The first Child's Play made $44 million on a budget of just $9 million, and so it should come as no surprise to learn that a sequel was given the green light almost immediately. A change in studio ownership put things on hold for two years, however, when the new company in charge of United Artists decided that they didn't want to make horror films (they collapsed in 1991, which should really be an object lesson as to where the quick cash was in Hollywood at the time). The movie rights hung in limbo for a while then, until Universal acquired them with the help of none other than Steven Spielberg, and so Child's Play 2 was released in 1990, exactly two years to the day that the first film had been released.
Two years after the events of the first film, Andy Barclay is now eight years old and living in foster care, his mother having been committed to a mental institution for sticking to the story about the murderous doll possessed by a dead serial killer (the cops who also saw all of this decided not to back up her story). He is taken in by new foster parents Phil and Joanne Simpson - Joanne seems nice enough, but Phil seems rather irritated by children and is very strict to Andy and their other foster, teenage girl Kyle. Andy is also sticking to the story of Chucky being alive and evil, which causes some problems at first when he finds a Good Guys doll in his new room, but he tries to move on for the sake of his new foster parents. Unfortunately for all concerned, the company which made the Good Guys dolls managed to get hold of Chucky's mostly-destroyed doll body and rebuilt it, to try to stave off shareholder concerns and bad publicity, and the moment Chucky is fully rebuilt he's straight back to killing people and searching for Andy so they can finally play that game of "Hide the Soul". With no-one believing Andy's claims that Chucky alive and trying to possess him and kill everyone, how will Charles Lee Ray be stopped this time?
I find myself questioning whether or not it was originally meant to be a whole two years since the events of the first film in this movie. It feels much more like it was originally meant to only be a few months, but with the rights limbo and everything things got stretched out and when they were finally able to start shooting they decided to try to keep things in real time - something which was totally disregarded in the next film but we'll get to that tomorrow. Regardless, events in Child's Play 2 take place over roughly the same time period of the first movie - about three days. That might seem like a pretty compact timeline, but remember, most of the Friday the 13th and Halloween movies take place in one night, so Chucky's still doing things at quite a relaxed pace for a movie slasher.
I think this movie is also where Chucky's status as a horror movie icon is solidified as well. Chucky gets to be a lot more creative in this movie, both in kills and in one-liners, and of course Brad Dourif gets to screech, cackle and generally chew up the scenery despite not being on set for the film because he recorded all of his lines ahead of time so that they could match the doll's animatronics to the words. I also noted that nearly all of the people Chucky kills this time around are pretty unpleasant people - particularly the school teacher, which seems worse than what's actually shown because of the way its shot, with the camera pulling away from the window as we see Chucky's hand coming down repeatedly to beat her to death with the ruler; and Phil, whose understated death, even with Chucky's laid-back quip of, "How's it hanging?" seems quite deserved - which probably also did its part to help turn Chucky into an iconic killer a la Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees.
The film's climactic act in the toy factory also feels incredibly appropriate given the subject matter of the film overall, and in fact writer Don Mancini had originally wanted this to occur in the first Child's Play, but it got cut from the final script. It just makes sense to defeat an evil possessed doll in a toy factory that's mass-producing hundreds of him. I personally also found the death of the worker via plastic eye placement to be a particularly creepy image, akin to what you might think Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? might look like if he hadn't been melted with turpentine. And of course, there's Chucky's protracted and surprisingly graphic death, where he ends up looking like what Fisher-Price might put out if they made a preschool toy of the alien from The Thing.
Child's Play 2 is more of a horror-comedy than its predecessor, which pretty much played it straight for most of the film. This time around Chucky gets to grow more as a character, via quips and some creative killings that we'd see more and more in the later films. The tension is lessened, at least partly because this time around we know exactly what's going on with the Good Guys doll, but the film is still solidly entertaining, as well as being very much a film of its time period (late 80s-early 90s, that transitional period when horror films were still good, but just before a lot of the straight-to-video dreck of the 90s started coming out).
3.5 out of 5.
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