Reviews & Columns |
Reviews DVD TV on DVD Blu-ray 4K UHD International DVDs In Theaters Reviews by Studio Video Games Features Collector Series DVDs Easter Egg Database Interviews DVD Talk Radio Feature Articles Columns Anime Talk DVD Savant Horror DVDs The M.O.D. Squad Art House HD Talk Silent DVD
|
DVD Talk Forum |
|
Resources |
DVD Price Search Customer Service #'s RCE Info Links |
Columns
|
|
Seed of Chucky (Unrated and Fully Extended)
Universal // Unrated // June 7, 2005
List Price: $29.95 [Buy now and save at Deepdiscountdvd]
I know the Online DVD Reviewer label means I'm honor-bound to be elitist, dismissive, and smugly sarcastic, but I'll shatter those stereotypes and admit to being a long-time fan of the Child's Play movies, particularly Ronny Yu's Bride of Chucky. With six years having passed between sequels, Chucky creator Don Mancini steps into the director's chair to helm the follow-up to that 1998 black comedy. Don't think of Seed of Chucky as Child's Play 5. It's Bride of Chucky 2, picking up not only where the previous installment left off story-wise, but also sticking with its splatter-comedy tone. Sure, Blockbuster probably files it under "Horror", but Seed of Chucky might be the single funniest comedy I've seen so far this year.
Whatever happened to baby Chucky? Bride of Chucky ended with the nightmarish newborn stuck in the cemetary, surrounded by the lifeless bodies of his plastic-molded parents. Seed of Chucky picks up a few years later. Tiffany and Chucky have been reduced to urban legends, currently being immortalized in a Hollywood slasher inventively titled Chucky Goes Psycho. Junior, meanwhile, is the perpetually terrorized half of a British ventriloquist act (shades of Devil Doll!). Dubbed "Shitface", the gentle, gender-ambiguous kid (voiced by Billy Boyd) is plagued by violent nightmares, and the only hint he has of his lineage is the "Made in Japan" stamp on his hand that leads him to think he's the child of Yakuza assassins or something. He catches an Access Hollywood report on the Chucky Goes Psycho set and realizes that...hey, those are his parents on th' telly, so he escapes and makes his way to La-La Land. Using the mainstay voodoo amulet (the only real plot point carried over from any of the first three movies), Junior revives Chucky and Tiffany, and their killing spree kicks off before the scene's out.
Still determined to transfer their souls into living, fleshy repositories, Chucky and Tiffany decide to become Hollywood's newest power couple by taking over the bodies of Redman and Jennifer Tilly (both playing cariactures of themselves). Redman is a rapper Passion of the Christ-ing it up as a director, and Jennifer Tilly is striving to recapture something resembling fame after wading around in low-budget schlock for years. Anyway, Junior tries to eke out an identity, although without much of a wang to speak of, Junior can't decide if he/she/it should sign up as Glen or Glenda. Tiffany attempts to give up killing, and since she wasn't keen on her previous plastic pregnancy, she decides to impregnate Jennifer Tilly with voodoo-Chucky-seed from a turkey baster. Chucky, meanwhile, is too busy stabbing, torching, and melting everyone in doll's-arm's reach to really care much one way or the other. I could keep rattling off this sort of stuff, but you get the general idea. It's not your standard stalk-and-slash formula.
One scene in Seed of Chucky has a photographer played by John Waters perched outside Jennifer Tilly's house, snapping photos as Chucky is upstairs jerking off to an issue of Fangoria while Tiffany is hiding behind a couch in the living room, ready to bludgeon Tilly as she's seducing rapper-turned-director Redman in the hopes of landing a role as the Virgin Mary in his Biblical epic. That's the movie's sense of humor in a nutshell, so if you like it...great! Keep reading. If that sounds too infantile or whatever your not-particularly-positive adjective of choice might be, you're better off cutting your losses and closing your web browser now.
Seed of Chucky is a comedy. There's still a hefty body count, and pretty much everyone who's in the movie for any length of time meets some sort of grisly demise, including airborne decapitation, acid-washed flesh (the movie's most completely random and completely hysterical kill), dinnertime evisceration, drawn-and-quartering-and-then-some, and aerosol-fueled burnination. No matter how many buckets of blood or homages to classics like Halloween, Psycho, and The Shining there may be, this is unquestionably still a comedy. Sometimes the laughs come from the over-the-top kills and sometimes they come from post-American Pie gags revolving around various bodily fluids, but Seed of Chucky's favorite target is Hollywood. The movie takes jabs at Britney Spears, rappers branching out into movies, the paparazzi, twelve step programs, and even though you think you might have heard every Martha Stewart joke ever, Seed of Chucky whips out the best one yet.
