My Buddi

After more than 10 years of writing about horror old and new, I hope it's clear to my loyal readers that I have no issues at all with the idea of film remakes. They're a staple of storytelling, from Eve and Pandora to Emma and Clueless. Yes, when you make something as awful as 2009's It's Alive, I'll complain about the details, but the actual concept of re-adapting a previous property is never the problem in itself.

So why, you might ask, did Emily boycott the Child's Play remake?

Boycott is a strong word, especially in the lazy age of the internet. I never made an oaktag sign or signed an online petition. I simply avoided any kind of support or even mention of a movie that I felt was a bit of an insult to a property I cherish.

Unlike almost every other franchise in cinema, Child's Play has always been distinctively Don Mancini's. The first film (one of the most personally influential films on my development as a horror fan) was his real break into the industry, and he remained the screenwriter for every installment (unheard of in horror or any genre). With Seed of Chucky (my personal favorite, probably because its campy sensibilities seem custom-made for my humor), Mancini moved into the director's chair and has been completely in control of Chucky's destiny from that point on. 

Until 2019.

Look, I understand any film studio dusting off its records to see which properties it still owns and can generate a few quick bucks. But unlike Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhes, Chucky was never Orion's; it was Don Mancini's. John Carpenter may have created Michael Meyers, but I'd bet a few packs of cigarettes that he never even saw most of its sequels. Mancini was (and thankfully, is still) working on a Chucky television series when Orion decided to throw the title at a new writer/director team. 

In a business that never pretends to value loyalty, it still felt dirty, and from my own sense of morality and diehard devotion to all things Don Mancini, I vowed to never give 2019's Child's Play any kind of money.

It's on Hulu now, and having heard many a critic or friend whose film opinions I deeply respect give the film hearty endorsements, I figured I could finally watch Child's Play without feeling too dirty.

Quick Plot: The Kaslan company is in high production on its first generation Buddi, an interactive doll that connects to all Kaslan-branded smart devices while also imprinting on your family. As you might imagine, conditions for the Vietnamese factory workforce are less than ideal. When one of the production workers is fired, he uses his last minutes on the job to disable the safety filters in a Buddi before it hits the US market (then promptly throws himself off a building).

Back in a Canadian city standing in for Chicago, young mother Karen is struggling to acclimate her moody son Andy to his new surroundings. When an unsatisfied customer returns a Buddi doll at the department store where she works, Karen gives Andy an early birthday present.

Naturally, said Buddi is that lucky product we saw in the prologue. It's not that Chucky is bad; he's just a sociopath with no sense of right or wrong. Throw on a little Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, bitch about your mom's jerk boyfriend, and before you know it, you're cutting class to cover up his decapitation. 

Kids really do have it harder in the era of smartphones.

Directed by Lars Klevberg from Tyler Burton Smith's fairly clever script, Child's Play was definitely more enjoyable than I was prepared to admit. The tone is consistently snarky without falling down the "is this movie insulting me for watching it?" wormhole so many self-aware films often just can't escape. Sure, Aubrey Plaza brings a very specific eye-rolling energy, but it works for both the character and overall feel. 

As for Chucky, it's hard not to be disappointed when one of our favorite villains of all time is reinterpreted in such a way that loses the very essence of your character. Mark Hammill is one of the most talented voice actors working today, but he's playing a robot, one that almost feels like a weird riff on autism. I don't mind the decision to cut the Charles Lee Ray persona in the name of a new story--in fact, I welcome a fresh take--but it just doesn't quite yield the full zany gold the setup promises.

That being said, I'd be lying if I said Child's Play 2019 wasn't a fun watch. At under 90 minutes, it wastes little time, and has a grand ol' time setting up elaborate, fairly ridiculous murders. I can't deny it points for having a good, mean time, even if I still feel wrong about enjoying it.

