Child's Play 3 (1991)

“And what are children, after all, but consumer trainees?”

Well, I suppose we’d better get the James Bulger connection debunked to start with. Jon Venables’ dad once hired this from a video store and didn’t show it to his son. That’s it. No connection. Don’t believe what you read in The Sun. Anyway, this is the best Child’s Play film so far.

Chucky is resurrected, with an admirable economy of storytelling, before and during the opening titles and we then jump into scenes of deliciously evil ‘80’s businessmen straight out of Robocop. They are delightfully amoral in deciding to once again market the “Good Guy” dolls in spite of everything that happened. All that matters is the bottom line, and Mr Sullivan, our cartoon baddie of a CEO, sneeringly puffs on his cigar and generally fulfils all the stereotypes. Naturally, he is one of Chucky’s first victims. The quote up there sums up what children mean to this apparent bachelor for whom family life and human contact mean nothing. Who’d have thought it? Another Hollywood film with a seemingly left wing message.

Andy is now sixteen. He’s aged suspiciously quickly in the last year. He is now at one of those horrible military schools that exist in America and, if this film’s depiction of what happens in them is remotely accurate, need to be banned immediately on grounds of child abuse. I hope that nothing like this happens in reality.

Still, this is the perfect setting for Chucky to embark on the usual fun and games. There are plenty of nasty bullies present so we can, with a clear conscience, cheer on Chucky as he gets them to snuff it. Chucky is as evil as ever, arranging for some silly war game to be enlivened with the use of real bullets, although the creators of this film seem to have some rather odd ideas about how long you can safely hold on to a grenade after you’ve pulled the pin, Chucky being a doll and all that.

It’s a shame that Sheldon doesn’t get a more gruesome demise, but I was pleased to see how the barber copped it. He wouldn’t have liked my hair. The bastard.

The conclusion, at a rather creepy amusement park, is not quite the spectacle that concluded the previous film so magnificently, but the ending is still worth waiting for. Sadly, there’s another tragic ending for Andy, as once again he’s led away by police to be blamed for Chucky’s crimes. He’s had a hard life, that lad.