As much as Seed of Chucky pokes fun at Hollywood and the cult of celebrity, Jennifer Tilly takes it on the chin more than anyone else. From the state of her career ("I'm an Oscar nominee, for Christ's sake, and now I'm fucking a puppet!") to her weight to her distinctively raspy voice to the lesbian scenes in Bound to her huge...tracts of land, Tilly has a great sense of humor about herself and really carries the movie. Despite getting top billing in the title, Chucky almost seems like a supporting character; Jennifer Tilly and Tiffany are the real stars of Seed of Chucky.
Seed of Chucky is funnier, bloodier, and more outlandishly clever than Bride of Chucky. However, Bride of Chucky felt like an actual movie, while Seed... seems like an uneven jumble of some really brilliant ideas loosely connected to try to hit an 80 minute runtime. There's still a story, and there's still a beginning, middle, and end, but it's so gleefully unconventional that I think it threw me off a bit. Seed of Chucky does a lot of things better than its predecessor, even if it doesn't gel in quite the same way and overall isn't quite as satisfying. That's okay, though; even if Seed of Chucky falls a notch or two below Bride of Chucky, it's still a tremendously entertaining movie, and fans of Bride... ought to find Seed... at least worth a rental.
As far as being "unrated" and "fully extended"...? Maybe a little bloodier, 'cause gallons of the red stuff get splattered around. Probably raunchier, too, especially the "masturbating midget" scene with Chucky making the cum-in-a-cup deposit. I'm too lazy to grab the theatrical cut and start A/B-ing specific scenes, but with as marginal as the differences in running time are between the two versions, it's a safe bet that that's pretty much it.
Video: Exactly what you'd expect from a recent, high profile theatrical release, the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen video is extremely sharp, richly detailed, very colorful, and free of anything bearing a passing resemblance to a flaw.
Audio: ...and likewise for the audio, offered in both Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kbps) and DTS. Like the movie as a whole, it's closer to a comedy mix than the typical horror movie soundtrack, so a lot of the action is anchored up front, and dialogue gets a lot of emphasis. Everything comes through cleanly and clearly, the surrounds get some decent usage, and the subwoofer really thumps when given the opportunity (especially when Chucky and Glen-or-Glenda tool around in Redman's Humvee with an "In The Club" knockoff blaring). No complaints. The DVD also includes subtitles in English, French, and Spanish, although it's not closed captioned.
Supplements: Wow. There's a lot -- three full pages worth, even, but I'll rattle those off in a second. First of all, it might be worth mentioning the movie opens with a kind of lame intro with Chucky and family in a limo, and a couple of equally uninteresting full-frame clips follow after the end credits.
"Chucky's Insider Facts on Demand" is a subtitle track that pops up little nuggets o' information throughout the movie, including explanations of some of the homages and in-jokes scattered throughout, background details on some of the cast and crew, technical details on the production, and completely random stuff like a red-headed Mexican bank robber who was dubbed "El Chucko" and Brad Dourif's grandfather inventing and patenting the color "ultramarine blue". I'm normally not all that keen on these sorts of fact tracks, but this is the best one I've seen so far and is worth a look.
Alongside the subtitle track are two audio commentaries. The first features writer/director Don Mancini and star Jennifer Tilly. Having already worked together before and being good friends, they have a great rapport with each other, and that's part of why it's such a fun track. Mancini notes that at $10 million (actually $12 million, but a couple million came back in tax credits or something), this is the cheapest of the Chucky movies, although you'd never know that to look at it. They also talk about accidentally capturing a bulky, underwear-less Jennifer Tilly exposing herself spreadeagle after slipping on stage blood, some of the challenges and limitations of shooting in eastern Europe with little time and little money on-hand, having to infuse the movie with an overabundance of British-ness, and hammering out a new Chucky monologue after a difference of opinion with Brad Dourif.
Commentary number two pairs Mancini with puppet master Tony Gardner. Considering Gardner's role on the set, it probably goes without saying that a lot of the discussion revolves around the puppe...I mean, the robots on sticks: the design, the technology, the planning, the execution, the disappearing moles... This is a more technically-minded discussion, but it's hardly dry or dull, and Chucky fans who are curious what all goes into pulling off these make-up effects should really enjoy it.