High Points

Bear McCreary has become the go-to composer for genre film and television over the last few years, and he delivers yet another quirky score that has its own point of view 

Low Points

While the final act's department store massacre is a joy, the actual ending has a certain rushed abruptness that feels lacking, even with a brief sequel-suggesting but low energy stinger

Lessons Learned

Efforts towards inclusivity onscreen should always be appreciated, but when watching a horror film, always remember that a character with a hearing aid exists solely for said hearing aid to eventually be used against him

Those who wait too long to take down their Christmas lights have no choice but to face the consequences of their inaction

As we learned from Furbies and Bratz, Americans sure do love their ugly dolls

Rent/Bury/Buy

Try as I may, I still feel wrong offering any kind of official endorsement about this Child's Play, but hey: it's fun. There's a point of view with some satirical thought behind it, and the movie manages to provide a few surprises along the way. 

It just...shouldn't have been made under its circumstance. 

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!

Look Who's Talking (with an Aussie accent): Ozzie

Here at the Doll’s House, few actresses have a track record as consistently awesome as Joan Collins. Examine:

Playing a victim to mind controlling ants with dreams of world domination in Empire of the Ants

Changing the world as a former exotic dancer who spurns the advances of an angry dwarf and subsequently gives birth to a demon baby with telepathic skills of murder in I Don't Want To Be Born

And now, the Divine Miss C gives it her all as a Cruella DeVille inspired toy company CEO intent on cloning a legendary talking koala bear and selling his offspring for the Christmas season for today's entry into Animals Doing Human Stuff.

God bless us, everyone.

Quick Plot: A middle-aged comic book writer named Charlie Foster (side note: Australian for beer) narrates the story of his young neighbor Justin’s adventures with Ozzie, an adorably terrifying koala bear who was taught to speak by his aboriginal friend Ngundi. How did Ngundi teach Ozzie this ability? The movie makes no attempt to learn, possibly because such an attempt would then have to explain the bizarre time frame wherein Joan Collins’ father learned about the magical creature in the 1970s, despite the fact that Ngundi is about 11 years old and the film is set present day 2006. Granted, Australia IS operating below the equator, and all this could be reasoned out as some sort of Lost-inspired time jumping without the bloody noses and symbolically named characters.

Or we could just forget our troubles with a talking koala bear that FARTS!

Yes, huzzah indeed

Because let’s face it: as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo taught us (or someone I know; not like I EVER turn the channel to TLC’s weirdly fascinating Toddlers & Tiaras spinoff, I mean NO WAY), farts are the universal language that everyone speaks.

But back to this:

Collins plays Maxine Happy (who in a crazy twist of irony, is anything but), a greedy corporate monster growing tired of her inherited company’s lagging profits. No wonder why she dispatches two Wet Bandit clones down under to bring her this mythical marsupial. After all, old fashioned Teddy Ruxpin knockoffs aren’t going to keep a gal in Elizabeth Taylor diamonds forever in THIS economy.

After successfully snagging Ozzie from his super secret (but really easy to find) village lair, the two goons fly home first class sitting next to Justin, an uncharming little boy whose hot mom is a flight attendant. A wacky switcheroo causes Justin to head home to New Zeal—er, America…yeah…America—with Ozzie in tow. Now he can finally find the courage to defeat the cruel school bully with a slow motion food fight in the school cafeteria!

Ozzie tries very hard to be a cute little film. Whether the titular character is adorable or horrifying depends, I imagine, on how one feels about animatronic creatures that talk but don’t blink. To me, they’re terrifying but I’ve also been known to fear caterpillars, My Buddy, holding babies, characters in movies that talk while driving, and Troll.

Shut up. It's discomforting

Truth be told, Ozzie ultimately has a cheerful good spirit about it. The film tries to incorporate Charlie’s comic drawings in a random manner that calls to mind the recent zombie thriller Exit To Humanity (and no, I’m not trying to show off the fact that I’m probably one of the few people alive that can somehow work Exit To Humanity into a review of a kids film about a talking koala bear), though where both are ambitious, neither really does much for either film. Disney’s The Kid actor Spencer Breslin gives it his all, even if he seems wildly miscast. It’s hard to ever knock a child actor who is, more so than his or her adult counterparts, so much more a victim or benefactor of good casting and direction. Breslin (Abigail’s big brother) doesn’t work in the role, but I’m far too nice a critic to put all that blame on a tweenager.

