Curse of Chucky (2013)

After Seed of Chucky, directed by Don Mancini, just like this one, I was expecting the worst but Mancini was able to surprise me again. He left comedy to go back to the original trilogy’s dark tones, and it worked. Although it’s far from being the best horror or slasher movie, Curse of Chucky sure is a pretty entertaining one – and it kinda made me excited about Cult of Chucky.

The story is about Nica, a young woman in a wheelchair (Fiona Dourif, Brad Dourif’s real-life daughter) who is forced to deal with her sister (Danielle Bisutti), her brother-in-law (Brennan Elliott) and her niece (Summer H. Howell) after the mysterious death of her mother (Chantal Quesnel). The cause of death, however, isn’t a mystery to us since Nica and her mother received a package containing Chucky (Brad Dourif) not long before dying. What we don’t know is what score Chucky is trying to settle as he starts killing the members of the family.

As you can see, it’s pretty simple. Also, it doesn’t have a lot of twists and there are plot holes here and there but it’s surpassingly well developed and it provides a quite solid explanation of why Chucky decided to torture this family (and it even ties in the original film).

Like I said earlier, Mancini ditched comedy for horror and he really should have done that before because he’s quite good at developing the horror, building suspense and delivering some pretty solid jump scares. There’s plenty of blood and gore, but there are some pretty interesting camera angles that are way more effective than all those effects.

The acting is average. Actually, most of it is below average, which is completely understandable given the poor characters and dialogue – Danielle Bisutti was truly awful though. Anyway, I was very impressed with Fiona Dourif. Although she overacted in some scenes, she pulled off her rather complex character beautifully.