down

I dare not even attempt coyness on the subject of Child’s Play. As many loyal readers already know, meeting a certain precocious plastic stabber at the ripe age of 6 changed my young life, pointing me forever down a path wherein the subject of dolls both terrified and fascinated me. 

Following a year of nightmares brought on by my inappropriate viewing of Charles Lee Ray’s first film outing, I went on to see every ensuing installment in the theaters. Perhaps the ushers gave my mother a questionable look when she brought her 8 and 10 year old children into a viewing of the particularly mean-spirited Child’s Play 2. Maybe it was odd that my entire family attending a weeknight screening of Private Chucky (aka Child’s Play 3). It was thrilling to be a teenager spending a Friday night with friends educating them on the franchise’s history when viewing Bride of Chucky. Nothing, however, has quite come close to the time I attended a matinee showing of Seed of Chucky by my lonesome, free to giggle and guffaw to my solo self’s content.

I adore the Child’s Play series, particularly the fifth installment lovingly written and directed by series creator Don Mancini. I rarely turn down a chance to proclaim my adoration for the highly underrated Seed of Chucky, making the fact that Mancini returned to the director’s chair for 2013’s Curse of Chucky such good news.

Quick Plot: Nica is an agoraphobic 25 year old paralyzed below the waist and nursing a heart problem inside an almost offensively awesome gothic-yet-modern home. One day, a mysteriously unmarked package arrives for Nica’s flighty mother. Guess who’s inside:

Before you can say hidee ho, Nica’s mom is found dead as a presumed suicide. Such news brings out Nica’s older sister Barb, along with her doofy husband Ian, cute kid Alice, sexy nanny Jill, and sexier priest played by She-Devil’s A. Martinez. 

Not just ANY Martinez. A. Martinez. 

Proceed to typical Chucky shenanigans as the foul-mouthed toy spends the evening poisoning chili, electrocuting the scantily clad, cussing a storm at a little girl, and plucking out eyeballs with giddy one-liners. The story is fairly straightforward, although the tone is decidedly different from most of the other installments. Whereas Bride and Seed were essentially all-out horror comedies (and very funny ones at that), Curse plays more like a horror film, effectively setting up its glorious home setting as a place filled with hiding spots and rickety elevators. While the franchise pretty much gave up on making Chucky a scary figure for its last two films, Mancini finds a way to stage him as a true villain.

It helps that his victims aren’t exactly U.S. Army cadets or Chicago policemen. Nica, played quite well by Fiona Dourif (yes, she’s Brad’s daughter; yes, she looks exactly like him; and yes, she somehow manages to be an attractive woman despite looking exactly like Brad Dourif), is hampered by a heart condition and wheelchair. While the character quite wonderfully proves herself to be a worthy adversary, the fact that she has these physical limitations helps to ward off some of the obvious ‘just fight back’ eye rolls often thrown at killer doll films and their ilk.

As you would also expect from the man who brought us Seed of Chucky, Curse is also quite funny, just not as aggressively so as its predecessors. It’s a tricky balance, but the film manages to be, for the most part, a straight horror film with just enough touches of humor to entertain on a separate level. Fans of the series will gobble up the final 20 minutes, especially since they bring back some familiar faces not to be revealed here.

High Points

The biggest complaint I’ve heard lodged against this franchise and really, any involving villainous shorties is that some viewers find it impossible to be scared of something they can just kick. Well haters, guess what: if you’re paralyzed below the waist, YOU CAN’T JUST KICK AN EVIL SUPERSTRONG KNIFE-WIELDING DOLL. Well-played, Mr. Mancini

Low Points

While I ultimately want to marry the final five minutes (especially once you add the vital post-credits sequence), I will confess to being one of the maybe many who thought ...

SPOILER ALERT

...that the introduction of Tiffany in the evidence depository was supposed to take place during the timeline of Bride of Chucky. Sure, it didn’t line up with that part of the series, but since the scene with the police officer was almost beat-for-beat the opening of Bride, I just figured the movie was ret-conning the last two films and spinning its own tale. The Internet (including an interview with Don Mancini himself) proved me wrong: Curse is indeed a sequel that follows Seed, give or take a few years for Tiffany (now in the body of Jennifer Tilly, natch) and a messily sewn-back-together Chucky to make up. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense and is SERIOUSLY AWESOME, but I will concede that the actual execution could have been done a little cleaner so as to not confuse some viewers.

