CULT OF CHUCKY
(R, Universal 1440, 91 mins., video release date: October 3, 2017)
The Chucky saga isn't as overbearing as Freddy or Jason, but ever since Karen Barclay bought the possessed play pal for her son Andy in 1988‘s Child's Play, the trajectory proved fairly similar. First, there was that intriguing and clever original from director Tom Holland. Then came a routine “the terror continues” sequel wherein the rebuilt Chucky proceeded to menace Andy Barclay and his adoptive family. It was tolerable, but the third installment made it look like Aliens by comparison. Controversial for the time as a lynchpin for the Video Nasties furor over in England, Child's Play 3 was also the series' nadir for a spell. Writer Don Mancini steered his creation through a couple of pomo revivals with the decent Bride of Chucky and the tired Seed of Chucky, which veered off too far into winking camp.
2013's Curse of Chucky gave Mancini's psychotic toy a fresher sense of purpose and also introduced the gifted Fiona Dourif (daughter of Chucky vocalist and character actor Brad) into the fray. This wasn't the Friday the 13th idea of a new beginning, but instead a leaner, meaner chamber thriller with a transfusion of new blood. Cult of Chucky, a.k.a. Child's Play 7, follows the path of Curse, but incorporates the more self-aware elements of the post-Scream Bride/Seed as well as tries for a trickier third act than expected from the reliable formula. The combination still seems unrefined: self-promoted director Don Mancini is no Wes Craven, and to watch Chucky brag about beating mean old Ms. Kettlewell with a yardstick is to cringe once again at the diminished returns which set in too early. Cult is a lesser movie than Curse despite its ambitions, but more tempered than previous rehashings and hinting at what could be a decent finale if Mancini tries for a third effort.
Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) and Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif) are most assuredly not well off for having made it out alive. Andy has never experienced a real childhood thanks to Chucky, and his adult life is even more abnormal. When another blind date ends in rejection because of his violent past, Andy retreats home to torture the disembodied, taunting head of his lifelong tormentor. Andy (and the child actor who played him in the first two movies) may have grown, but he's still mentally 12 and burning his action figures in a mutually spiteful dynamic. Paraplegic Nica, meanwhile, took the rap for the mass killings of Curse and is now in psychiatric care, with deliberate echoes of Brad's Oscar-nominated debut role as well as Fiona's association with the crowd-funded indie chiller Fear Clinic.
In a fraction of the time it takes for Nica to be rehabilitated, who should come interrupting her group therapy sessions but a Good Guy Doll with the familiar name of Chucky! The body count rises and Nica's warnings go unheeded by her lecherous shrink (Michael Therriault as Dr. Foley). Outside of these confines, Andy is mocked over the phone by Charles Lee Ray's paramour Tiffany Valentine, whose soul continues to live on in the body of actress Jennifer Tilly. Turns out there's an even more abridged version of the Damballa voodoo chant which Charles exploited to inhabit the Chucky toy. Worse, there's enough of the Lakeshore Strangler to go around when there are eventually three Chuckys going to murderous work at the funny farm.
Mancini quotes the visual tricks of De Palma and Kubrick (split screens and sterile palettes) as he peppers his dialogue with throwaway references to not just earlier Child's Play movies, but even the Hannibal TV show. Just as ham-fisted are his attempts to discredit Nica's sanity by having Dr. Foley hypnotize her into believing she is the real homicidal maniac, which only serves to set up the big ironic twist to come. There's a strong Elm Street 3 vibe to the proceedings, especially when Andy arrives to take care of Chucky but is punk'd in much the same way Nancy Thompson was at the end of Dream Warriors. Alex Vincent has less screen time than Langenkamp, but he does make a stronger impression up until he ends up in the cell. The characterizations of Nica's fellow inmates, which include the smooth-talking former vagrant Michael (Adam Hurtig) who believes her as well as the nastily skeptical Claire (Grace Lynn Kung), are as stock as a supermarket's inventory.
What remains good about Mancini's series are both Brad and Fiona Dourif, the delirious mixture of graphic violence (the worst saved for an unsuspecting orderly who walks into Dr. Foley‘s office) and psychological trickery (Elisabeth Rosen as Madeleine forms a deranged attachment to Chucky in repose) and his willingness to embrace unconventional narrative outcomes. I've come around to the diabolical fates for Andy and Nica in hindsight, and the film's reliance on practical puppet/splatter effects is old-fashioned in the best ways. And like Curse, the unrated version of Cult of Chucky is baited with a credit cookie that brings back another beloved survivor (“You seen dolls that pee?“) and gooses up Mancini's cliffhanger finale. It's tempting to suggest that Don Mancini, whose energies are better spent on writing, should hand over the directorial reigns to, in Chucky's vulgar parlance, your “goddamn women drivers!” You think the Twisted Twins would sign on for it? This is 2017, after all, and at least in the entertainment world, the honor of saluting the good old days of horror should itself transfer to a more progressive body.