Maxine’s evil plan is strangely fascinating, especially once the details roll out. Her head scientist has been training koala bears to eat candy and snacks so as to make the toys much more sellable. That’s rather sad. Oh, and she has successfully ordered her Beakman-esque minion to limit Ozzie clones’ lifespan to two years, the perfect buying cycle for the toy marketplace. Throw in the fact that Ozzie WILL DIE WHEN CLONED, as mentioned several times during the kidnapping, and you have something rather unsettling.

But worry not, dear young readers, for Ozzie is filled with hijinks! Bad men fall off ladders! Bullies try to kill outcasts! A child responsibly dons a helmet before embarking upon a 5 minute long bike chase—complete with the token ‘honest local workers trying to hang up a street banner only to be thwarted and possibly left for dead’ trope—then steals a jet ski and rides on for ANOTHER 5 minutes in a sequence that’s weirdly reminiscent of a recent Louie episode.

Only without the helmet. Irresponsible Emmy nominees…

High Notes

As the poor man’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ralf Moeller gets the film’s best subplot in the part of an oafish goon who loves comic books above all things. It even has a fairly cute resolution

Low Notes

This is a film about a talking koala bear. So why does the talking koala bear seem to have less lines than just about everyone else onscreen?

Friends To The End

When making a children's film, the last thing you want audiences to say is "kinda like in Child's Play." I said that quite a few times watching Ozzie, mostly because:

-What does the original 'toy' Ozzie say to his child friends? Hi. My name is Ozzie. Will you be my friend?” A reminder: What does the original 'toy' Good Guy say to his owners? "Hi. I'm ____ And I'm your friend to the end."

-When Chuc--I mean, Ozzie ends up on a flight home to the "U.S.A.," he comes face to face with his toy likeness and proceeds to bury the stuffed animal in a duffel bag while he enjoys the fresh air with his new boy pal. Oh yeah, kind of like how in Child's Play 2, Chucky finds an innocent plastic Good Guy...and buries him in the backyard so that his boy pal is his alone

-This: 

and this:

Lessons Learned

Creative control is just a technicality

Koala bears dream in full color cartoons

Even the most remote and secret aboriginal village has fast Internet access

Also, boys who can teach koalas to speak

Bedtime for a typical 10 year old is 5PM

Whether you’re a perfectly trained mercenary or a band of fourth graders, few instruments are quite as confounding as the dreaded net

Montage Mania!

Strangely enough, said montage doesn’t involve the film’s talking koala bear. Nope, it’s just a rather gross cleaning-up-the-mess-my-pet-koala-bear-made-in-the-kitchen sequence, wherein Justin vacuums up popcorn, smears jelly back into the disgusting jar, and occasionally eats food left on the floor while a song about “cleaning up my room” plays too loud.

Soundtrack Strangeness

While it’s no blatant ripoff of Footloose, Ozzie does earn a few extra bites of eucalyptus by ending on an original song called, you know it, Ozzie. Sample lyrics (that I was able to understand:

Ozzie!

First lost then found

Ozzie!

Free and unbound

Ozzie!

You make me talk

Ozzie!

You taught me how to whirl (maybe: it got hard to hear amongst the harmony)

It hurts me sooooo

To let you goooooo

But you’re my friend

I know you’ll never end (?)

Sadly that’s all I got. But make no mistake: it’s totally going to be played at my wedding.

I know Justin's Middle Aged Best Friend! I applaud as well.

Standard Animals Doing Human Stuff Trope Checklist

New Kid In Town: X. Or Check. It SEEMED like he was new, so let’s just split the difference and say 1/2 point

Recent Dead Or Divorced Parent: Check

Montage: Check

New Friendship: Check

Potentially Inappropriate ‘Friendship’ Between Child & Unrelated Adult: Check

Evil Corporate Enemy: Check

Original Song: Check

Bully Comeuppance: Check

Small Town Values: X

Back to Nature Moral: Check

Overall Score: 8.5/10

We’ve got a formula! 

A-Paws-Meter

Depending on your taste, Ozzie is either an effective horror film, charming children’s adventure, boring 87 minutes of occasional crassness, or a dream come true. For those who have said, time and time again, why AREN’T there more films about koala bears making fake vomit sounds or kicking bad men in the groin? Ozzie is Citizen Kane with a cute accent. For anyone else, why are you still reading?