Bride of Chucky

Alternate titles : Child's Play 4

Tagline : "Chucky Gets Lucky"

The moment I heard Rob Zombie's "Living Dead Girl" playing across the opening credits, I knew I was going to love this movie. This, the fourth in the "Childs Play" series, sees  a former girlfriend of Charles (Chucky) Lee Ray , Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) acquiring the old "Good Guys" doll that his soul took over.

After stitching him back together and using a little help from her "Voodoo for Dummies" manual, he is resurrected once again into the body of the doll. But unfortunately, they have a bit of a falling out session and she refuses to help him find a new host body for him to take over. Notwithstanding, Chucky subsequently kills her, then resurrects her into the body of another doll so that she is forced to help him.

This presents one slight problem though. In order to transfer into new host bodies they need to recover Chucky's amulet necklace, which is buried with his body in the next county. Posing something of a logistical challenge for the two, as how do you get there when you're a doll?

Being a resourceful type, Chucky concocts a plan to recover the necklace by conning Tiffany's next door neighbour into delivering them to the cemetery keepers house. Of course, what follows is a trail of blood and carnage, as the young lad who's taking them across state lines is also eloping with his girlfriend, the niece of the local police chief (John Ritter), and they run into a whole lot of trouble as Chucky and Tiffany proceed to start bumping off everybody who gets in their way. Leaving a mysterious trail of corpses in the unsuspecting couples wake.

By far, this is the best in the "Childs Play" series since the first film. Obvious efforts were made to update the franchise, and bring it in line with the 90's style "Scream-era" horrors of the time. The killings are on fine form, there's some hilarious gags in it, and the soundtrack is all by Heavy Metal / Hard rock artist's. I recommend it wholeheartedly, even though parts 2 & 3 were decidedly lacklustre.

Best line : Chucky, having killed a cop by firing a load of nails into his head, exclaims "Hmmm now why does this guys face look familiar?".

Overall Marks : 7/10.

Terrifying Trivia

• Alternate tag lines "The couple that slays together, stays together", "The Honeymoon's gonna be a killer", "This time Chucky has a playmate all of his own", "This time there's more to fear".
• Tiffany's Line "We belong dead" was a direct quote from the film "Bride of Frankenstein".
• John Ritter is probably best known for his roles in comedy films, in particular "Problem Child" in which he had to deal with another pint sized menace.
• The US poster was a parody of the poster for "Scream 2".
• Alexis Arquette's character, Damian Baylock, was a reference to the film "The Omen", in which the central character Damien had an evil nanny called Mrs Baylock.
• The date on Tiffany's newspaper clippings at the beginning of the movie and the date of death on Charles Lee Ray's tombstone is 9 November 1988, which is the release date of the first Child's Play movie
• Universal studio's where a little reluctant to release Bride of Chucky in the UK, owing to the adverse publicity "Childs Play 3" received after being (FALSELY) linked to a couple of murders over here. In the end it was released by a independent distributors Metrodome.
• The date on Tiffany's newspaper clippings at the beginning of the movie and the date of death on Charles Lee Ray's tombstone is 9 November 1988. This was the original US release date of the first Child's Play movie.
• When Chucky killed Chief Kincaid (John Ritter) he was originally going to say "Sorry Jack, threes a crowd" which was a reference to the US TV show "Three's Company" in which Ritter also starred. However, the director decided to leave this out of the final cut as he felt it was too corny.

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