Unlike a majority of the horror community, I hold absolutely no love for Chucky and the Child’s Play franchise, finding the whole thing rather dumb. So when I heard they were going to remake it, I could only react with a drawn-out yawn, so much so that I only recently viewed it on a random streaming channel.

And, you know, if I’m being honest, I kind of liked it.

Whereas the 1988 original film cast Brad Dourif as a serial killer who, using the dark power of Satan, transfers his murderous soul into the plastic body of the My Buddy-like doll Chucky — it was the ’80s and, I suppose, that’s the best we could do — this reboot, revamp and retelling instead turns Chucky into a deviously programmed doll with seriously damaged AI.

When a Vietnamese tech enters some bad codes in the doll’s internal computer out of spite, the now-monikered Buddi toy heads to America, a walking and talking app designed to help every aspect of your life for the rest of your life. When single mom Karen (a miscast Aubrey Plaza) brings home a defective Buddi toy for her deaf kid, Alex (Gabriel Bateman), everything from dead housecats to self-driving vehicular manslaughter occurs.

I’m pretty sure we all know by now the doll does it, right?

Voicing this incarnation of Chucky is Mark Hamill, who does a credible job, getting rid of Dourif’s smart-ass psycho sneer and, instead, giving Chucky an aura of murderous sympathy, with Chucky just doing as he was programmed (or not programmed) to do. It’s a plot point I’m sure pissed off many murder-loving misanthropes, but I dug it.

And while this Child’s Play was largely forgotten a couple of weeks after release — and apparently there’s a new television series featuring Chucky 1.0 on the horizon — this take was an honestly brave attempt to retell a story that has long desperately needed a new storyteller. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Many times in many horror films, whenever an Indigenous person is introduced, it’s typically because they can offer the always-white leads some sort of supernatural hokum to help defeat whatever spiritual evil is onscreen, typically leading to their mostly unceremonious and largely forgotten deaths.

The made-for-Shudder flick Blood Quantum, however, sends those tired stereotypes straight to hell with a Native-made and Native-cast zombie flick that, for once, actually puts Indigenous people in the heroic roles and Caucasians in their real-life historical contexts as colonial terrorists and cowardly opportunists.

Sometime in the early 1980s on the Red Crow Reservation in Quebec, a fisherman’s catch of the day just won’t die, the constant flopping around the beginnings of an undead outbreak that, months later, has become a nationwide epidemic that, thank God, can’t kill Natives due to their strong Indigenous blood — at least that’s what’s implied.

As more and more whites come to the reservation for their protection, so do their freshly bitten. With even their best efforts to maintain some semblance of control, a mass infection eventually runs — or, rather, shuffles — rampant on the rez, with fresh Caucasian zombies wreaking havoc as Red Crow warriors armed with shotguns, machetes and even a chainsaw do their best to contain it.

They fail. I can’t be the only person to see the historical parallels, can I?

Though there are a few moments when the movie is slightly hampered by an obviously low budget, Blood Quantum still makes for an effective chiller, in large part to the casting of Michael Greyeyes, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Forrest Goodluck, as well as Indigenous director Jeff Barnaby for having the absolute resilience and terrifying skill to finally make a Native horror flick and get it fucking right.

(As for the title, in case you’re not Native, it’s the percentage the white government uses to measure and determine the amount of one’s Indigenous ancestry and heritage.) —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.