Child's Play
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
There are a number of horror films with popular statuses that will get me in hot water if I talk about them. Well, enough people asked me to cover the original Child’s Play for my Halloween reviews, so I once again have to apologize. I don’t think very highly of this film at all. In fact, I don’t care for the franchise. I have always found the series to be an obnoxious mixture of comedy and horror in the kind of way that insists you must laugh and you must gasp. I’ve discussed the similarities between the two genres before and the ability to elicit a reaction out of the unsuspecting audience, but films like Child’s Play just miss the mark on what authentic laughs and scares are. For me, these kinds of mixed-genre films — specifically like Child’s Play — try to combine these two elements without any sense of striking gold in either area. It’s this murky middle ground that occasionally works (see Scream). Child’s Play tries to nail this secret formula, and to me it just doesn’t. I don’t find it funny or scary. I find it annoying.
Maybe back in the ‘80s I would find the premise of a sought after toy trying to kill more interesting. There was no internet. Most of what you discovered would be through the television or word-of-mouth mumblings. The hit toy of the season would plop on your radar, and you would know that it was a must-get commodity (as a child who wanted the toy, or as the guardian that was assumed to be buying it). To find out that this toy was evil and murderous is a twist on that mentality: one’s greatest desire turns out to be their worst nightmare. By now, that kind of trope is beyond old hat, and what its premise is trying to say just doesn’t work for me, especially because it’s a flimsy-enough backstory for a film meant to release a bevy of thrills and chills (and the prologue barely matters; it could be a film about an anthropomorphic badger that had its den squashed by the very environmentalists that sought to save its species that goes on a rampage, and the end result would be the same.
Child’s Play is meant to be humorous and scary, but it winds up just being irritating.
If none of the horror moments frighten me or the one-liners make me laugh or win me over, then I’m just not a Child’s Play kind of guy. I don’t get why so many iterations of this story have been made, or why there’s currently a television series that has just come out. To me, everything about Chucky (his voice, his jokes, his design) zaps me right in that part of my frontal lobe that throbs into migraine territory within microseconds. I don’t care about Chucky or why he is the way that he is (ooo, a serial killer’s soul gets trapped in the doll. Save it), or what he wills to do next. I don’t root for any protagonist that goes up against this thing because I want them to succeed, but because I want that excruciating pain to end. On that note, Child’s Play is perfect for Halloween, because it is for sure a torturous affair, and I’ll be damned if I will be caught dead watching it again. Maybe I’m no fun. Well, neither is Child’s Play.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.