A deleted scene with Debbie Carrington is also included. It was originally intended to be two scenes -- one setting up a kill and the other gruesomely paying it off -- but the payoff was never filmed, and the setup didn't really belong in the movie without it. So anyway, the setup runs a little over three minutes in length and is centered around the tiny actress Debbie Carrington, who plays herself playing the Tiffany doll. The scene can be viewed with optional audio commentary by Don Mancini and Carrington.
"Chucky Unsheathed" is a two minute mock-interview where Chucky is presented with screentests for parts in movies he tried out for but didn't land, such as Scarface and American Pie. Also less funny than it sounds is the "Family Hell-Iday Slideshow", which spends three and a half minutes with Chucky, Glen, and Tiffany looking at corpse-peppered slides from their vacation.
A minute and a half piece from The Tonight Show has Jennifer Tilly mock-detailing her experiences shooting on location in Romania. A more realistic but still extremely entertaining account can be found in Jennifer Tilly's diary (similar to the one on the Bride of Chucky DVD), where she writes about the production from its seemingly-stillborn early days to some of the on-set hee-larity when cameras finally started rolling years later. It's a great read, with lines like "'I've already vomited in my purse, and given Redman a blow job,' I say. 'I don't really think being called a skag is going to further damage my reputation.'"
I have no idea what "FuZion" is, but one of the show's correspondents spent a few minutes interviewing Jennifer Tilly, Tiffany, and Chucky. It's well done and professional and all but still pretty standard press junket interview stuff. There are also fourteen minutes of storyboard comparisons, tackling a total of five different sequences. Rounding out the extras are a full-frame theatrical trailer, a letterboxed teaser trailer, and a set of cast/crew bios.
Too exhausted to use complete sentences anymore, but animated 16x9 menus. No insert. Keepcase with those snapping, locking tabs. Twenty chapter stops.
Conclusion: Horror sequels are expected to get blander and more formulaic with each entry, but the Child's Play series has managed to avoid a lot of those missteps. With more than fifteen years between them, the original Child's Play is unrecognizable from this, the fifth installment in the series. The hysterical, gory, raunchy, Hollywood-in-joke-y Seed of Chucky follows in the same direction Bride of Chucky headed a few years earlier. Seed of Chucky isn't as consistent or as oddly charming as Bride..., but if you like one, you'll probably like the other, and I guess that's really all the review you need. The DVD looks and sounds great, and a slew of extras have been piled on to make sure Chucky fans get their money's worth. Highly recommended as a rental; recommended as a purchase.
Whatever happened to baby Chucky? Bride of Chucky ended with the nightmarish newborn stuck in the cemetary, surrounded by the lifeless bodies of his plastic-molded parents. Seed of Chucky picks up a few years later. Tiffany and Chucky have been reduced to urban legends, currently being immortalized in a Hollywood slasher inventively titled Chucky Goes Psycho. Junior, meanwhile, is the perpetually terrorized half of a British ventriloquist act (shades of Devil Doll!). Dubbed "Shitface", the gentle, gender-ambiguous kid (voiced by Billy Boyd) is plagued by violent nightmares, and the only hint he has of his lineage is the "Made in Japan" stamp on his hand that leads him to think he's the child of Yakuza assassins or something. He catches an Access Hollywood report on the Chucky Goes Psycho set and realizes that...hey, those are his parents on th' telly, so he escapes and makes his way to La-La Land. Using the mainstay voodoo amulet (the only real plot point carried over from any of the first three movies), Junior revives Chucky and Tiffany, and their killing spree kicks off before the scene's out.
Still determined to transfer their souls into living, fleshy repositories, Chucky and Tiffany decide to become Hollywood's newest power couple by taking over the bodies of Redman and Jennifer Tilly (both playing cariactures of themselves). Redman is a rapper Passion of the Christ-ing it up as a director, and Jennifer Tilly is striving to recapture something resembling fame after wading around in low-budget schlock for years. Anyway, Junior tries to eke out an identity, although without much of a wang to speak of, Junior can't decide if he/she/it should sign up as Glen or Glenda. Tiffany attempts to give up killing, and since she wasn't keen on her previous plastic pregnancy, she decides to impregnate Jennifer Tilly with voodoo-Chucky-seed from a turkey baster. Chucky, meanwhile, is too busy stabbing, torching, and melting everyone in doll's-arm's reach to really care much one way or the other. I could keep rattling off this sort of stuff, but you get the general idea. It's not your standard stalk-and-slash formula.
