So it was with great happiness that I noted recently before turning in that Child's Play has gone free on Amazon Prime Video. So I did what anyone in this situation would do: got buzzed on boxed wine* and messaged commentary to my fellow horror/scifi friends.
IJS, if you shoot a serial killer, and he vows eternal vengeance, then starts chanting, and a bolt of lightning strikes the toy store you're in, the proper response is to blow up the building, then soak what's left in gasoline, set it on fire, then blow it all up again.
Pretty self-explanatory. I'm a perennial skeptic of supernatural claims, but still, when one sees something clearly supernatural, one should react accordingly. Especially if the consequences for failing to do so could be that an immortal killer is going to have a blood feud against you. It reminds me of a line from my recent read, The Ball and the Cross, by the always-entertaining G. K. Chesterton:
When James Turnbull saw this he suddenly put out a hand and seemed to support himself on the strong shoulder of Madeleine Durand. Then after a moment's hesitation he put his other hand on the shoulder of MacIan. His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful. In many sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism. All his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact. But he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this--that he preferred a fact even to materialism.
Besides, the toy store just got struck by supernatural lighting, and there's a killer's body inside. You can totally cover up your Bolshevik Muppet act.
8yo [sic] rides around on the El during school hours, and no one comments? That's some hardcore free-range childhood.
We try to free-range our kids. These days our two girls spend most of their days riding bike at the parks near our house. They aren't trained not to talk to strangers, though they are trained not to go anywhere with them, nor to take anything from them. That last part is mostly about our oldest's peanut allergy, though.
But a 6-year-old boy rides around on the Chicago MTA all morning, on a weekday, gets off in a bad part of town, and no one thinks to maybe ask him where he's from? Really?
Then again, it is Chicago.
Okay, the kid gets committed for talking to the doll, and she keeps it?
I mean, what's her plan here? Give the doll back to the kid when he gets out of the hospital? Let's take the naturalistic explanation that the kid is just having a psychotic break. It was obviously associated with the doll, so maybe at least tossing it in the trash would be appropriate. Maybe?
Granted, if she had, the thing could have snuck up on her at its leisure and killed her in her sleep, so I guess it was a good thing she kept it close. Friends and enemies and all that.
Also, this kind of goes back to the first point. The kids claims the doll is alive. Sure, I can buy that you wouldn't normally believe that, but there were footprints of that size in the spilled flour on the counter where the friend was before falling to her death. If you'd listened to the kid, you would have seen the flour on the doll's shoes.
And once she's realized this, the proper response is overwhelming violence. By approaching the doll hesitantly, she telegraphs that she knows while giving it plenty of time to come up with a plan. Moments later, even after revealing its true nature, it plays dead (inanimate?) to get her close enough to attack. The smart move would have been to rush it, toss it in the fire, slam the spark cage down, and torch it. Right then and there. To borrow another phrase from classic literature, the slave Demetrius gives his master Marcellus some excellent advice in The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas:
"When one picks up a nettle, sir, one should not grasp it gently."
That said, cast iron ovaries on her for chasing after it.
She does deserve mad props for chasing after the thing after it nearly kills her.
I need a trench coat.
I've always wanted a trench coat. Probably from watching the X-Files growing up. There was that short phase after I watched The Boondock Saints where I wanted a pea coat.
This had to be an absolute riot to make.
I've always wanted to do practical effects for a schlocky movie. And also stunt work. Sadly, the closest I've gotten is being redshirted in a novel. /sigh
How did the couch not catch on fire?
One of my dad's stories from his time as a USAF medic on a domestic SAC base was of an airman admitted after falling asleep on a couch with a lit cigarette. It didn't end well. If an ember can (and often does) light up a couch, certainly a flaming plastic doll can. I'm gotten burning plastic stuck to my hand before. That [redacted]'s like napalm.
On the other hand, I suppose this was the days before CGI, so that was most likely a practical effect, and so there was a real couch that really got exposed to real flames and didn't light up. But somehow, I can't imagine that a financially struggling single mom has the money for high-end flame retardant furniture. Not to mention carpet. Maybe the husband's life insurance policy was that good, but then, why is she sweating the $100 for the doll?
Also, maybe she should have moved out of Chicago when he died. Money goes a lot further in rural setting, and it would have prevented this whole mess.
Maybe move one's head *away* from the door the knife is randomly coming through.
'nuff said
Just a reminder, "when you need it" is not the time to develop marksmanship.
I mean, cut her some slack. She has to shoot him in the heart to kill him. The average size of an adult human heart is 5" tall by 3.5" wide, or 17.5 square inches. If the heart is roughly proportional to overall size, then with a height of 29", Chucky's heart is 2.27x1.59" or approximately 3.59 square inches. That's roughly half the surface area of a credit card. And it's moving.
But the point still stands that having some more practice in would have helped tremendously. That or a shotgun.
Then again, she's in Chicago. Just knowing how to get one shot off and hitting with it is doing pretty good. Which brings me to the next observation:
Also, it is a cautionary tale of firearm maintenance.
The wounded detective gives her his ankle gun to go after Chucky. She gets a round off, hitting Chucky in the leg, but the gun jams before she can fire again. Now, obviously, the aforementioned training time would have been helpful, assuming she had spent some of it on practicing immediate action drills. And maybe she was limp-wristing the gun.
But I think a more likely explanation is that the detective probably didn't maintain his firearm properly. It's his ankle gun, after all. A small pistol that is meant to be carried often and fired seldom. It probably hasn't been cleaned in forever.
One of those animal control nooses-on-a-stick would certainly have been handy.
Chucky if far stronger than your average doll. He's able to stab a kitchen knife through an interior door. That said, when engaged in hand-to-hand combat, the protagonists repeatedly overpower him. He does appear to still be subject to standard physics. He's easily flung across entire rooms. His only kills are by ambush.
Most importantly, he does not appear to possess (ba-dum-bum) any shape shifting abilities that would allow him to lengthen his arms. This movie would have been very short if instead of the detective, the hero was the local dog catcher.
Or call LawDog.
I will say, I appreciate the 1980s main-characters-survive optimism. Refreshing change from 2000s everyone-dies nihilism.
Probably the biggest reason I gave up watching horror movies is the 21st century's obsession with "artistic" angsty endings where either everybody dies or if they don't, are subjugated into the evil they are fighting (looking at you, Midnight Meat Train). In the 20th century--with notable exceptions like the original Night of the Living Dead--at least some of the protagonists would overcome the antagonist. Sure, plenty of people would get killed, but there was always the final girl who would outsmart the killer and banish him.
I think I blame Shrek. Shrek made it cool to subvert norms, and now every film feels the need to. Which is stupid, because that just makes a new norm. So now, I'm looking forward to a new crop of films that subvert the subversion and once again...y'know, let the hero(es) win.
I just hope I don't have to wait until the 22nd century.
*Don't judge: it's been a rough year.
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