SPY HARD
(PG-13, Hollywood Pictures, 81 mins., theatrical release date: May 24, 1996)
Turner Classic Movies aired Who's That Girl recently as related from a tweet by Bill Chambers of Film Freak Central. But having reviewed it myself, it's just another sub-mediocrity which has benefited way too much from glib nostalgia. I dread TCM turning into I Love the '80s, but 1996’s Spy Hard doesn't make me pine for the dregs of the next decade to end up on the suspect list of modern "classics." Another case of something which stunk from the beginning and has rightly decomposed, Spy Hard appears to be a feature-length vehicle for director Rick Friedberg and spoof comedy superstar Leslie Nielsen. But it was also the debut screenplay credit for Rick's son Jason and his college roommate Aaron Seltzer, and one's heart not only sinks at this, it forces you to leave your seat to ensure it didn’'t fall right out of your ass.
The seminal send-up of espionage tropes already came from the ZAZ trio with Top Secret! All Spy Hard adds to it is "Weird Al" Yankovic's send-up of the Maurice Binder title sequences from umpteen James Bond movies and the discreetly bombastic theme songs accompanying them. Without his Airplane!/Police Squad benefactors, Nielsen winds up in his very own Leonard Part 6 as secret agent Dick "WD-40" Steele, facing arch-nemesis General Rancor (Andy Griffith) 15 years after blowing up his helicopter, but merely ridding him of both arms in the process. Rancor has taken hostage Barbara Dahl, daughter of Steele's deceased one-and-only Victoria (both Dahls played by Stephanie Romanov), but what the 80-minute Spy Hard is most concerned with are the kind of toothless pop culture references Friedberg & Seltzer have beaten to death since then as amateur parodists: from Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid to Sister Act to Speed, with an already-expired swipe at Cliffhanger (and a Michael Jackson gag better used in Neil Young's "This Note's for You" video) and an aimless recycling of Pulp Fiction's dance sequence which fails to do for that iconography what “Straighten the Rug” from Top Secret! did for Elvis movies.
With Nicollette Sheridan as the Yurrupean love interest (or Agent 3.14), Charles Durning as the Agency's master-of-disguise chief, Marcia Gay Harden as Moneypenny, and Barry Bostwick & Robert Guillaume as the reigning top agents, Spy Hard doesn't lack for a willing ensemble. Bostwick affects Ted Kennedy's Brahmin accent with blithe merriment, and the times when Nielsen simply coasts on his mugging, velvety charisma are comparatively painless to the inferior jokes he delivers. But the Friedbergs and Seltzer and fourth writer Dick Chudnow can't even do right by the cameo talent they've corralled, let alone their principals. Aside from both Mr. T and Alex Trebek in the opening riff on Mission: Impossible, there are the wasted likes of Ray Charles as a bus driver, Pat Morita (first Collision Course, now this) as a gay maitre d' and, as passengers on Charles' bus, both Curtis Armstrong and Michael Berryman. That I didn't notice or laugh at Curtis Armstrong at first watch is a special form of stupidity (the late Taylor Negron is in this, too, as a painter, but I don't want to see any more Savage Steve Holland MVPs pissed away like this). Eddie Deezen is in this, too, but so what? He's been too good for a lot of his post-Grease career.
Spy Hard plays like a dark omen for the way spoof movies would devolve into mean-spirited, cheapjack redundancy rather than genuine subversion or anarchy. Bond movies tended to be in on the joke even at their laziest and lamest, and Spy Hard doesn't push their inherent ridiculousness over the edge in an amusing way. Seeing Talisa Soto, the gangster moll from Licence to Kill, and Robert Culp, the other half of I-Spy who's not Cosby, doesn't lend it any charitable relevance. We get a lot of femme fatales and ancillary characters dispatched in cartoonish ways, including a dancing fool who pops up frequently to take bullets and throwing stars for Steele. But they are about as unfunny as the Home Alone rip-off (read: NOT parody, just regurgitation) which casts John Hughes' Dennis the Menace, Mason Gamble, to be Macaulay Culkin only to have the thugs rough him up as revenge for Getting Even with Dad and both My Girl movies. That Gamble-as-Culkin has to say he wasn't even in My Girl 2 only reinforces this malignant recognition-as-joke approach would get worse in the future with the "movie" movies. Ian Pugh, also of Film Freak Central, said it so well in his book-exclusive takedowns of Friedberg/Seltzer's Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie from the FFC 2009 Superannual. And so did Doug "The Nostalgia Critic" Walker in this editorial.
