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Give Seed of Chucky credit for embracing the increasing absurdity of the franchise -- even if the end results really aren't all that funny or entertaining.Read critic reviews
Watch Seed of Chucky with a subscription on Peacock, rent on Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, or buy on Vudu, Amazon Prime Video.
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Seed of Chucky videos
Movieclips: Best of Chucky
15:51
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Tiffany Guts Redman
CLIP 2:58
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Glen or Glenda
CLIP 2:50
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - A Voodoo Pregnancy
CLIP 2:38
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - The End of the Family
CLIP 3:14
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Father Son Bonding
CLIP 1:36
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Chucky Meets His Son
CLIP 2:40
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Oops, I Did it Again
CLIP 1:20
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Glen Kills
CLIP 2:07
Seed of Chucky: Official Clip - Killing is an Addiction
Chucky stars in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Chucky (left) and Jennifer Tilly (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Tiffany (left) and Chucky (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Tiffany (left), Jennifer Tilly (center) and Chucky (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.John Waters (left) and Chucky (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Redman (left), Jennifer Tilly (center) and Tiffany (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Jennifer Tilly (left) and Hannah Spearritt (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Chucky stars in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Redman (left) and Chucky (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Jennifer Tilly (left) and Don Mancini (right) on the set of Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Jennifer Tilly (left), Chucky (center) and Tiffany (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Jennifer Tilly (left) and Redman (right) star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Jennifer Tilly and Glen star in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.Chucky stars in Don Mancini's SEED OF CHUCKY, a Rogue Pictures release.
Gentle Glen (Billy Boyd) is a ventriloquist's dummy, the offspring of evil doll Chucky (Brad Dourif) and his doll bride (Jennifer Tilly), both of whom are now deceased. When the orphaned Glen hears that a film is being made about his parents, he goes to Hollywood and resurrects them in an attempt to get to know them better. He is horrified when Chucky and his lover embark on a new killing spree, and Chucky is equally horrified that his son has no taste for evil.
This movie is freaking insane. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but it's consistently nuts. Wildly meta and painfully self-aware, it's also just plain weird. Honestly, I was here for most its weirdness, especially when it came to paparazzi John Waters who is an absolute delight. What doesn't quite work for me is the titular "seed" of Chucky and Tiffany. He's actually quite timid and nice in opposition to his parents, and while that's a cute idea for a second, it's just not enough to sustain a movie. He's a decent character, but not a great one. I don't know, this movie is just bonkers, but I kinda' liked it. Definitely not the best of the Chucky films, but still fun.
A couple of the Child's Play movies delve into the comedy genre, but Seed of Chucky is the only one that leans into it fully. It's not a funny horror film, it's a comedy with some blood in it. Where the past two movies dip their toe into comedy, Seed of Chucky is a comedy, and that complete dedication to a genre pays off. It's not great, but it works.
Super Reviewer
Oct 16, 2014
Horrible in every way, Seed of Chucky is an atrociously awful piece of garbage. While the meta humor and jokiness worked in the last film, here it's completely out of control. The script is incredibly lazy and makes no kind of sense at all. Worse still is Jennifer Tilly's ridiculously idiotic performance as herself. Indescribably bad, Seed of Chucky is just so damn stupid that there's no fun in any of it.
Super Reviewer
Jul 06, 2014
Horror franchises are invariably subject to the law of diminishing returns. The original Nightmare on Elm Street, Hallowe'en or Friday the 13th were so definitive in their own ways that any sequel couldn't hope to improve upon them, aside from addressing certain technical issues. Even with partial returns to form along the way, these sequels inevitably ended up retreading old ground, even in franchises that didn't start from the top.
The Child's Play franchise seemed to have run its course when Child's Play 3 went straight-to-video, only for Ronny Yu's Bride of Chucky to give it a new lease of life. By abandoning outright horror in favour of self-aware, postmodern horror-comedy, the series successfully embraced its goofier elements and turned them into something disturbingly memorable. Seed of Chucky attempts to carry on where Bride left off, but is far less successful, being ill-thought out and poorly directed.
Playing the postmodern game is a gamble in any genre. Deliberately deconstructing a story, or drawing attention to the artificiality of a given situation, can have the effect of undermining the audience's emotional attachment. The horror genre, like fantasy and sci-fi, relies heavily on the suspension of disbelief: without an audience investing in the characters and their situation, a horror film cannot be scary.
