Child's Play (2019)

For years horror remakes were just such pieces of shit. They were just so utterly terrible and without benefit. They were dreaded by fans of the old films and loved by teenagers mostly. It’s been a few years since we were getting a bunch of them, but I guess the people behind this Child’s Play remake really took their time on purpose. This is actually pretty awesome.

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE AHEAD.

Director: Lars Klevberg

Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Hamill, Gabriel Bateman

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

I mean, Child’s Play was never, like, one of the all-time best horror films. The character was iconic, sure, and Brad Dourif was fun. But the movie was never on my shortlist with Texas Chainsaw or The Haunting or whatever. It was goofy schlock and it was good at what it did, and that was fine.

And I think it’s time to just go ahead and admit that the classics aren’t always infallible or always gonna be the best ever. There’s so much new stuff coming out all the time. Maybe not everything back then needs to be the best ever. How about we start being open to some of the newer films being as good as, or better than, the classics? It’ll happen eventually. The world keeps moving, art keeps coming out, it’s going to happen. So fuck it, Child’s Play 2019 is better than the original one. I’ll just start with that and hope others follow my lead.

And this one works because they were having fun with the silly concept. Aubrey Plaza as the mom is already fun, as her seething eye-rolls and sarcastic smiles add a lot to the whole thing. She plays it more straight as the film goes on but the weirdness of her acting makes it work. Just put her in everything. I guarantee that would make so many fucking movies better. Mark Hamill as Chucky is fun, especially if you remind yourself that this is also Luke Skywalker talking. Diversity is the key in life!

The big change is that, unlike the old one where Chucky was a devil-possessed voodoo doll, now he’s a Smart Toy that is built to act like a robot and can hook up to WiFi and stuff. I can’t be sure that the company in the movie didn’t intend to make a serial killer doll, but hey, there are weirder corporate decisions made all the time – look at the numerous cases where clothing companies decide to embrace blackface, for example. Making a murder doll isn’t that strange in comparison.

I will say Chucky’s new look in this movie is actively horrifying. Look at that thing – it looks like fucking devil spawn shit. It looks like a badly made wax doll that got left in a hot car for a week. It looks like what a blind serial killer would make if you gave him a lump of rotting clay and told him to try and mold a human face approximately.

The most unbelievable part of the film is that anybody would want to play with this even if it wasn't a serial killer.

So I guess whenever Andy expresses dislike for something – the cat, say, or his mom’s asshole new boyfriend – Chucky gets that ole murderin’ gleam in his eye and makes it happen. It’s totally predictable, but the fun factor is there. It’s gorier than I thought it would be – I didn’t think I’d see a skinned bloody skull in a Child’s Play remake, but there you go.

The movie pretty much goes as you expect, though the subplot where they have to get rid of the human face skin mask of Andy’s mom’s boyfriend that Chucky brought back to the house is a fucking trip. They end up having to wrap it up in gift-wrap paper and then Andy’s mom sees them. So they have to pretend to gift it to this old lady down the hall. Andy, then, has to get it back, doing so by befriending them and going to their place for dinner and then stealing the head back and bolting. Oh, you know, just normal kid problems.

Oh and there’s another guy who is some weirdo stalker who has cameras set up all over the building, using them to watch Aubrey Plaza take a shower. He finds Chucky in the garbage after Andy throws him away and does mad science experiments to bring him back. What is wrong with this movie? Everything in it is so gloriously insane. This guy, by the way, dies when Chucky dangles him over a table saw and cuts him in half. If a tiny talking doll can do this to you, you deserved it, sorry.

The climax is a wacky insane romp in the department store, where Chucky takes over the system and locks everyone inside as tiny toy drone planes begin to murder everyone! Woohoo! This is probably some kind of allegory for the current US geo political situation. The part where some of the other dolls turn evil, including one version of the doll that’s an anthropomorphic bear, only adds to the horror. Kids shouldn’t be playing with dolls – that’s my takeaway. Give ‘em an iPad and fuck it, just let their brain download into the fucking cloud. Who was asking for the anthropomorphic bear doll, by the way? Probably ought to get them on a watchlist. Fucking creepy shit.

Overall, the movie makes a strong case for Chucky being a good guy in this. For the bulk of the film he’s just protecting Andy – he kills that stupid fucking cat, and the mom’s boyfriend was an asshole anyway. He’s a valiant hero. Sure, the lines are blurred by his attempted genocide inside the department store. But who said any hero was perfect? Maybe the film is really pushing our expectations of heroism and making a real statement…

Or, maybe not. Who’s to say?

