Child’s Play 3 Review
Posted by Darkness on July 9, 2012 (Updated: 21-Aug-2023)
Don’t Fuck with the Chuck.
Child’s Play 3 takes place 8 years after the events in Child’s Play 2. The toy company is releasing a new line of Good Guy dolls and Chucky’s remains from the previous film gets recycled in a creepy scene at the beginning. The first Good Guy doll off the assembly line is given to the CEO as a present. Before we know it, Chucky is on the rampage once again and tracks down 16-year old Andy Barclay who has now been sent to a military academy. When Chucky gets there, he finds a new friend in a kid called Tyler and tries to transfer his soul into him.
The movie is directed by Jack Bender who is probably more well known now due to his directorial work on LOST. Don Mancini returns as the writer. Mancini didn’t have a whole lot of time to create the screenplay here. As soon as Child’s Play 2 was released at cinemas, the studio greenlighted a third to be released the following year. Child’s Play 3 is reportedly Mancini’s least favourite Chucky movie due to how fast he had to write the script. I’m not a big fan of the military academy setting but I’ll give credit to Mancini for trying something different with the movie.
There are lots of new cast members. Justin Whalin (New Adventures of Superman) plays Andy Barclay while Perry Reeves plays his love interest De Silva and Dean Jacobson plays his room-mate Whitehurst. Travis Fine plays Shelton who is your typical bad-ass military commander. He’s incredibly obnoxious so I was glad when he was killed off. I only wish it’d have been Chucky to kill him. Jeremy Sylvers plays Tyler who is central to Chucky’s plan. He’s no Alex Vincent and he does get a bit annoying after a while. They’re all fine actors I guess. I just wish more time had been given to Chucky rather than what Andy was getting up to in the academy. One funny character is the barber who seems to have an obsession with cutting people’s hair off. It was amusing seeing him put Chucky in his chair and is about to cut his hair when Chucky comes alive and slits his throat.
Brad Dourif returns to voice Chucky and once again is great. As with the previous movie, the humour is ramped up a notch in this picture. Chucky says some funny one-liners: “Nothing like a strangulation to get the circulation going.” and “Don’t fuck with the Chuck” are among them. I must admit I do like the humour because it sort of compensates for the poor script. The special effects have definitely improved since the last movie. They supposedly used computers to help with the lip sync this time around to make things a bit more realistic.
There are a lot of unique deaths. The CEO is strangled, the dustbin man is crushed to death, the barber has his throat slashed and the military leader is scared to death. For the war games, Chucky switches the ammunition in the guns for live rounds and Shelton is killed in the crossfire. The climax of the film takes place at a carnival. Chucky and Tyler end up inside a ghost train. One moment I love is when part of Chucky’s face gets sliced off. You can see his eyeball, teeth and blood. It just looks horrific. I have to hand it to special effects crew for that. After running around, Tyler, Andy and Chucky end up on the top of a tall structure and Chucky is finally killed when Andy throws him into an electric fan.
Child’s Play 3 received a lot of flak when it came out. It got a lot of negative reviews. Fans and critics alike didn’t like it and it didn’t make much money at the box office. It’s long been considered the worst Child’s Play movie in the series but that award goes to Seed of Chucky. I just wish we’d have had a better setting with a decent story here.