One scene in Seed of Chucky has a photographer played by John Waters perched outside Jennifer Tilly's house, snapping photos as Chucky is upstairs jerking off to an issue of Fangoria while Tiffany is hiding behind a couch in the living room, ready to bludgeon Tilly as she's seducing rapper-turned-director Redman in the hopes of landing a role as the Virgin Mary in his Biblical epic. That's the movie's sense of humor in a nutshell, so if you like it...great! Keep reading. If that sounds too infantile or whatever your not-particularly-positive adjective of choice might be, you're better off cutting your losses and closing your web browser now.
Seed of Chucky is a comedy. There's still a hefty body count, and pretty much everyone who's in the movie for any length of time meets some sort of grisly demise, including airborne decapitation, acid-washed flesh (the movie's most completely random and completely hysterical kill), dinnertime evisceration, drawn-and-quartering-and-then-some, and aerosol-fueled burnination. No matter how many buckets of blood or homages to classics like Halloween, Psycho, and The Shining there may be, this is unquestionably still a comedy. Sometimes the laughs come from the over-the-top kills and sometimes they come from post-American Pie gags revolving around various bodily fluids, but Seed of Chucky's favorite target is Hollywood. The movie takes jabs at Britney Spears, rappers branching out into movies, the paparazzi, twelve step programs, and even though you think you might have heard every Martha Stewart joke ever, Seed of Chucky whips out the best one yet.
As much as Seed of Chucky pokes fun at Hollywood and the cult of celebrity, Jennifer Tilly takes it on the chin more than anyone else. From the state of her career ("I'm an Oscar nominee, for Christ's sake, and now I'm fucking a puppet!") to her weight to her distinctively raspy voice to the lesbian scenes in Bound to her huge...tracts of land, Tilly has a great sense of humor about herself and really carries the movie. Despite getting top billing in the title, Chucky almost seems like a supporting character; Jennifer Tilly and Tiffany are the real stars of Seed of Chucky.
Seed of Chucky is funnier, bloodier, and more outlandishly clever than Bride of Chucky. However, Bride of Chucky felt like an actual movie, while Seed... seems like an uneven jumble of some really brilliant ideas loosely connected to try to hit an 80 minute runtime. There's still a story, and there's still a beginning, middle, and end, but it's so gleefully unconventional that I think it threw me off a bit. Seed of Chucky does a lot of things better than its predecessor, even if it doesn't gel in quite the same way and overall isn't quite as satisfying. That's okay, though; even if Seed of Chucky falls a notch or two below Bride of Chucky, it's still a tremendously entertaining movie, and fans of Bride... ought to find Seed... at least worth a rental.
As far as being "unrated" and "fully extended"...? Maybe a little bloodier, 'cause gallons of the red stuff get splattered around. Probably raunchier, too, especially the "masturbating midget" scene with Chucky making the cum-in-a-cup deposit. I'm too lazy to grab the theatrical cut and start A/B-ing specific scenes, but with as marginal as the differences in running time are between the two versions, it's a safe bet that that's pretty much it.
Video: Exactly what you'd expect from a recent, high profile theatrical release, the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen video is extremely sharp, richly detailed, very colorful, and free of anything bearing a passing resemblance to a flaw.
Audio: ...and likewise for the audio, offered in both Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kbps) and DTS. Like the movie as a whole, it's closer to a comedy mix than the typical horror movie soundtrack, so a lot of the action is anchored up front, and dialogue gets a lot of emphasis. Everything comes through cleanly and clearly, the surrounds get some decent usage, and the subwoofer really thumps when given the opportunity (especially when Chucky and Glen-or-Glenda tool around in Redman's Humvee with an "In The Club" knockoff blaring). No complaints. The DVD also includes subtitles in English, French, and Spanish, although it's not closed captioned.
Supplements: Wow. There's a lot -- three full pages worth, even, but I'll rattle those off in a second. First of all, it might be worth mentioning the movie opens with a kind of lame intro with Chucky and family in a limo, and a couple of equally uninteresting full-frame clips follow after the end credits.
