Child's Play 3

Child's Play 3 title

Tag Line : Look Who's Stalking.

Child's Play 3 The film that spawned a hundred outrageous newspaper stories and resulted in even stricter video censorship laws in the UK, is in fact one of the unlikeliest examples of video nastiness you could expect to see.

Filmed virtually straight after part 2, this outing is actually set some 8 years later. Andy Barclay is now aged 16 (played this time by Justin Whalin) and has been remanded to a military academy, following several run-ins with the law.

In the meantime though, Play Pals toys have just decided to re-launch their range of "Good Guys" dolls and have just been revamping the old factory. Of course, you can guess who the first doll off the new production line is going to be!

Chucky decides to pay Andy a visit and so mails himself to the military school. However, he inadvertently ends up in the hands of young Cadet Tyler, who decides to keep Chucky for himself. So Chucky decides "what the hey!" and so tries to take take over young Tyler's body instead.

The rest of the film is spent with Andy trying to stop Chucky from possessing Tyler and showing us the brutality of Military boot camps. Andy, Tyler and Chucky have several run-ins before having a final showdown at a fun-fair, where Chucky comes a cropper in the ghost train.

There are some genuinely funny scene's where Chucky bumps off several senior officers, exclaiming "Don't fuck with the Chuck". One of which being the camps barber, played by Andrew Robinson. There's also a very funny battle scene where the cadets are playing war games with paint pellets, except that Chucky goes and changes the rifle ammo to live bullets which makes things kind of interesting.

Released direct-to-video here in the UK, this film is alright as far as sequels go but on the whole is about on par with part 2. Pay no attention to the adverse publicity that surrounded this film after its UK release in 1993. This movie is a dam sight tamer than most other horror movies that have come out before or since.

Overall Marks : 6/10.

Other Information.

Alternate tag lines, "There comes a time to put away childhood things, but some things won't stay put", "Chucky goes Ballistic", "Chucky has a new playmate".
Justin Whalin, who takes over the role of Andy Barclay, had previously starred in the Dirty Harry movie, "The Dead Pool". He has also starred in the murder spoof "Serial Mom", alongside Kathleen Turner.
Andrew Robinson who plays Sergeant Botnick the Army Barber, also starred in the first "Dirty Harry" film, playing the Scorpio killer. He has also appeared in numerous horror and fantasy films and TV series, including "Hellraiser", "Pumpkinhead 2" and "Trancers 3". But he is probably best known for his role as "Garak" the Cardassian tailor from "Star Trek - Deep Space Nine".
The film proved to be only a moderate success, grossing just over $14.9million in the USA.
As with part 2, there where several scenes cut from original version that appeared in the USA TV network's version. These included, additional dialogue with the company boss and his assistant at the beginning. Andy talking with Tyler on the bus taking them to Military school and another scene where they're chatting outside Tyler's room. Andy and Whitehurst chatting before parade, and again after they've got their hair cut. There's also a scene where Shelton finds Andy and DeSilva kissing in the woods during the wargames and an additional scene of Andy in class after the garbage man gets crushed.
This film received a lot of adverse publicity in the UK back in 1993, after the ever vigilant gutter press FALSELY tried to link the movie to a couple of child murders. Although these wild accusations proved to be completely unfounded the distributors, CIC video, decided to withdraw the film from circulation along with Child's Play 2, and cancelled it's proposed sell-through release. The film was never banned, but remained unavailable until 2002 as the distributors chose not to re-issue it until then. Click HERE to find out what all the fuss was about.