Images copyright of their original owners, I don't own them.

Ma (2019)

This has to be the most absurd shit I’ve seen in a while, even counting the John Waters film I saw last week (Desperate Living). Not that this is as full of genitalia and body mutilation and gross out stuff as that movie was – though there is some – but just the choices this movie makes are so goddamned weird.

Director: Tate Taylor

Starring: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers

IMDb

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE COMING UP.

This is an Octavia Spencer vehicle where she plays a small-town veterinarian who apparently loves hanging out with children so much that it drove her insane. I thought at some points, this could be genuinely profound, a revealing character study, maybe about small town living or what trauma does to you. But instead it just turned into a bunch of nonsense.

I guess it starts with a new girl in town character, Maggie, as she and her mom move back to some lame podunk Midwestern town. Her mom wears a skimpy outfit at a casino while Maggie makes friends with a bunch of hoodlums who do insane and groundbreaking things like hang out at gas stations and try to get adults to buy them booze. Watch out! These kids are ON THE EDGE!

They make friends with Spencer’s character Sue Anne, or ‘Ma,’ who invites them over to hang out and drink and smoke pot in her basement in the woods. Being dumb kids, I can see it. Though the part where Spencer’s character makes this one jock kid strip totally naked at gunpoint should’ve probably been more of a giveaway. But kids are so damn desensitized to everything now.

I guess there are a few decent scenes setting up the characters, and at first, Spencer’s character is legit kind of creepy as she goes through her sort of revenge game against these kids, who are the children of some assholes who wronged her in high school. Apparently once a long time ago, those kids tricked her into giving a blowjob in a janitor’s closet to some nerdy kid when she thought she was with the popular guy. 

That’s the only thing they show us as to why she turned out so fucked up. I hate to sound insensitive here. But the movie just makes such a bad case about her psyche and how she turned out crazy that it’s making me look like some kind of alt right incel douche here. Like goddammit. It’s not played for sympathy so much as just this cheap thing. There’s not a point where the movie reflects on why what happened to her was bad or what effects that would actually have. It’s just “blowjob closet rape scene = you turn into a crazy horror movie stalker 30 years later.” Somehow, I don’t think the American Psychological Journal is calling you back.

Ma also has a daughter of her own, Genie, who she makes believe is sick and keeps home from school a lot. Like that closet rape scene, this is another actually serious thing that the movie barely treats as such. It's child abuse. But it’s kind of glazed over and never given much any point in the story. But who needs that boring real life shit when we have a bunch of scenes of Octavia Spencer partying with hick teenagers???

The main character, Maggie, dates this one guy for a while, and a few kinda nice scenes happen, maybe almost approaching character development even. Though even that goes nowhere and amounts to nothing, much like the lives of the people living in the small town in the movie. Meanwhile, Spencer’s Ma character texts people a lot, too much even. OooOOOOOoooh! Scary? I dunno. I’ve had this happen in real life from weirdos I’d known online for a few months. Didn’t make me want to see a horror movie about it.

The problem with the movie going forward is that I doubt the writers remember what it was like to be a teenager. Maggie and her mom have this overblown fight about her going to Ma’s house to hang out, and it barely makes sense. Even though Maggie herself has been worried about going there for most of the movie, now she’s super mad about it and hurling insults at her mother! It’s a pretty brutal argument for this movie’s standards, and I’m pretty sure Maggie hasn’t even been this mad at the actual villains in the movie.

Maggie goes back over to Ma’s house to save her boyfriend, and they all get trapped down there as Ma predictably goes insane. Only, even the torture methods are off. Like she paints this black kid’s face white, sews a girl’s lips together and burns another kid just one time with an iron. That’s all she does to them. Then she wants a “picture” with them to replicate her own high school years, and at that point I was just like “oh, I get it now, this is really fucking stupid.”

Then, to make things even more bizarre, when Maggie has to go stab Ma in the back to save Genie, she shouts “I’m not my mother!” I guess because her mom had to move back to her hometown and take a shitty waitressing job? Was that the message this whole Godforsaken time?

This whole thing was just a mess, and the more I thought about it the worse it seemed. I liked Spencer’s acting and even the kids were good. But the story and script just made no real sense. Every “serious” plot thread was seemingly cast aside in favor of scenes of the characters drinking and partying. In fact, pretty sure that was the whole motive here, to have an excuse to drink and party and somehow get paid for it. In which case this movie is actually ingenious and I was wrong about all of this.

Image copyright of its original owners; I don't own it.