On a narrative level, Seed of Chucky is trying very hard to be Wes Craven's New Nightmare, one of the best instalments of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Craven's meta-horror explored the boundaries between the characters and the actors that played them, nodding toward the films' often fanatical fanbase and poking fun at the absurdities of the film industry. While not as scary as the original, it managed to be both a successful postmodern exercise and a compelling horror movie in its own right.
The biggest problem facing Seed of Chucky is that Don Mancini is no Wes Craven. While his writing skills are not in doubt (at least on the first Child's Play film), he does not have the directorial skill to pull off something so self-referential. Where Craven directed with intelligence, giving the audience both gore and clever subtext, Mancini is content to go for something much more basic and yet pass it off as being clever. The film isn't pretentious in this regard per se, but it makes disappointingly little out of both its premise and material.
There's always a certain amount of pleasure to be mined from actors playing themselves and taking the mickey. Jennifer Tilly has a lot of screen presence, and film fans will nod approvingly at all the references to Bound (her break-out role with the pre-Matrix Wachowskis). But once the basic gag is out of the way - Tilly is a fading actress who 'dolls herself up' to get a part - the film keeps repeating itself until the concept is neither funny or interesting anymore.
Likewise, many of the horror nods in Seed of Chucky are underused. John Waters is a widely respected figure in cult film circles, and casting the director of Pink Flamingos as a seedy paparatso is a nice touch. But his character doesn't get to do much that is endearing or appealing beyond the confines of the initial joke. It's very much a one-joke role, with Waters quickly mining it for all its worth and then spending the rest of his screen time looking confused.
Seed of Chucky isn't all that scary either, though that isn't entirely surprising. The Child's Play series was never an out-and-out frightener, with even the first and best instalment having goofy tendencies and a pretty silly set-up. But while Bride of Chucky made its humour dark enough to give the title character some threat, Seed of Chucky is completely ramshackle, with its few scary moments not being properly supported by the surrounding plot.
Gorehounds will probably find something to enjoy in the numerous grissly death scenes, which are technically accomplished from a props and make-up perspective. The deaths vary in their level of comedic inventiveness, with the disembowling at the dinner table probably being the most memorable. But as far as suspense or terror is concerned, there's nothing in Seed of Chucky which comes together; the horrific moments are sporadic and don't escalate in any particularly successful fashion.
The comedy of Seed of Chucky is equally hit-and-miss. On top of its botched self-awareness, many of the character jokes are laboured. The whole discussion about Glen's gender quickly becomes tired, with the Ed Wood reference being run into the ground and the pay-off with Glen's cross-dressing being unsatisfying. The running jokes about Glen weeing himself through fear are better than the similar gags in Garbage Pail Kids, but that's about as far from a ringing endorsement as one can get.
Most of the funny moments come from the ridiculous nature of a given situation. The film does go the whole hog when it comes to Chucky and Tiffany's preposterous plan to regain human form, particularly when it comes to getting Tilly pregnant. Brad Dourif has always done black comedy very well, as evidenced through his subsequent work with Werner Herzog. And having never shared a scene together in The Lord of the Rings (save in the extended cut of The Return of the King), it's nice to see him and Billy Boyd interacting here.
For all its funny moments, however, Seed of Chucky never becomes any more than a collection of poorly-assembled bits. It never gets to grips with its storyline beyond what is needed for a given scene to pay off, nor can it really decide whether it wants to satirise the film business or just use it as a plot device. There have been many worse horror films and worse films about the film businesses, but there are few horror-comedies which are this actively episodic.
The film also comes up short from a visual standpoint. Bride of Chucky was shot by Peter Pau, who went on to win an Oscar for his work on the brilliant Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He retained many of the signature touches of Child's Play while bringing a more tongue-in-cheek sensibility to the lighting. This film, on the other hand, is lensed by Vernon Layton, who shot the equally disappointing Blackball, featuring Paul Kaye and Johnny Vegas.
Like Blackball, Seed of Chucky has a tacky feel to it which works against Mancini's efforts to make us like the characters. The colour palette is far too plastic and glossy to be a proper black comedy or horror film, with the choice of colours and angles lending themselves more to American Pie or the Wayans brothers. Put simply, it feels cheap, and looks far too mainstream to cut it as a proper Chucky movie.
Seed of Chucky is a disappointing sequel which is neither funny nor scary enough to hold a candle to its predecessor. For all the moments which produce a shudder from the gore or a snigger from the jokes, it ultimately never makes as much of its premise as it really should. It's not an unmitigated disaster, and there are many worse horror sequels, but it will leave both fans and newcomers feeling short-changed.
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