"Chucky's Insider Facts on Demand" is a subtitle track that pops up little nuggets o' information throughout the movie, including explanations of some of the homages and in-jokes scattered throughout, background details on some of the cast and crew, technical details on the production, and completely random stuff like a red-headed Mexican bank robber who was dubbed "El Chucko" and Brad Dourif's grandfather inventing and patenting the color "ultramarine blue". I'm normally not all that keen on these sorts of fact tracks, but this is the best one I've seen so far and is worth a look.
Alongside the subtitle track are two audio commentaries. The first features writer/director Don Mancini and star Jennifer Tilly. Having already worked together before and being good friends, they have a great rapport with each other, and that's part of why it's such a fun track. Mancini notes that at $10 million (actually $12 million, but a couple million came back in tax credits or something), this is the cheapest of the Chucky movies, although you'd never know that to look at it. They also talk about accidentally capturing a bulky, underwear-less Jennifer Tilly exposing herself spreadeagle after slipping on stage blood, some of the challenges and limitations of shooting in eastern Europe with little time and little money on-hand, having to infuse the movie with an overabundance of British-ness, and hammering out a new Chucky monologue after a difference of opinion with Brad Dourif.
Commentary number two pairs Mancini with puppet master Tony Gardner. Considering Gardner's role on the set, it probably goes without saying that a lot of the discussion revolves around the puppe...I mean, the robots on sticks: the design, the technology, the planning, the execution, the disappearing moles... This is a more technically-minded discussion, but it's hardly dry or dull, and Chucky fans who are curious what all goes into pulling off these make-up effects should really enjoy it.
A deleted scene with Debbie Carrington is also included. It was originally intended to be two scenes -- one setting up a kill and the other gruesomely paying it off -- but the payoff was never filmed, and the setup didn't really belong in the movie without it. So anyway, the setup runs a little over three minutes in length and is centered around the tiny actress Debbie Carrington, who plays herself playing the Tiffany doll. The scene can be viewed with optional audio commentary by Don Mancini and Carrington.
"Chucky Unsheathed" is a two minute mock-interview where Chucky is presented with screentests for parts in movies he tried out for but didn't land, such as Scarface and American Pie. Also less funny than it sounds is the "Family Hell-Iday Slideshow", which spends three and a half minutes with Chucky, Glen, and Tiffany looking at corpse-peppered slides from their vacation.
A minute and a half piece from The Tonight Show has Jennifer Tilly mock-detailing her experiences shooting on location in Romania. A more realistic but still extremely entertaining account can be found in Jennifer Tilly's diary (similar to the one on the Bride of Chucky DVD), where she writes about the production from its seemingly-stillborn early days to some of the on-set hee-larity when cameras finally started rolling years later. It's a great read, with lines like "'I've already vomited in my purse, and given Redman a blow job,' I say. 'I don't really think being called a skag is going to further damage my reputation.'"
I have no idea what "FuZion" is, but one of the show's correspondents spent a few minutes interviewing Jennifer Tilly, Tiffany, and Chucky. It's well done and professional and all but still pretty standard press junket interview stuff. There are also fourteen minutes of storyboard comparisons, tackling a total of five different sequences. Rounding out the extras are a full-frame theatrical trailer, a letterboxed teaser trailer, and a set of cast/crew bios.
Too exhausted to use complete sentences anymore, but animated 16x9 menus. No insert. Keepcase with those snapping, locking tabs. Twenty chapter stops.
Conclusion: Horror sequels are expected to get blander and more formulaic with each entry, but the Child's Play series has managed to avoid a lot of those missteps. With more than fifteen years between them, the original Child's Play is unrecognizable from this, the fifth installment in the series. The hysterical, gory, raunchy, Hollywood-in-joke-y Seed of Chucky follows in the same direction Bride of Chucky headed a few years earlier. Seed of Chucky isn't as consistent or as oddly charming as Bride..., but if you like one, you'll probably like the other, and I guess that's really all the review you need. The DVD looks and sounds great, and a slew of extras have been piled on to make sure Chucky fans get their money's worth. Highly recommended as a rental; recommended as a purchase.
|
Popular Reviews |
Sponsored Links |
|
Sponsored Links |
|
Release List | Reviews | Shop | Newsletter | Forum | DVD Giveaways | Blu-Ray | Advertise |
Copyright 2024 DVDTalk.com All Rights Reserved. Legal Info, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use,
Manage Preferences,
Your Privacy Choices
|