With Seed of Chucky, writer-director Don Mancini finally distances himself from the previous Chucky films and admits his true love for camp and homage. The first three Child’s Play films were routine slasher flicks. Bride of Chucky, on the other hand, was a playfully perverse step in the right direction, focusing on the love story between its two plastic serial murderers, Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif) and Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly). Seed of Chucky is so blatantly about these white trash plastic creatures, as well as their sexually ambiguous offspring Shitface, a.k.a. Glen or Glenda (Billy Boyd), that it asks us to place all sympathy with them.
We open with Glen/Glenda as an orphaned puppet boy working for the circus, narrating a la Pip from Great Expectations. In short order, the clever little urchin has made his way to Hollywood, where the inanimate Chucky and Tiffany dolls are being used in a film-within-the-film entitled Chucky Goes Psycho, starring Jennifer Tilly—playing herself in a self-deprecating “Am I fat?” performance. It’s not long before the demonic dolls are awakened and back to their favorite pastime. Macho man Chucky tries to make a man out of Glen/Glenda through a series of killing rituals, while star-struck Tiffany wants to transfer her soul into the body of the real Jennifer Tilly.
Mancini goes for as many lowbrow gags as he can pack in, so even when Seed of Chucky feels crass, inconsequential, sloppy, obvious, and stupid (which it does most of the time), it’s also anarchic, unembarrassed of itself, and endearingly goofy. Example: a tabloid reporter played by trash kingpin John Waters covertly snaps photos of Chucky masturbating to the pages of Fangoria. Waters is almost loveable when he quips, “God bless the little people!” Seed of Chucky may be disposable goods, but you’ve got to love a movie that spends an exhaustive amount of time on a subplot involving rap icon Redman playing himself as a hypocritical Mel Gibson evangelist type making a film about the Virgin Mary, though he’s not above using the casting couch on the road to salvation. In the great E.C. Comics tradition, Seed of Chucky lets the punishment fit the crime.
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