With the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises earning their own retrospective documentary features, a Child’s Play one was only a matter of time. Meet Living with Chucky, the first feature for Directors Guild of America student award winner Kyra Elise Gardner.
Was it necessary? Nope.
Am I glad it’s here? Yep.
Why is Chucky’s hair red? Watch.
Movie by movie, the doc chronologically covers this doll of a horror series. To no one’s shock, emphasis is placed on the 1988 film that started it all. Over the journey, creator Don Mancini recounts how his original script of Blood Buddy morphed into a surprise horror hit, then into simultaneous self-parody and LGBT advocacy. Notes Mancini, Bride of Chucky deliberately marks “when we made it pretty gay.”
John Waters turns up to extol his love of watching that film’s doll sex. Child’s Play 3 is barely mentioned — and its inadvertent controversy in Great Britain glossed over. The 2019 remake is included almost as an afterthought, but that may be for the best.
At the halfway point, we learn Living with Chucky bears dual meaning: We’ve lived with Chucky in our pop-culture consciousness for 35 years now, but Gardner literally lives with Chucky; her father, Tony, a Hollywood makeup effects and animatronics extraordinaire, has been a part of the franchise since 2004’s Seed of Chucky. While good-natured, the examination of her family’s and other families’ relationship to Chucky not only feels like a different film, but the lesser half.
Living with Chucky’s highest creative point resides in the first half’s framework, depicting all the movies — VHS, then DVD — atop a TV. When it’s time for one to be discussed by a talking head — Brad Dourif, Alex Vincent, Jennifer Tilly among them — we see that title plucked from the stack and inserted into the proper player. It’s such a simple conceit, yet brilliant. —Rod Lott