![]() Karen happily bestows the gift unto her son, Andy (Alex Vincent, six-years-old at the time of filming), a virtually friendless child who is absolutely wrapped up in the entire Good Guys franchise, watching the animated show religiously while owning such excessive things like the Good Guys Tool Set. The now-possessed Chucky doll eventually gets into the hands of loving single-mother Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks), who buys it for cheap off of a street peddler after her friend Maggie (Dinah Manoff) informs her that there’s a way to get the popular doll for cheap. The script went through three re-writes, with director Tom Holland’s final version integrating the element of voodoo, something that serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) is a fan of, and who practices on a Good Guy doll while bleeding in a Chicago toy store, transferring his life into the figure before dying at the hands of cop Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon). Don Mancini’s original screenplay (first titled Batteries Not Included and then changed to Bloody Buddy for legal reasons) capitalized on this fear, suggesting that there was something far more sinister lurking within these human-like creations. Of course, Child’s Play was released in 1988, and just one year prior, the animatronic-doll fever was in full swing. Chucky was one of many “Good Guys”, an off-shoot of a fictional TV series in which “Good Guys” pledged to be your child’s friend to the end, and the $100 Good Guy animatronic dolls were just starting to hit the market, causing a Furby-like frenzy among consumers. What made Child’s Play so profoundly scary to begin with was simply the very nature of Chucky himself: he was a child’s toy. This goes for Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and - of course - Child’s Play. Yet looking back, the first Halloween is a genuine masterpiece: an advanced course in cinematic horror, showing the paranoia and psychological dread can be far more fright-inducing than just “cool death sequences”. Though both of these franchises were running out of gas long before these moments, it was these specific events that showed more than anything else that some of the old horror strongholds had truly Jumped the Shark (or Nuked the Fridge, if you prefer). The Halloween franchise reached an untimely demise when, in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, Busta Rhymes shouted out “Trick-or-treat, motherfucker!” The Friday the 13th series lost it when 2001’s Jason X featured a young astronaut riding Jason’s metallic body through the Earth’s atmosphere like a bobsled. When a horror movie has been franchised to death, it’s often so easy to overlook what made audiences connect with the series in the first place.
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