This three-movie weekend horror recap includes one horror comedy that lived up to expectations, one that was pitched as a comedy but didn't work in that regard, and one, just for good measure, that isn't a horror comedy, but scared the shit out of me four months ago when I first watched it, so I thought I would show it to my wife.
You only get posters for the first two, because I've already written about the third movie and three movie posters is just too much.
My Friday night double feature was made possible by two movies under 90 minutes long. Unfortunately, I did get tired enough by the end that I had to watch the last ten minutes of the second one after 2 a.m.
Bride of Chucky was one of the unseen horror comedies I might have been able to produce before this series started without the benefit of consulting any lists. The Next Picture Show podcast mentioned it in relationship to M3GAN when they talked about that movie earlier this year, though I only listened to the podcast relatively recently since it took me until April to see M3GAN. I knew that this was considered to be the film where the Child's Play series took a definitive, intentional turn towards comedy -- so I didn't worry so much that I'd be seeing these movies out of sequence, which I usually considered a no-no. I saw the original movie back at the time -- and didn't like it very much, if my subsequent Letterboxd star ratings and placing on Flickchart are an accurate reflection of my feelings -- but didn't see Child's Play 2 or Child's Play 3, the third coming out a mere eight months after the second in 1991.
The now poorly received series then went into hibernation for seven years, surely convincing most people they had stopped after a trilogy now that the limited initial love for these movies had dissipated. But someone -- writer Don Mancini, director Ronny Yu -- decided it was time to inject a little life into the series and into that doll that was inhabited by the soul of a serial killer, and they came back with what I can only imagine is the best Chucky movie anyone will ever make. (Though I did quite like the 2019 reboot.)
There isn't a moment of doubt that Bride of Chucky is both self-aware and in on the joke. The evidence locker where this murderous doll has been lying in pieces (presumably his fate at the end of Child's Play 3) also contains Jason Voorhees' hockey mask, Michael Meyers' Shatner mask and Freddy Krueger's knife fingers. The release of Scream two years earlier was probably the dividing line that allowed Mancini and Yu to go there, though there's no Ghostface mask -- too recent.
Jennifer Tilly comes in soon after and vamps gloriously, not because she's overdoing it but because a certain vamping quality is built into her performance style. We learn her character, Tiffany, was the girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray at the time he was killed and sucked into the body of the doll, so she's the one who engineers the theft of the doll from the evidence locker so she can extract his soul back into a body. However, she gets mad at the revived doll when she learns Ray never actually planned to propose to her back at that time, and laughs at the mere suggestion. (The ring she thought was an engagement ring was actually booty from a robbery.) So she locks him in a cage and buys a lookalike female doll in a bridal gown, mostly to taunt him as she figures out how she's going to continue to make his life hell. It actually goes the other way around when a bathtub electrocution consigns her soul to the new doll.
Having not seen enough previous or subsequent Child's Play movies to fully have a basis for comparison, I suspect the main way this registers as a comedy is the dialogue and line deliveries given these two characters, and the way they bicker. In order to preserve what's scary about a doll like the original Chucky, you can't give him too much dialogue, and the dialogue you do give him has to be consistently menacing. By giving these two characters a lot of time on screen just by themselves, you have to delve into purposefully banal exchanges that are just funny because of the disconnect between what they're saying and their little murderous doll faces. Effectively one of these two characters is, or both are, the protagonist of this film, whereas the other films would have been told from the perspective of a human.
Oh there are humans here, too -- Katherine Heigl, surprisingly, and John Ritter, plus some other actors who were new to me. (Though Ritter doesn't last too long and his death involves another humorous allusion to a stalwart horror franchise.) But we are interested most in the doll dynamics and they are consistently played for maximum possible laughs -- though not dumb laughs. (There's a scene where Chucky is using a Speak and Spell in his cage and has to spell "woman." He spells it "B-I-T-C-H," and the Speak and Spell corrects him on the spelling. This is actually a smart undermining of and poking fun at his toxic masculinity, since both Tiffany and the Speak and Spell are thwarting him.)
In fact, I was surprised at how much intelligence went into making this movie. Yu came out of Hong Kong cinema and has some credibility as a filmmaker, which shows up here on multiple occasions. Can you believe there would be split diopter shot in Bride of Chucky? That's where a split lens is used to allow both the foreground and the background to be in focus simultaneously. Overall I was just surprised at how good this movie looked, especially since I thought Idle Hands (shot a year later) looked so crappy. It turns out it wasn't just that movies made in the late 1990s looked bad.
