Child's Play (R)
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This came out in 1988, but I didn't see it until 2025. It has an absolutely ridiculous premise, so I expected it to be more comical than scary, but it was played fairly straight. (I suspect some of the later entries in the franchise may be more comedic than this one.) There is a supernatural element to it, but mostly it's a slasher film. I wasn't sure whether I would like it or not, but I did. I mean, it wasn't great, but it was better than I expected. As far as scary doll movies go, I liked it more than Annabelle and less than M3GAN.

It begins with a police detective named Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon) chasing a serial strangler named Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), while Ray's accomplice, Eddie Caputo, leaves him behind. Ray breaks into a toy store, followed by Norris, who shoots him. Before Ray dies, he uses a voodoo chant to transfer his soul into a talking "Good Guy" doll.

Later, it is Andy Barclay's sixth birthday. He wants a Good Guy doll, but his mother, Karen (Catherine Hicks) can't afford one. But when she goes to work, her friend and coworker Maggie Peterson (Dinah Manoff) informs her that there's a homeless man outside trying to sell one of the dolls much cheaper than a store-bought doll. So she buys it, and gives it to Andy. Then Karen has to go back to work, leaving Maggie to babysit him. The doll, who says his name is Chucky, eventually kills Maggie. (We don't actually see him do it, but it's pretty obvious it's him.) Chucky also plans to kill Eddie for abandoning him, and Norris for killing him. And he wants to get his soul out of the doll's body and into a human one. So he goes to see the guy who had taught him the chant, who now tells him he has to use the chant to transfer his soul into the first person to whom he'd admitted his true identity. And that's Andy.

Well... at first Karen doesn't believe Andy when he tells her Chucky is alive, but she becomes desperate after Andy is forced to stay at a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. When she confronts Chucky, she forces him to admit he's alive, which he does by attacking her. She then tells all this to Norris, who doesn't believe her. Until Chucky attacks him, that is. So, Karen and Norris have to try to stop Chucky from taking over Andy's body.

I don't want to reveal any more of the plot, except to say that by the end, Chucky seems to have been destroyed beyond any possibility of coming back. But of course, since I already know there are sequels, that's obviously not the case. Anyway, Chucky does kill a number of people throughout the movie, and it's more believable than I would have thought it possibly could be. Chucky is legitimately scary. I still couldn't take the movie entirely seriously, and I probably found some things amusing that weren't meant to be. But it was still fairly good, when it easily could have been really bad.