Lessons Learned

If you’re confined to one secluded house that gets no cellular reception, you’re probably better off just canceling your iPhone plan and saving on the unused minutes

Real hell is watching a DVR’d Real Housewives marathon while eating tuna melts

Dolls using the F-word are never not funny

Look! It’s-

Some guy named Brennan Elliot playing the amusingly incompetent Ian. Why is this important, you ask? Mr. Elliot apparently had a supporting role as a henchman in what has become my favorite Lifetime movie of all my life time, Murder On the 13th Floor. 

See, like any actor ever appearing on an episode of Law & Order: SVU, I have a compulsion to always mention the hilarious Murder On the 13th Floor any time I have even the vaguest excuse to do so. Hence, Murder On the 13th Floor.*

*I also have this weird fantasy that if I say the title enough times while staring in a mirror by candlelight, I will suddenly be living the life of a sharp-faced Jordan Ladd on the penthouse of a high-tech apartment building, hiring overly violent, ultimately inefficient thugs to slaughter my nanny. Let me dream...

Rent/Bury/Buy

For any fan of the Child’s Play series, Curse of Chucky is a must. Aside from its full-out fan service in the final act, it manages to do some new things with the legacy and character. Brad Dourif gets a little more to do, and his eerily spitting image of a daughter holds her own as a plucky protagonist. Writer/director Don Mancini achieves quite the challenge in making a horror film that’s occasionally scary, occasionally funny, and ultimately, quite a treat for those friends to the end.

Shortening Cred: It’s Chucky. He’s 2 feet tall and not growing. Long live the King of the Shortening!

One Good Cop Dog

To say my expectations were high for 2008's Cop Dog would be an understatement akin to dubbing Clive Owen okay-looking or nachos a mildly enjoyable snack or this picture of bulldog puppies kinda cute.

Kinda?

C'mon: based on the kind of WTF trailer that defies any sense of ‘typical kids film,’ my heart was set on canine thespian Kuma’s title role to change my life.

Let us see if it did.

Quick Plot: Poor Marlowe looks awfully bored sitting in a cage at a K-9 training center, where all his four-legged friends are busy running through hoops and practicing scent trails. Some fancy editing tells us that Marlowe’s human police partner died nearly one year ago and his widow and son Robby are still picking up the pieces.

Not of the dead guy, at least, not literally (though the fact that he died in an explosion does lead me to now wonder). Robby has become moody and weird, leading his mom to consider stashing him away at some form of Cuckoo’s Nest-y juvenile facility. To perk him up, she agrees to adopt Marlowe who would otherwise be put out of his misery/boredom by going to a glue factory.

As a housedog, Marlowe isn’t a champ. He takes a liking to chewing up shoes, running amuck, and chasing the sexy lady dog.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, we know she’s a lady dog because she has pink bows on her ear, which actually has more of a weird schoolgirl porn star feel but what can you do.

Also on Marlowe’s list: catch the bad guys who killed his partner AND stole his Rick Grimes-meets-the-urban-sombrero hat.

As worn by Parker Lewis himself, all grown up with a shaggy Bill Paxton circa Titanic haircut.

Step back, Clive Owen. There's some fierce competition brewing...for my heart.

The bad guys--Parker Lewis and his lackey, a doofus whose sole character trait is that he chews more gum than Violet Beaureguard--are obsessed with unlocking a Lost-like hatch in the backyard of Robby, the same locale where pops saw his gruesome end. Of course, you would suspect that said Lost-like hatch is hiding something super secret and important, and I'm almost positive we do eventually discover what said super secret and important secret is. Except it's now been 18 hours since I've watched Cop Dog and like Guy Pearce in a sports jacket, I can't for the life of me remember what it was.

I think I drink too much.

In one of his typical acts of blatant bad behavior, Marlowe runs away from Robby to chase the loitering bad guys and promptly gets hit by a truck (meta-ly played by the film's director, John Murlowski, he of the vastly different Golden Christmas and Freeway Killer). Despite Robby's cries for WATER!, Marlowe joins his late partner in the heavenly afterlife...or does he?

In the world of Ghost Cats and Karate Dogs, one would think that "Cop Dog" was enough of a title hook to serve as a film's premise. Clearly, one is not familiar with the fanciful machinations of screenwriter Steven Palmer Peterson (he of the spectacular Lifetime original Murder On the 13th Floor, a 'thriller' that manages to obliviously insult career women and the African American race in a rather adorable manner). My completely uninformed understanding of the screenwriting process for Peterson went something like him saying this: "Sure, a COP DOG is neat, but what the kids REALLY want from their cinema is more GHOST COP DOGS. Now hand me another Zima!"