It took "Weird Al" Yankovic seven years after UHF to come up with the single funniest element of Spy Hard. In a shorter time frame, Seltzerberg have been distressingly rewarded for their brainless, repetitive, shoddy contributions to the genre. There have been six of them ranging from Date Movie to The Starving Games, and there isn't one moment in any them that could light the menorah like Yankovic did when he married the music from "Money for Nothing" to the lyrics of "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." Mark Knopfler is no match for such dire straits as this. In the spirit of Yankovic, here's my final thought on Spy Hard courtesy of Rip Torn's Artie from The Larry Sanders Show and the aforementioned Savage Steve Holland: "You opened with a showstopper. The movie's over...You can go home now." Move-ah, move-ah.
(PG, Universal Pictures, 91 mins., theatrical release date: March 26, 1986)
Had Richard Benjamin's only directorial credit been My Favorite Year, I would embrace him as a legendary one-shot akin to Charles (The Night of the Hunter) Laughton. Alas, the retired actor kept plugging away from behind the camera, his follow-ups from 1984 being the romantic Racing with the Moon, starring Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage, and the pedantic City Heat, starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. Benjamin took the latter gig when Blake Edwards was booted from the production, and it turned out to be a thankless task. Neither of the macho marquee idols lived up to the charming self-deprecation of the great Peter O'Toole, and it was clear that not only had Edwards' muse abandoned him (he fittingly declined credit for the sloppy script by changing it to S.O.B.), but that Benjamin couldn't handle tonal changes even in a B-grade gangster movie.
Still, My Favorite Year was a pleasant surprise back in 1982, and the box-office king of that year was paying attention. The Money Pit should've closed out another banner year for Steven Spielberg as a Christmastime release in 1985, but with his own The Color Purple bucking for Oscar-validated prestige that he did not get, it was delayed until the following spring, upon which it was razzed all over in the critical press as a disappointing ancestor of both the Cary Grant/Myrna Loy gem Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Spielberg's own Poltergeist. Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, Benjamin's leads here, each provided good work for Ron Howard in the past (Night Shift, Splash) but make a lackluster impression together, even if their individual appeal breaks through on occasion.
If Pacific Heights were a broad domestic comedy instead of a middlebrow thriller, The Money Pit is what springs to mind. Walter Fielding (Hanks) and his girlfriend Anna Crowley (Long) have respective gigs in the music biz (he as a legal advisor, she as a concert violinist), but they are dirt poor and crashing in the home of Anna's symphony conductor/ex-husband Max (Alexander Gudonov) on his European engagement. His tour ends prematurely, forcing them to decide upon buying a home just as swiftly. With luck, Walter and Anna hit upon a million-dollar mansion being sold at a $200,000 song by Estelle (Maureen Stapleton), whose husband Carlos has been detained by Israeli spooks. Or at least that's what she tells Anna; she neglects to mention the house is so decrepit, it's practically as stable as a castle made of Elmer’s Glue and popsicle sticks.
The entire staircase comes loose and collapses. The water main appears to be connected to the sewage system. One flick of a light switch sends wily sparks shooting up the electrical wiring. The naïve couple invest whatever cash they have for repairs in the service of men named Shirk (Joe Mantegna is the grossly disreputable carpenter) and hellion laborers who tear out the ground and leave holes in the walls. The ones who do renovate work for weeks on end, which doesn't prevent further destructive chain reactions. The lovers' morale is eaten away like a cartoon termite feasting on the Pink Panther's cottage, which leaves them to vulnerable to suspicion and infidelity.
Richard Benjamin is on surer footing here than he was with City Heat, and a couple extended scenes of the house wreaking havoc harken back to the slapstick vigor of My Favorite Year. Compared to Spy Hard, Benjamin is better at stacking his cards and toppling them than Rick Friedberg. And when it comes to peripheral jokes, writer David Giler shames Seltzerberg as much as The Nostalgia Critic. Walter seeks a cash advance from a prepubescent multi-millionaire he represents, coming up with this assertive form of blackmail: "If you don't loan me that money, I’ll not like you anymore!" There's also a fine gag involving Anna's medicine cabinet, and Gudonov's conceited, contemptuous Max upstages even the hysterical Tom Hanks.
But like Hanks' previous The Man with One Red Shoe, another terribly wan spy caper, The Money Pit lacks a black comedy foundation to go along with the elaborate catastrophe. It's inevitable that the unmarried Walter and Anna will require some patching up of their own, but this is thrown at us half-baked and hastily. Spielberg and Giler, as executive producers, have commissioned the house to be the star at the expense of Hanks and Long, still small-screen personalities in 1986 and saddled with a script that lets them down not just physically, but materially. The contrivance of their love story eventually shows up the limited capacity of the comedy, and since The Money Pit isn't as whimsically demented as Back to the Future or Gremlins, the Spielberg productions it truly recalls are the more labored, self-conscious carnival rides of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, and still on a lesser scale.
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