Child’s Play (2019)

” Introducing your new best friend.”

Henry Kaslan

There’s only a small handful of horror films that I enjoy, it’s not my favorite genera but I enjoy one every once and while. I also went into this movie fairly blind and not knowing what to expect, I haven’t seen any of the other Child’s Play films and decided to go into this reboot with fresh eyes as opposed to watching the original first so that way I wouldn’t be constantly comparing it. As I watched through my knees (I’m honestly really bad with horror films), I enjoyed this movie more than I thought I was going to.

From what I’ve been told about the original, this one doesn’t share much resemblance to it besides the title and a killer doll named Chucky stabbing people. In this version, Chucky is an A.I. designed to help and connect to home appliances (a super advanced “Alexa” if you will), and we follow Andy (Gabriel Bateman) and his new “Buddi” doll (Mark Hamill) as they grow and connect with each other. In a very E.T.-esk way, Andy and Chucky grow very close as they can easily relate to each other, Chucky is defective and was returned, while Andy is deaf and has trouble making friends. The acting by Gabriel Bateman was one of my favorite parts of the film, he did an awesome job, and Mark Hamill’s voice as Chucky I think worked very well. The slow build between the two sets up the horror and suspense that unfolds later on, and there was surprisingly some comedy along the way. The pacing of the build I thought was very well done, it didn’t jump straight into killing people like I was afraid it was going to, that’s the fault I have with most modern horror films is it jumps too quick into the action. Another thing I wasn’t expecting is they set up Chucky as a very sympathetic character, even though what he’s doing is very extremely wrong and horrific, you can’t help but feel bad for him whenever something happens.

My negatives are the dumb decisions that are made by characters in horror films, but I guess nothing exciting would happen if every character was the smartest person on the planet. It was also very gory, I’m not good with gore but I can’t blame it too much because what else should I have expected from an R-rating? Last but not least, as the build was really good, there’s a particular scene where gets very generic “watch out things are gonna kill you but they’re super easy to defeat” and it happens very fast and that’s when it kind of lost me. Shortly after that it was able to fortunately pick back up for a fairly creepy third act.

I enjoyed Child’s Play, but I probably won’t see it again mostly because it’s not my genera, if you really like horror I think you’ll enjoy this movie though. 7/10 is what Child’s Play is going to get from me, there was some truly scary moments in this (at least for me, I’m very weak apparently) that I kept thinking about as I tried to sleep and followed me into the next day. Which toy-based film are you planning on seeing this weekend? And if you saw Child’s Play, how’d you like it, and how would you compare it to the original?