Bride of Chucky (Childs Play 4)

Bride of Chucky title

Tag line : Chucky gets Lucky.

Bride of Chucky : (Child's Play 4) The moment I heard the Rob Zombie's opening song "Living Dead Girl", I knew I was going to love this movie . This, the fourth in the "Childs Play" series, sees the return of Brad Douriff as Chucky's voice and introduces Jennifer Tilly as Chucky's new "Doll" Tiffany.

In this, Tiffany, the former girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray (Chucky), manages to acquire the old "Good Guys" doll that his soul took over. After stitching him back together and using a little help from her "Voodoo for Dummies" manual, he is resurrected once again into the body of the doll.

Unfortunately, they have a bit of a falling out session and she refuses to help him find a new host body for him to take over. So Chucky subsequently kills her, then resurrects her into the body of another doll so that she is forced to help him.

This poses one slight problem though. In order to transfer into new host bodies they need to recover Chucky's amulet necklace, which is buried with his body in the next county. How do you get there when you're a doll?

Being a resourceful type, Chucky concocts a plan to recover the necklace by conning Tiffany's next door neighbour into delivering them to the cemetery keepers house. Of course, what follows is a trail of blood and carnage, as the young lad who's taking them across state lines is also eloping with his girlfriend, the niece of the local police chief (John Ritter), and they run into a whole lot of trouble as Chucky and Tiffany proceed to start bumping off everybody who gets in their way. Leaving a mysterious trail of corpses in the unsuspecting couples wake.

By far, this is the best in the "Childs Play" series since the first film. There have been obvious efforts made to update the franchise, and bring the series in line with the 90's style of "Scream era" horror. The killings are on fine form, there's some hilarious gags in it, and the soundtrack is all by Heavy Metal / Hard rock artist's. I recommend it wholeheartedly, even though parts 2 & 3 sucked.

Best line : Chucky, having killed a cop by firing a load of nails into his head, exclaims "Hmmm now why does this guys face look familiar?"

Overall marks : 7/10

Other Information.

Alternate tag lines "The couple that slays together, stays together", "The Honeymoon's gonna be a killer", "This time Chucky has a playmate all of his own", "This time there's more to fear".
There's a great Heavy Metal/Hard Rock soundtrack album of this film currently available, featuring "Slayer", "White zombie", "Type O negative" and "Motorhead" to name but a few. Unfortunately though, the intro song - Living Dead Girl - by Rob Zombie does not appear on it for some strange reason, so if you want to listen to that one you'll have to buy Rob Zombie's own album "Hellbilly Deluxe" (Yes I'm sure it's a marketing scam, but both are excellent albums, Believe me!).
The US poster was a parody of the poster for "Scream 2".
Jennifer Tilly is probably best known for her role in the comedy film "The Trueman Show", for which she received an Oscar nomination.
Tiffany's Line "We belong dead" was a direct quote from the film "Bride of Frankenstein".
John Ritter is probably best known for his roles in comedy films, in particular "Problem Child" in which he had to deal with another pint sized menace.
Alexis Arquette's character, Damian Baylock, was a reference to the film "The Omen", in which the central character "Damien" had an evil nanny called "Mrs Baylock".
Apparently Universal studio's where a little reluctant to release Bride of Chucky in the UK, either because of lack of interest, or because of the fuss kicked up about Childs Play 3 being (FALSELY) linked to a couple of murders over here. In the end it was released by a independent distributors "Metrodome".
The date on Tiffany's newspaper clippings at the beginning of the movie and the date of death on Charles Lee Ray's tombstone is 9 November 1988. This was the original US release date of the first Child's Play movie.
When Chucky killed Chief Kincaid (John Ritter) he was originally going to say "Sorry Jack, threes a crowd" which was a reference to the US TV show "Three's Company" in which Ritter also starred. However, the director decided to leave this out of the final cut as he felt it was too corny.
A fifth film was planned, entitled "The Seed of Chucky". However, Universal studios pulled the plug on this as they decided they didn't want to make horror films any more. Kind of hypocritical seeing as it was thanks to horror films that enabled them to build the studios in the first place. The film eventually got the go ahead in 2003 after being picked up by Focus studios, who are a subsidiary of Universal.