No Surrender Cinema: Chucky (Season 2)
As I sit here and write this review, I’m only a few hours removed from carving a Thanksgiving turkey and slicing up a variety of pies for family members. While I hope that all of you reading this enjoyed your holiday, I’m using my downtime tonight to not only recover from some slight overindulgence, but to talk about slicing and carving of an entirely different kind. The curtain closed on Season 2 of Chucky on Thanksgiving Eve, ending the latest chapter in the story of the three foot terror…or did it? Spoilers abound, so enter this edition of No Surrender Cinema at your own risk!
If you saw my review of Episode 1 for the current season (and if you didn’t, shame on you), you’d know all about the trouble that our heroes have found themselves in this season. Jake, Devon, and Lexy take the fall for the death of Jake’s foster brother Gary, an act which was actually committed by Chucky. Since no one will believe the three, they’re sent off to Incarnate Lord, a Catholic school that just so happens to be the alma matter of one Charles Lee Ray! Chucky’s endless assaults have fractured the spirits of the three youngsters, with a rift growing between Jake and Devon and Lexy becoming addicted to pills. As if these poor kids haven’t been overflowing with trauma for the past year, Chucky is still on the loose, and having all three of his current targets confined to one location is going to make things much easier.
Did I say Chucky was still on the loose? I meant Chuckies, in the plural sense. It turns out that Andy Barclay running the truck full o’ Chucks off the road managed to take most, but not all Chucky dolls out. This was one of my favorite parts of the season, because rather than just Chucky Numero Uno stalking and slashing, we were introduced to several Chucky variants! There was the Chucky that the kids managed to capture and break the sadistic spirit of, turning the murderous doll into “Good Chucky”, a true Good Guy in every sense of the word that protected his friends and sprung into action against one of the other Chucky dolls. That variant in particular was Chucky Prime, a bigger, badder version of Chucky that looked like the type of Chucky doll Vince McMahon would have signed to a WWE contract. Then there was The Colonel, a bald Good Guy doll that spoke with a Southern twang and treated his vendetta against the kids, as well as Andy Barclay, as an act of war. By the time Chucky Season 2 was over, I think there were as many Chucky dolls in featured roles as there were actual humans!
Speaking of the humans, aside from our heroes, mostly everyone else in the cast that had beating hearts only served to fall victim to Chucky’s wrath at some point. One of the nuns takes a heart attack when Chucky makes his first appearance at Incarnate Lord, a nice nod to the way Chucky scared Colonel Cochrane to death in Child’s Play 3. Nadine, Trevor, an old classmate of Lexy’s who also goes to Incarnate Lord, has a hole punched through his torso Mortal Kombat style by Chucky Prime. Nadine, Lexy’s roommate who ends up as an ally to her, Jake, and Devon, gets on the bad side of Good Chucky’s dueling personalities. Even Andy finds himself on the sharp end of Chucky’s knife once again when it’s discovered that he’s been held captive by The Colonel and tortured relentlessly, much how we found Andy to be torturing the original Chucky doll back in Cult of Chucky.
As enjoyably evil as he is, Chucky isn’t the only one with blood on his hands. The ongoing saga of Tiffany in Jennifer Tilly’s body becomes more meta than ever before with an episode dedicated to her, complete with guest appearances from her Bound co-stars Joe Pantoliano and Gina Gershon, and Jennifer’s real life sister, actress Meg Tilly. The episode, played out like an old time murder mystery, was chock full of inside jokes and references to Tilly’s body of work, along with the notable names hamming it up by playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Tiffany’s further descent into madness also leads to the revelation that the “real” Jennifer Tilly (in this universe, last seen in Seed of Chucky) is now trapped inside the Tiffany doll, which leads to scenes where Tilly is literally arguing with herself. While we’re on the subject of Seed of Chucky, Season 2 finally returns Chucky and Tiffany’s androgynous offspring Glen (or Glenda) to the franchise as a pair of gender-fluid human twins unaware of the truth of their past. The pair return home to reunite with their mother in the midst of her anguish (not to mention that she still has quadruple amputee Nica Pierce in captivity in her home), and it’s not long before they are thrust into the mix of Chucky and Tiffany’s homicidal rampage.
Even with 7 films under its belt before the Chucky series premiered on cable, the franchise wasn’t known for much in the way of creative kills. That’s one avenue where the Chucky TV show easily succeeds, because with the relaxed limitations here in 2022, the show is able to go to lengths that the prior films could have only dreamed of. The perfect example of this is the death of Father Bryce late in Season 2, where actor Devon Sawa’s character explodes into pieces in a sequence that gets replayed over and over again as part of the broadcast. The creative forces behind Chucky know where their bread is buttered, and when gore is called for, they get it right every time. Father Bryce’s death is one of those scenes that I fully expect to see go down in history as a legendary meme, right up there with the original head-popping climax of Scanners. Those same relaxed rules and regulations also let the writers let loose with the language, a point that gets brought up in another meta moment where Chucky is hosting his own TV show and, realizing he hasn’t killed or cussed at all yet, stabs WWE superstar Liv Morgan while shouting the F word repeatedly. We even get a few episodes where the very first words uttered are “Last week on fucking Chucky…“, so the writers are taking advantage of getting their favorite curse words in (within reason) wherever they can.
I will admit that there were a few points this season where things got a little confusing with all the jumping around, and the setting of Incarnate Lord seemed to be done more as a parody of modern religion versus having an unfamiliar, potentially creepy location for our heroes to battle their pint sized plastic foe. It was nothing that a quick push of the rewind button couldn’t solve, but my personal favorite part of the season came at the tail end, where all of our characters united to triumph over Chucky once and for all. That led to another nice nod to the past, when a victorious Andy and his foster sister Kyle (Christine Elise) were shown leaving, only for a flashback to the end of Child’s Play 2 where they two exited the Good Guys factory as the sole survivors of a Chucky encounter. The final battle with Chucky at Incarnate Lord claimed the lives of several main characters, but just when you thought things were going so well for everyone…boom! The finale for Season 2 comes, takes everything we just saw in the past 9 episodes, and kicks it right in the nuts! A slight time jump has our remaining characters feeling a little more at ease, but the threat of Chucky is still looming, and before Christmas is over there will be a few twists and turns that will have this Child’s Play fan anxiously awaiting Season 3.
Chucky is currently streaming on Peacock and On Demand.
