It has now been 8 years since Chucky’s second death, and the Good Guy dolls company have re-opened their abandoned factory. As Chucky’s “corpse“ is being removed, a drop of his blood falls into the molten plastic which is used to produce the new Good Guy dolls, which of course gives him a new body so he can start killing and cursing once again.
Since 8 years have passed, Andy is now 16 years old, and he has been sent to Kent Military School. And yes, his mother is still in the loony bin. At this military school he befriends an 8 year old boy named Ronald Tyler, another cadet named Harold Aubrey, and the spunky female cadet Kristin De Silva whom of course becomes his love interest. His only struggle so far is the sadistic lieutenant colonel Brett C. Shelton, who bullies the cadets and really has one out for Andy. This not nothing compared to the threat of Chucky, who of course has managed to find out where Andy is and gets himself shipped to him as a package. Chucky is in for a surprise, though, as it isn’t Andy who ends up opening the package, but 8 year old Tyler who really, really wants his own Good Guy doll. Chucky decides to tell Tyler his secret, which will give him the opportunity to use a voodoo soul-swapping ritual to take over the kid’s body. None of this goes exactly after Chucky’s plan, but as always he’s determined enough to do anything to get his way.
Child’s Play 3 from 1991 is the third film in the franchise, once again written by Don Mancini but this time directed by Jack Bender, with David Kirschner as executive producer. And this one received mostly negative reviews from critics, and ended up being the lowest-grossing film in the series. The movie was made very shortly after the second film, giving it a tight schedule. It was filmed at the Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, while the rest was filmed in California at Los Angeles and the Universal Studios Lot, with the carnival scenes shot in Valencia, California.
It also became somewhat notorious in the UK as it allegedly inspired a real-life murder of a child named James Bulger, where the killers were two ten year olds. It was said that they had imitated a scene where one of Chucky’s victims were splashed with blue paint, but this was just a rumor mainly based on that the father of one of the boys had rented the film some months earlier. The boy in question had most likely not even seen the movie since he had not been living with his father at the time. What can you say…people always try to blame shit on movies, games and other media.
When it comes to franchises, there will always be those movies considered the “better“ and “worse“ ones. Sometimes you have a dip and rise of varying quality, while other times you have a constant nosedive (like what happened to the Hellraiser franchise, where pretty much none of the movies after the third one seemed like they were made to be Hellraiser movies at all, and the Hellraiser elements felt like they had been shoehorned in). I guess we can say that in Chucky’s case, the character definitely feels more important than the story at this point. And I’m going to guess that this is why Child’s Play 3 was the last movie in the franchise to have “Child’s Play“ in the title, and the upcoming ones were always titled Chucky-something-or-other. And that’s very understandable.
What’s mainly different this time around, is that Andy is now closer to becoming an adult. Thus the movie spends some time with how he interacts with the other people, including his love interest, all of which isn’t that much of interest to be honest. You just wanna see Chucky messing around and killing people. The animatronics and effects are still really good, and Chucky looks more menacing than ever. And while the death scenes are a bit mixed (there’s one where a guy literally just gets a heart attack because he’s so scared by seeing Chucky), I loved the mean spirited garbage truck scene.
Many seem to consider Child’s Play 3 to be the “black sheep“ of the franchise, and while I personally find it far from the best, I still had a good time with it.
Director: Jack Bender
Writer: Don Mancini
Country & year: USA, 1991
Actors: Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers, Travis Fine, Dean Jacobson, Brad Dourif, Peter Haskell, Dakin Matthews, Andrew Robinson, Burke Byrnes
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103956/