I could go on about the joys of Bride of Chucky, but I have two other movies to get to.
It may have been too much to expect a movie made in 1982 also to be self-aware as a horror movie and exist in the realm of comedy, but I was led to believe The Slumber Party Massacre might be that movie. It made it onto at least one of the lists I consulted, and it was a title I was aware of just because of its B-movie pulpiness.
As I began watching, though, I quickly concluded that if it was included on lists of horror comedies, that was because someone found its technique worth of ridicule. Alas, The Slumber Party Massacre had to be a lot worse than it was to fall into the category of "so bad it's good."
This is a classic example of the horror movie's sale of female flesh to its prospective audiences. That poster is a rather brazen admission of that agenda. At a slumber party, of course teenage girls get semi-naked (or fully naked) and have pillow fights, right?
In fact, the gratuitous nudity in some of the earlier scenes that take place in a high school locker room shower are exactly the types of things no filmmaker could get away with today. The camera goes up and down the naked bodies of the showering girls, with no other purpose than to reveal their flesh to the audiences. Imagine my surprise that the film was directed by a woman, Amy Jones -- likely with explicit instructions from a lot of men who knew what this movie had to contain for audiences to buy tickets.
The killer is an escaped convict who gets his hands on a drill. I did find there to be something sort of funny about how the film doesn't do anything to shroud his identity in the sort of mystery that is necessary to add extra menace to his character. No, when we see him, it's just some ordinary, perhaps slightly mean-looking guy without a mask or anything other means of preventing people from seeing his face and identifying him in a police lineup later on. (The mask has a practical purpose in addition to making the killer more terrifying.)
A number of characters gets sliced up by the drill in ways that are rarely imaginative enough to remember, but never incompetent enough or with poor enough effects to cause laughter. If you were expecting poor acting to push this into the realm of comedy, you'll be disappointed there too, as these are competent enough professional actors. The writing is a bit of a disappointment, too, in that it is perfectly passable.
I felt like a movie like this would get either a Bride of Chucky-esque four stars on Letterboxd, or one star because it would be so terrible. The two stars I gave it were an indication of it disappointing in either direction and just being a bland, mediocre horror movie rather than a delight -- for either of the possible reasons it could have been a delight.
The last movie I am talking about today is Skinamarink, which I watched back in April and then tried to watch again Saturday night with my wife.
I say "tried" because she didn't last the whole movie. She did last long enough that I thought she would have overcome the initial barrier to entry, which would mean she'd be on board for the whole thing. Alas, she expired after 52 minutes, acknowledging that it was a good movie but that it was more creepy than scary, and that its slow pace meant she'd be asleep after watching ten more minutes -- so that would mean she wouldn't see it anyway.
I applaud her on the effort. She doesn't watch a lot of movies these days, and Skinamarink demands a lot of its viewers. There is almost no plot. We experience a haunting in a house seen almost exclusively from weird, canted angles, lit by sickly lamp light or the light of a television, where it is always night and where the images are captured through the fuzzy and grainy technology of a 1995 camcorder. Only once do you see the face of any of the four characters, only two of whom make any significant appearance. The creepy things that happen -- and there are plenty, eventually -- don't really start to gain in intensity until the second half of the movie, before which you are left entirely to imagine that something might be about to scare the crap out of you, some not-quite-seen thing moving in the grainy black. In fact, my wife was less than five minutes away from something that might have kept her involved until the end, but really, she probably just wanted to get to her own Saturday night viewing, and I can't blame her. She did try, and knowing the type of movie it was, I had given her permission to bail before we even started. I thought making that explicit was the least I could do, given her willingness to trust me on a movie she hadn't heard of and knew nothing about.
The anticipation of horrors to come certainly sustained me, even on a second viewing, as this environment tingled my spine throughout, even though I knew the approximate intervals at which the conventionally scary things would happen. Even those conventionally scary things are minimalist in nature, which I think only makes them more effective than some banal jump scare. The fact that I am getting chills even as a write about Skinamarink is a good indication of the sort of headspace this movie creates. I continue to find it a singular accomplishment in horror. Though now that I've watched it twice in just more than four months, I'll probably wait a couple years before a third viewing ... time enough to forget some of the things I know about it and again find myself in a constant state of anticipation and terror.
It's possible I will watch one more horror comedy on either Sunday or Monday night, but if not, it's certainly been a good theme this month. On Halloween itself, my wife and I plan to watch this year's horror movie Talk to Me, which neither of us has seen -- and which she should watch in its entirety, since it has her full buy-in.
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