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| Mom and Grampy |
4-2-00 - This
year’s Academy Awards ceremony has come and gone, and the best thing I can say
about it is that Billy Crystal was funny for about twelve minutes. After that
it was the usual, ridiculously long awards ceremony. “American Beauty” won the
most awards, and that lady who played a man in a woman’s body in “Boys Don’t
Cry” won for best female lead ... two films which again prove that one need not
spend eighty million dollars to produce a winning movie. On that note, I DID see part of “Bride of Chucky” the
other night on The Movie Network, and why this movie was never nominated for an
Oscar is a mystery to me. Here’s what I gleaned, from the twenty-five minutes I
watched...
Chucky is
a little plastic doll who somehow - and sadly, I did not see any of the
previous Chucky masterpieces - had a malevolent human spirit transferred into
his lifeless little body. He’s quite the little devil, with his mischievous
expression, patchwork of facial scars, and diabolical habit of brutally
slaughtering people. By the time I began watching the movie, Chucky had already put a few notches on his belt. He was
imprisoned in a cage by a very mean woman with whom he exhibited some kind of
enigmatic, sado-masochistic tension. The
plot thickens when this caretaker buys Chucky a girl doll to be his bride.
Spurned by this callous rejection, Chucky throws a hissy fit, saws through the bars of his cage with his
new doll bride’s wedding ring, then attacks his shedevil caretaker while she’s
taking a bath. Though she puts up a pretty good fight, Chucky prevails by throwing a live electrical
appliance into the bathwater. Sparks fly, she
convulses, thrashes about, and finally, after a very entertaining
fifteen or twenty second medley of blood-curdling death screams, she
reluctantly expires. Now the film really
takes off. Chucky tries unsuccessfully
to transfer the shedevil’s malevolent spirit into the body of his plastic bride
by uttering some ineffectual incantations, but not until he plucks the eyeballs
out of the dead shedevil’s head and plugs them into the doll does the doll “become”
the shedevil. The transformation is now
complete, and Chucky’s new bride “becomes”
the personality of his now-expired and somewhat charred shedevil caretaker. Are
you with me? Concurrently, the doll bride undergoes some cosmetic changes,
which make her to look a like a Marilyn Manson fan. Chucky now has the love of
his life, and off they go on their honeymoon of murder and mayhem. B.O.C. proves to be infinitely more creative
and even more devilishly homicidal than Chucky, and our hero realizes he has
finally found his soul mate. The lovemaking scenes were, well, unique.
Usually,
in these kinds of high school “slash and screw” movies, there are a series of
violent murders, typically with a kitchen knife, pick ax, chainsaw, scissors,
railroad spike, garden shears, or whatever other sharp pointy object is handy.
That gets old fast. These little dolls are much more creative. My favorite
murder scene involves Chucky’s bride and two of the more unsympathetic
characters in the film. While the two characters are having sex, Chucky’s bride
somehow causes the ceiling-mounted mirror over their waterbed to shatter, thus
showering the two with cascading shards of broken glass. The piece de
resistance is the Sam Peckinpah slow motion shot of the waterbed exploding in a
maelstrom of bloody water, engulfing the two flailing victims. Kudos to the
director of Bride of Chucky ... this one is a keeper.
You can
take your Oscars and shove them where the sun don’t shine. I’ll take “Bride of
Chucky” over “Snow Falling on Cedars” any day. There are
so many good movies I have yet to
see. For instance, “I Dismember Mama” or
ANY of the “Hellraisers,” “C.H.U.D” (cannibalistic humanoid underground
dwellers), etc.,etc. ... there just aren’t enough hours in the day to see everything
I want to see. Thank goodness for VCR’s!
And to the
people who organize the Academy Awards ceremony ... next year, will you please
give us the abridged version? Nobody
wants to sit through four hours of this tripe.
- Jamie Oppenheimer
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