At Marlowe's funeral, his sad lieutenant bestows upon a despondent Robby the dog training whistle his dad used to use on Marlowe. Before you can say, "Oh! Is this a MAGIC whistle that will summon Ghost Cop Dog to aide Robby in the investigation of his dad’s murder," allow me to point out the fact that a dog training whistle might have come in handy a week earlier when THE DOG WAS EATING FURNITURE AND RUNNING IN FRONT OF TRUCKS.

But I digress. Robby soon discovers that it is indeed a magic whistle that will summon Ghost Cop Dog to aide him on his investigation, and the plot kicks in.

Because Robby's best friend's dad is a paranormal investigator with a stable Skype connection, the kids learn that they must solve the mystery of dad's passing within one year of his death or else pops and Ghost Cop Dog will be trapped in a horrible netherworld limbo (that is hopefully nowhere near as painful as the film Netherworld) forever. That's a lot of pressure to put on a kid during his summer break, but thems the breaks when Parker Lewis is rocking an urban sombrero.

Thankfully, his pal Deb is willing to do whatever it takes to catch these rascally villains, including participate in the strangest montage yet to grace Animals Doing Human Stuff month. See, after the kids discover one of the bad guys has an annoying--yet convenient--habit of leaving chewed up gum at the scene of the crime, Robby concocts a genius/really gross plan in 5  steps:

1-Collect recent receipts from nearby convenience stores that carry various chewing gum

2-Identify which flavor and brand of chewing gum has been left behind

3-Cross-check the findings with the receipts to identify which store the assailants have been frequenting

4-Hang out at said store until the bad guys come in and purchase the precise chewing gum pattern order

5-Kill them? In truth, the fifth step was foggy.

The real question you're wondering, of course, is how did the kids match the chewing gum to the receipts? The answer is simple:

Montage of two preteens pulling out sticks and spider eggs from days-old discarded gum to identify its flavor.

Maybe that's why my macaroni 'n cheese dinner wasn't as tasty as I expected it to be.

Much like Patrick Swayze after his tutorial with Vincent Schiavelli, Marlowe can occasionally harness some corporeal powers to attack the bad guys or, as revealed in the greatest coda of all time, impregnate a porn star terrier mix. In other words, it all ends happy with Robby NOT going to the juvenile crazy house and Marlowe spreading his seed to give us more ghost cop dogs for eras to come.

High Points

KUMA!

Low Points

Aside from one of them being Parker Lewis, the villains in Cop Dog offer nary a note of being interesting. Perhaps my standards were raised to unreasonable heights following Craig Ferguson’s glorious turn in Lenny the Wonder Dog, but I don’t even remember what the bad guys actually wanted (other than gum)

Lessons Learned

Guys are handsome, not pretty

Sometimes people LEAVE and they DON’T come back

Contrary to popular belief, giving a dog that just got hit by a car water will not bring him back to life

After you have a nervous breakdown, you can see the world more clearly

Standard Animals Doing Human Stuff Trope Tally

New Kid In Town: X

Recent Dead or Divorced Parent: Check OBVIOUSLY

Montage: Check. And gag.

New Friendship: Check

Potentially Inappropriate ‘Friendship’ Between Child & Unrelated Adult (Human): X. 
Evil Corporate Enemy: X. Parker Lewis answers to no one.

Original Song: I wish.

Bully Comeuppance: X

Small Town Values: X

Back To Nature Moral: X. 

Overall Score: 3/10. But it has Kuma, so let’s adjust to 30,000,000,000,000,000,007/10 for more accuracy.

In Conclusion...

I'd like to thank all of you that hung around for this Animals Doing Human Stuff month, especially those rock stars who contributed their own reviews. I imagine most of my readers generally come here to learn about homicidal dolls and killer refrigerators, so I apologize if these past 30 days didn't quite satisfy your bloodlust. With a few years of blogging under my collar, I wanted to experiment a little more with some new types of cinema and as you can probably tell, the only things I enjoy nearly as much as horror is are good old fashioned terrible movies or, on the flip side, bizarrely misdirected gems that don't understand their audience. The ADHS genre is bursting with such treasures, some of which we got to ravage like a cat from outer space at an orgy, others that left us wanting, well, wanting more ghost cat. Ultimately, we had our montages, troubled kids, divorced/dead parents, bully comeuppances, and in a few glimmering moments, original songs that could possibly bring about world peace or destroy the music industry once and for all. It's a gamble really.

October begins tomorrow, and with that will come a full month exclusively devoted to the horror cinema you've come to expect from a blog about...you know...horror movies. So long as I keep that balance of candy corn and pumpkin beer at a manageable level, expect much.