was child's play ever scary?

Before getting into this, I am beginning this post on Oct. 21, 2015 a.k.a Back to the Future Part 2 day. By time of posting that day will have passed and the following observation will be late (or is it early? Maybe it's on time in ways we can't possibly comprehend!) Pretty much everything that you could want to read about the BTTF movies is out there already, but I figure I'd mention, briefly, why it is one of the few franchises where the sequels are so goddamned good. Simple really: the writers realized the most interesting thing about the fictional world they created was time travel, and they used it to great effect in the first as a way of understanding how Marty & Co. got to where they were in the future by showing off the past. They essentially made the same movie with the same kind of meta-commentary in Part 2, but instead had them go forward to, well, today. It's literally the mirror image of its predecessor. If Marty and Doc had gone back to another point in history -- say to change Marty's destiny as a child or something -- it would've been A) exactly the same movie as its predecessor and B) utter crap. In the age of sequels, that's how you do one right. It would help if many of the movie franchises out there now used some interesting material to begin with...

And to answer the question in the headline: no. Child's Play is not scary, and I'm not really sure it ever was.

I was 6 in 1988 when the movie hit theaters, so I'm not sure about the initial reception, but was a little more than surprised to see that Roger Ebert gave it a good review. But I digress: it is a greatly enjoyable movie and the effects, particularly Chucky's face, have held up reasonably well (as practical effects do -- nothing ages faster than animation).

Plot-wise, with a little explanation of the cursed "Good Guy" doll in the opening, Child's Play is the Talky Tina episode of Twilight Zone fed growth-hormone beef and shot up with PCP. In the classic horror fable, we the audience never get an explanation as to why Talky Tina doesn't like Dad very much, and that adds to the intertwined senses of mystery and dread. Chucky comes about from a mix of serial killer/toy store/voodoo ritual right from the get-go, and it is more than a little telling that the only non-white character (briefly) in the movie is the voodoo priest who equips the Lakeshore Strangler with the power to reanimate himself.

It was filmed in Chicago but never identifies the city, and the cast of white victims suffering the albeit unintended wrath of Creole magic brings to mind such racially-loaded terms as "urban decay." This is a theme that runs through the core of a few 80s movies and skirts the edges of many more, from the Chinatown vision of LA critical to Blade Runner to the punks in the opening of Terminator or perhaps most egregiously, the Hispanic heroin-addicted homeless rapists in that shining banner of American cinematic achievement that is Jason Takes Manhattan. There's also a splash of the late-decade recession that reared it's ugly head towards the end of the Reagan presidency: the economy tanked, cities were a mess and many experts agree the sitting president was in the throws of Alzheimer's. Shit sucked, is what I'm getting at. Catherine Hicks's (who won a Saturn for best actress in a horror, believe it or not) character must work double-shifts at a department store to scrape by as a single mom in 80s-land, and still only manages to get a coveted Good Guy doll from a homeless shill.

At the heart of the plot is little Andy, Karen's son and seeker of the Good Guy doll, and at the heart of the movie is a comment on commercialism as it relates to kids. Good Guy himself was based on Hasbro's mega-popular My Buddy toy. I can still remember the commercials and that lurid, unblinking and deadened thousand-yard stare. Before My Buddy was Chatty Cathy -- the subject of the aforementioned Twilight Zone. And after, Cabbage Patch, Furby, Tickle-Me Elmo, each with their associated yarns of Christmas Eve Wal-Mart brawls.

Karen, of course, doesn't believe Andy when he tries to tell her Chucky offed the babysitter with a claw hammer. It's not until she learns that Chucky foregoes alkaloids for his juice and goes straight for the hard stuff -- pure evil serial killer soul -- that Karen moms the hell out and drafts a detective investigating the babysitter's demise to her cause. Not that she'd need to: Chucky's on a mission to whack his former partner who left his corpus to die in a toy store at the hands of the very same detective, at which point the horror movie shifts into crime-revenge as told by Jim Henson with a gut full of Wild Irish Rose. Chucky proves more resilient than Rasputin in the final battle over Andy's soul, and the toothy melted face is really the stuff of nightmares. He's slain in the end, but given the sheer amount of sequels, we know that the killer is never really dead.

The original question was whether the movie was scary or not, and I think that depends on how you define scary. It's got some good jump-scare moments that I'm sure were more terrifying in a dark theater at 130 decibels, and the bit where little Andy is locked in a hospital room as Chucky's pitter-patter of untimely doom inches closer is quite tense. But the entire thing is so out there, particularly Chucky's off-the-cuff "Stupid bitch!" and "I'll fucking gut you!" lines, it doesn't lend itself toward fear the way, say, Night of the Living Dead or even that Twilight Zone do.

Though it is a fantastic time capsule into the average person's anxiety over what the holiday rush for crappy toys does to kids and, ultimately, what it does to parents. I am not looking forward to the day two fully-formed adults hospitalize each other over four-year-old-friendly drones, but the revisit was certainly worth it.

(It's 11:22 p.m. at time of posting. Made it.)