I never watched these movies as a kid, but I have vivid memories of Child’s Play 1-3 VHS covers in rental stores as a kid.
I only watched this movie about 15 years ago, and that was because I enjoyed Tom Holland’s Fright Night.
I have not seen any of the sequels until now.
Maybe it is because of how fantastical the later movies get, or being raised by a single parent, but what stuck out about the original film is the way it grounds you in the POV of this family unit.
Andy’s introductory scene is so good at just making him a kid, particularly in the way the camera stays on the child’s messy efforts to make his mother breakfast: burning the toast, spilling the juice, flooding the cereal bowl.
One of the tensest scenes in the movie is the brief sequence of Andy carrying the tray into his mother’s room, intercutting the food going everywhere with his small feet tripping over each other.
These scenes give a sense of realism but also a sense of stakes. This is just an ordinary kid with an ordinary mother.
The film does not spend a lot of time going over the family’s backstory, and it does not need to.
The focus on the economics of being a single mother - having to stay at work; the kid who has to learn how to take public transport around the city - even before Chucky shows up, there is a precariousness to the family that raises the stakes.
It also feels like the film lifting a middle finger to the family values of the eighties, and horror thrillers of this kind. Not just slasher movies, but more straightforward thrillers like Fatal Attraction or The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.
There are so many variations of this horror scenario where the victims would be a conventional nuclear family. Instead it is a single woman and her son struggling to find anyone who will believe or help them.
As the film’s anchor, Andy’s mother Karen, Catherine Hicks is fantastic. It is a tough role - playing a mother torn over whether to believe her son is a murderer - and she plays it without mannerism or overwrought emotion.
What helped sell her relationship with Andy is the sense of strain, the occasional moments when she cannot keep the mask up and snaps at him. She feels real. It is too bad her character was not brought back.
Chris Sarandon is well cast as the cop - he is invested in the case but he is not presented as a hero. He’s an asshole who does not believe Karen until he is almost killed - and when he does help, he never tells them what caused his change of heart (not that we need the exposition, but it feels character-based; he is too proud to admit he is wrong).
And finally Brad Dourif. While we get a few moments of the real man at the start, this performance is all about the voice. What a voice - the way he can go from trembling falsetto to a low bellow - it is almost like he is naturally caught between adolescence and adulthood.
The tension between the adult and the child, innocence and knowledge, a single parent playing mother and father - there is a duality to Child’s Play that would continue to play out through the sequels, as writer Don Mancini would continue to mine the story of Chucky and his growing brood.
But we shall leave that to another review…
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