Living With Chucky
It was the second film produced from a script written by Don Mancini, a film student of UCLA, Cellar Dweller having faded into obscurity but Child’s Play having achieved considerably more success when released nine months later in November of 1988, a “killer doll” horror movie which played well to the Christmas crowds hunting for toys to keep their demanding children happy.
Mancini having written all six sequels released over the following three decades and directed the final three, Seed of Chucky, Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky, they are revisited in Living with Chucky, written and directed by Kyra Gardner, daughter of Tony Gardner, the special effects designer and puppeteer whose “small army of technicians” has embodied Chucky and his family in the later films.
The history of sinister dolls in cinema and television well established, Dead of Night, The Twilight Zone’s Living Doll, Devil Doll and Magic, Mancini’s script, originally titled Batteries Not Included then later Blood Buddy, had initially been passed over by producer David Kirschner but he became interested after reading a book of similar material, the concurrent Cabbage Patch Doll craze making the premise topical and so marketable.
Interviewing Mancini, Kirschner, Gardner, Brad Dourif who played serial killer Charles Lee Ray, shot by police but whose spirit inhabited “Good Guy” doll Chucky, Alex Vincent whose young Andy first received Chucky, Jennifer Tilly, Billy Boyd and Fiona Dourif who played key roles in the later films, the picture is one of great enthusiasm and kinship, children who have grown up in an extended second family in a series which was consciously inclusive, with a single parent family and gay, transgender and disabled characters.
Living with Chucky shot as the Chucky television series was in production but not yet aired, the wider context of the films is sidestepped, the third particularly controversial in Britain where it was tangentially blamed for a copycat killing, the approach celebratory rather than critical, the director including herself in the later segments and any impartiality superceded by glee and a maudlin soundtrack, more akin to a promotional DVD extra than a true examination.
The films neatly synopsised as far as Cult of Chucky, there are interesting anecdotes, the deceased protagonist named for three famous killers, James Earl Ray, Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Manson, and particularly the footage of what goes on behind the scenes to create the illusion of Chucky, but while entertaining the totality feels somewhat superficial, Living with Chucky an unconventional lifestyle but apparently one filled with camaraderie and joy.
Living With Chucky is streaming on the Arrow platform now
