Time is growing short, folks! There is only a small amount of moments left in the month for a few mini-marathons to keep you awake until the wee hours of the morning. Tonight’s features are two tales about pint-sized terrors that reduce the human population and dwarf the competition.
They both require a tiny bit of disbelief suspension, but not to a point that will stunt anyone’s IQ. Grab a pony keg and stay for a little while!
Child’s Play (1988)
For those who weren’t there, the 1980s were an amazing time for kids who liked toys (and had parents who could afford to buy them). Along with having some of the greatest animated shows of all time, that decade was an endless stream of action figures, boardgames, toys with life-threatening accessories, dolls, and every last one of those cartoons had their own massive merchandise catalogue with half an aisle dedicated to it in the eternally missed Toys R’ Us.
One of the most popular items were these creepy mechanical dolls that imitated a human child, and it usually came with a cassette of pre-recorded words to jam into a tape player that was embedded in the thing’s chest so it can talk to you while staring off into space with its blank, soulless eyes. Kinda freaky, right?
In 1988, director Tom Holland would bring to physical life the nightmares of many wimpy youngsters, and even more grownups who know what it feels like to get psyched out by their kid’s doll while passing through a dark room in the middle of the night. Reuniting with Chris Sarandon from last evening’s Fright Night, he released the slasher classic Child’s Play.
A movie that has created a complex for some, deepened ones that already existed in others, and it gave birth to the term “Pediophobia” for all of those wimps to wear.
This is the story of a guy named Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif). He’s a New Jersey transplant who moved to Chicago to be somebody. Its dark, cursed streets fed into his already raging homicidal urges from living in the Garden State, and he started making a big name for himself in the city of death. Dabbling in voodoo taught to him by Southside Oungan, John “Dr. Death” Bishop (Raymond Oliver), Charles goes on a killing spree, and earns himself the nickname “Lakeshore Strangler” by the terrified public.
Things are going great until he gets sloppy, and is caught slipping by Detective Mike Norris (Sarandon). The two men get in a shootout through The Loop that ends at a toy store over on State & Wabash. Charles is cornered, full of holes, and bleeding to death. Fearing eternal damnation for his soul, he searches for somewhere else it can go instead. The dreaded Lakeshore Strangler had one more trick up his sleeve, and found his way out after crashing into a stack of Good Guy dolls.
With a few ominous chants (and an awesomely far-fetched lightning strike) Charles Lee Ray was no more. Detective Norris found his lifeless body lying beside a Good Guy that was out of its box, and naturally thought nothing of it.
Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) is just trying to survive in the big city. She works forced overtime at a downtown department store and has no choice but to speak to the manager. Her son Andy (Alex “Toothpick Joints” Vincent) is having his sixth birthday, and just when she thinks she knows what he wants as a present, the television changed his mind (as it does!) at the last minute.
All of a sudden, he wants a Good Guy doll, and Andy isn’t going to settle for a box full of clothes, but it’s also out of Karen’s budget. Luckily, a creepy peddler had one for cheap that he found at a burned down toy store, and she bought it off of him after some extremely poor haggling. She gives the little whiner the doll named Chucky, and assumes that will bring a moment of peace into her otherwise hectic life.
Then her best friend/coworker Maggie (Dinah Manoff) takes a swan dive out the window of Karen’s 9th-story apartment while babysitting Andy, and there’s absolutely no sign of a break-in. In fact, there were little footprints found at the murder scene, and a little pair of feet to match them, but no solid evidence linking them to the crime. They leave the apartment, but tag Andy as a person of interest.
Andy tells his mom that Chucky is alive; that real his name is Charles Lee Ray, and that Chucky said “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch, and got what she deserved.” Not wanting to consider the unthinkable, she lets it go until the cops find Andy near a house that blew up in a seedy part of town, and he becomes the suspect.
They decide to keep him, and especially after he starts ranting about how Chucky orchestrated the whole thing. Still not believing that her wet blanket of a son is a murderer, she decides to inspect the doll. Just as she notices that it has been moving around this whole time without batteries, Chucky (iconically voiced by Brad Dourif) decides that Karen must “wanna play,” and that’s when the fun starts.
This is a movie that sounds ridiculously absurd on paper, but works so well on film. It came at the tail end of the slasher genre’s popularity and gave it a nice zap of borrowed time. Despite the premise, it keeps a serious tone all throughout, but it also affords a little dark humor to connect all the parts.
The sequels that followed (excluding the underrated Child’s Play 2) saw an increase in the laughs, and campiness, but the Chucky series helped to get the story back to its horror roots. Chucky is ready to be your friend to the end over on AMC+. Hidey-ho!
Puppet Master II (1990)
If the last movie tickled the Memberberries of some of you out there, then get ready for a swift kick to the nostalgia nuts with this unearthed treasure from your old friends (and mine) at Full Moon Features.
This great company ruled the world of direct-to-video horror in the early 90s, and brought a low-budget charm that was rapidly deteriorating in that dreary decade. With such guilty pleasures as Subspecies, Killjoy, and their knock-off of Marvel’s Doctor Strange called Doctor Mordrid, this next one came out at the height of their popularity, and remains one of their best.
The year is 1939, and André Toulon is a skilled puppet maker who comes across an old Egyptian formula that’s able create life out of inanimate matter. He gives this formula to his puppets, and it works, but the Nazis want it. In desperation, Toulon offs himself to protect the secret of artificial life from the Third Reich.
Fifty years goes by, and a bunch of psychics meet at a California Inn to investigate the suicide of one of their friends. It turns out that this friend found Toulon’s puppets, a diary containing formula-making instructions, and he used it to give the puppets life before staging his own self-termination.
These puppets start killing his friends one-by-one, and he eventually reveals himself as the puppet master, but screws up by declaring that he no longer needed their assistance. They turn on him, kill him, dump a leach into his mouth, walk away from the whole scene, and now you know what happened in the first Puppet Master movie.
The newly liberated puppets Tunneler, Leech Woman, Jester, Pinhead and my/everybody’s homeboy Blade go to the grave of their old master André Toulon (Steve Welles), and use the green Egyptian elixir to bring him back to life for further instructions (like all puppets do!). Already awake, he decides to continue his work, and also introduces an impressive new puppet to the gang, the extremely badass Torch.
Meanwhile, parapsychologist Carolyn Bramwell (Elizabeth Maclellan) is sent to the California Inn to investigate the mysterious death of a person from the first movie who had their brains pulled out of their nose with a hook, and she brings a crew of idiots along with her.
Going under the false name of Eriquee Chaneé at the Inn, Toulon believes that Carolyn is the reincarnation of his deceased wife, Elsa, and that’s enough for him start his next big resurrection project.
The reason why this one is on here instead of the first movie is because it’s better (in my professional opinion). Both are a fun watch, but Puppet Master II takes it up a fiery notch. The effects are cheesy, but the last I checked most cheese is delicious.
It’s the closest horror fans had to creature features at the end of the last century, and helped keep the genre alive to see the new millennium. This personal favorite, and the rest of the series, can be found on TUBI with no strings attached (except for the obstructive ads). In conclusion, here is a trailer:
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