The first Child’s Play had a secret.
The sequel doesn’t.
We already know Chucky is alive. We know Charles Lee Ray is inside the doll. We know Andy Barclay was telling the truth.
Child’s Play 2 doesn’t bother rebuilding that mystery.
It rebuilds Chucky instead.
So what happens when the killer doll no longer has to spend half the movie pretending to be a doll?
He gets to become Chucky.
That’s the biggest difference between the two films. The original gets plenty of mileage from uncertainty. Is Andy imagining things? Did the doll really move? When will somebody finally believe him?
By the sequel, that question is gone.
Andy believes.
We believe.
The adults still don’t.
That makes Andy’s situation nastier than it first appears. He survived Chucky, but survival didn’t put his life back together. His mother is gone, he’s been placed with a foster family, and every adult around him treats the truth like evidence that something is wrong with him.
Then somebody brings another Good Guy doll into the house.
Brutal.
Alex Vincent plays Andy differently this time. He doesn’t have to discover that Chucky is dangerous. He recognizes the threat immediately.
The problem is that he has already learned what happens when he tells people the truth.
Chucky knows that too.
And Brad Dourif gets much more room to enjoy him.
The first movie gradually reveals Chucky’s personality. Child’s Play 2 lets it loose. He’s sarcastic, impatient, and increasingly furious that transferring his soul into one small kid has become such a pain in the ass.
The doll can still be creepy sitting silently in the corner.
Now there’s also a personality waiting behind that plastic face.
The puppetry makes the difference. Chucky moves with more confidence. His expressions are broader. The movie is less interested in hiding what he can do.
He doesn’t just move anymore.
He performs.
That could have made him less frightening.
Instead, it makes him Chucky.
Kyle helps the movie in a different way. Christine Elise gives Andy someone who understands what it’s like to live in a house where adults make the rules and kids deal with the consequences. She doesn’t believe him immediately, but once the evidence becomes impossible to ignore, the movie doesn’t waste forever making her argue about it.
She gets involved.
And then Child’s Play 2 arrives at the Good Guy factory.
It’s the perfect place to finish what the sequel has been doing all along.
Chucky is suddenly surrounded by thousands of versions of himself.
Plastic heads. Empty eyes. Assembly lines. Boxes full of identical Good Guys waiting to be shipped somewhere else.
Everything in that factory says Chucky should be interchangeable.
Except by now he’s anything but.
As the machinery tears him apart, the cute Good Guy disguise disappears piece by piece. He loses a hand. His body gets mangled. The harmless toy Andy was originally supposed to trust becomes increasingly impossible to recognize.
And the factory just keeps producing perfect new ones around him.
That’s what makes the setting more than a cool place for a finale.
The company can manufacture another doll.
It can make another face.
It can put another Good Guy in another box.
But it can’t make another Chucky.
So what happens when Chucky stops hiding?
The mystery disappears.
The personality takes its place.
Child’s Play proved the doll was alive.
Child’s Play 2 made sure we’d never mistake him for just another doll again.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
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