Seed of Chucky (review)

Okay, dolls can be supercreepy when they're inanimate and merely staring at you from across a semidarkened bedroom. Pour a serial killer's deranged soul into one of those plastic nightmares, and the skin-crawlingness should go way up, right? But actually, Chucky (the voice of Brad Dourif: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) is way more funny -- in that buckets-of-blood kind of way -- than scary. And then there are the other, um, bodily fluids that, er, come into play in this new installment of the gore-galore annals of Chucky. In a story that folds and refolds in upon itself rather amusingly, Chucky and his bride, Tiffany (the voice of Jennifer Tilly: The Haunted Mansion), are playing themselves in a horror movie about the "urban legend" of killer dolls, when they decide to impregnate their human costar -- Jennifer Tilly, playing herself and sending up with abandon her ditzy-bombshell public persona -- with their offspring. It's not quite as illegal-in-Texas deviant as it could have been, but how a plastic doll is able to fill a sperm-specimen cup with, um, the appropriate material goes unexplored, for which I am very grateful. Meanwhile, the dolls' long-lost first child (voiced with a wicked hilarity by Billy Boyd: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World), who is also a plastic doll, if one possessed by a gentler soul than the 'rents', escapes a horrid life of ventriloquism in England only to discover the awful truth about Mummy and Daddy's fatal hobby. One wishes as much effort had been expended on the Hollywood-satire angle as is expended on the grossout angle -- this is the squishiest, slipperiest, most disgusting movie of the year -- but there's a certain charm in the gleeful illogic of this cheerfully absurd flick. And with overt references to the baddest of bad movies -- Boyd's doll has some gender issues that Ed Wood would understand -- it's clear that this one has no intention of being mistaken for an Oscar hopeful.