Child’s Play review: Chucky's AI reboot is an old-school horror treat

Dir: Lars Klevberg. Cast: Mark Hamill (voice), Aubrey Plaza, Gabriel Bateman, Brian Tyree Henry, Tim Matheson, David Lewis. 15 cert, 90 mins

The “video nasty” panic of the Eighties never had an official mascot as such, but it would have struggled to find an apter one than Chucky, the haunted doll who slashed and cackled his way through the Child’s Play series. A benign-seeming gizmo, beloved by children, that turns out to be a Trojan horse for unmitigated evil? Mary Whitehouse couldn’t have dreamt up a better allegory for the softly whirring VHS deck in the corner of your living room that could introduce your offspring to the likes of Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust.

Indeed, in the struggle to make sense of the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993, it was to Chucky that some MPs and campaigners turned, after it emerged that one of the two young killers’ fathers had recently rented the third film in the franchise. Now that cinema has weathered the Hostel and Saw series – and worse – the Child’s Play films look decidedly quaint, and the more recent instalments, half-sunk in self-parody, have acknowledged as much.

But the 1988 original remains a creepy and menacing watch – and its trickster spirit is the one being channeled by this corporate reboot, with a not-insignificant degree of success. Pointedly arriving in cinemas on the same day as Toy Story 4 – itself not short of spooky mannequins – Child’s Play ’19 takes living-doll horror back to first principles.

In doing so, it also embraces its datedness, and carries itself for the most part like a Stranger Things nostalgia binge: lots of Amblin-style diffuse backlighting, freckled and tousle-haired kids, low-level domestic strife cribbed from early Spielberg, and unabashedly gungy practical effects. (The doll itself even has a “magical” glowing finger, in a nod to ET.)

But it also deftly relocates its plot to the premise, by having its Chucky possessed not by the ghost of a serial killer, but artificial intelligence gone bad. The Buddi smart doll is the latest gadget being churned out by Kaslan, a Google-like conglomerate, but a row at the company’s Vietnam sweatshop leads to the safety protocols on one model being maliciously disabled.

The rogue doll, which names itself Chucky, finds its way to Karen (Aubrey Plaza), a harried young single mother who presents it to her son Andy (Gabriel Bateman) on his birthday. But rather than ordering taxis and curating his music library, it’s soon scampering about with a carving knife, and issuing twee-sounding threats in the gleefully manic voice of Mark Hamill. This is entertaining as far as it goes, particularly since director Lars Klevberg and writer Tyler Burton Smith select Chucky’s first few victims for maximum audience schadenfreude.

The best and goriest is Karen’s toxic boyfriend Shane (David Lewis), whose impressive demise factors in a watermelon, a lawnmower, a string of Christmas lights, a ladder and a garden gnome. And the use of a practical, rubber-faced Chucky doll, only gently augmented by visual effects, gives the character an unsettling presence that a more obviously CGI approach couldn’t have matched.

Unfortunately, the film stumbles as soon as Chucky’s rampage becomes more indiscriminate. There’s less fun in watching him murder an innocent old woman, even if she gets in a good one-liner first, while the initial gory excess soon gives way to sub-Gremlins mayhem which only scratches the satirical potential of its tech-nightmare premise.

Plaza, though clearly game for a laugh, is also badly miscast here: the fresh-faced 34-year-old doesn’t look nearly careworn enough to have raised a teenage son, despite the script’s half-hearted attempt to explain it by reference to a “productive” 16th birthday party.

As far as today’s teens are concerned, Child’s Play would probably have had to try all-out, Evil Dead-level nightmare absurdism to stand a chance of a successful revival. But for those of us old enough to have been terrorised the first time round, it delivers a nasty-but-nice-enough childhood flashback.