CHILD'S PLAY IV: CHUCKY GETS LUCKY

Directed by Ronny Yu

Starring Brad Dourif, Jennifer Tilly

Universal Pictures

It is a rare movie that makes you stand up and cheer as the credits roll. Bride of Chucky is such a movie.

Horror movies these days tend to be self-referential disasters, as though knowing and admitting that a movie is boring and predictable makes it less so. Not Bride of Chucky. Miraculously, this ridiculous gem has made it through the po-mo silliness that infects so many movies these days and is one of the most entertaining films of the year, easily besting such pathetic recent horror offerings as Halloween: H20 and those lame Screams.

The joys of Chucky are pure and simple. There's this doll, see, and he's possessed by the soul of a serial killer and so he kills a lot of people in improbable ways. The sheer inanity of this premise ensures entry into B-movie heaven, but as this is the fourth of the Child's Play movies (it's been 10 years since the first) something new is added: Chucky's ex-girlfriend is turned into an equally evil and equally plastic doll. So there are all your standard horror movie tropes--"chilling" music, ridiculous quick cuts, and so on--but it's two dolls causing the mayhem. The brilliance of this premise will not be appreciated during our lifetime.

These evil dolls could, of course, be causing more mayhem in real bodies so they try to switch into the bodies of two Noxzema models by obtaining a magic medallion buried along with Chucky's human corpse (not that this matters much to the movie or makes much sense). The teens that fall into this trap are completely immemorable, cast as they were by looks.

The girl gets docked a point for having been in a Gerard Depardieu movie, but since, to quote from the film's Web site, "she appeared with Steven Segal [sic, amusingly] in the action thriller Under Siege 2, in the pivotal role of Segal's [sic] niece who is kidnapped as bait when terrorists seize the train she is on," all is more or less forgiven. She is joined by some `90210'-clone from a soap opera. Their best friend is a stereotypical gay guy ("Oh pooh!"), played by some other guy you've never heard of.

Chucky's girl (pre-Barbie-izing) is played by the breasts of the breathtakingly talentless and Academy-Award-nominated Jennifer Tilly. Whoever made the decision to cast the most annoying voice in movies in a mostly vocal role ought to be subject to Ms. Tilly's audio-book recording of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary.

Conversely, the voice of Chucky belongs to the talented and Academy-Award-nominated Brad Dourif, who occasionally sounds like he's voicing Ren and Stimpy. But none of this matters.

Unlike most horror movies these days, Chucky has a smart, talented director in Hong Kong's Ronny Yu, who also directed the excellent Cantonese-language Bride With White Hair. Chucky's Hong Kong action-movie heritage is evident in the extreme violence and good, lame humor present. Everything bursts into flames and blows up: a police car, a RV, a waterbed (no joke) and much more. A person hit by a Mack truck is completely atomized. John Ritter (as the police chief out to separate our teen lovers) is murdered horribly--twice! A goth who wears Speedos (played by another damned Arquette sibling) gets his piercings ripped out painfully.

And for those of you wondering about the truth of Chucky's tagline--"Chucky Gets Lucky!"--it is brought to vivid, hilarious life in one of the weirdest, most demented scenes to be found in any American movie in years. And Chucky has one of the best endings of any movie in years, too.

What elevates Chucky into the sublime, though, is the little things: Jennifer Tilly thrusting her pelvis in perhaps the least subtle come-on in screen history, the movie's weird obsession with killing people by electrocution, the frequent unexplained continuity errors, its pointless and empty pop-culture references which fall endearingly flat, and pearls of dialogue like, "I'll kill anybody, but I'll only sleep with someone I love" and "Martha Stewart can kiss my shiny plastic butt."

This is the kind of movie where two "swingers" suggest a foursome with our teen runaways (just married in a sequence which cuts between another hilarious murder and the ceremony, a la Godfather's baptism), only to be murdered in most bizarre fashion by two satanic dolls. The dolls then tongue and screw, all the while making jokes about being anatomically correct and using "rubbers." (Cuz they're plastic, get it?) Needless to say, this is a special movie.

The only frightening thing in the movie is the soundtrack, filled as it is with the dreadful musical stylings of Insane Clown Posse and Rob Zombie. With just a sprinkling of self-consciousness and heaps of bad taste (the bad taste in this movie easily surpasses that found in John Waters's recent, limp Pecker), director Yu has made a B-movie that can easily stand next to such giants as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Plan 9 From Outer Space and Troma classics like Surf Nazis Must Die and Class of Nuke'em High. The concept is not just perfectly ridiculous--that didn't save the dull, dull, dull Leprechaun 4: In Space-- but is also perfectly executed, with humor and style.

I saw Chucky the way it was meant to be seen: in an empty theater on a Monday night, with some friends, and a bunch of drunk guys and four-year-olds yelling at the screen. It was the most fun I've had since I came to Massachusetts.