CURSE OF CHUCKY (2013)

After efforts to reboot the Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Scream, and Texas Chain Saw series have fallen through pretty pathetically, it's good to see that Chucky is still Chucky.  The killer Good Guy Doll™ has still got it.

While many horror series pass through different hands and different approaches, Curse of Chucky benefits from familiarity and limited ambition.  It sticks with what has worked about the concept.  The series thus far has had the same producer and writer, and Brad Dourif has voiced the titular killer in each one.  Curse continues the tradition by keeping things spare, lean, and simple.

Nica (Fiona Dourif, Brad's daughter), bound to a wheelchair, lives with her mother Sarah (Chantal Quesnelle) in an old, decaying mansion that looks carted in from a James Whale film.  One afternoon she receives a strange package from an unclear sender.  Inside: well, you know.  Terror is soon pursuing Nica and Sarah in their labyrinthine house, as well as Nica's sister Barb (Danielle Busutti), her husband Ian (Brennan Elliott), their young daughter Alice (Summer Howell), and their au pair Jill (Maitland McConnell).

None of what happens here is groundbreaking, but writer-director Don Mancini creates believable characters with real relationships that exist for reasons other than to be chopped up.  They have real family troubles that are connected to the impending Chucky massacre, and not artificially built like many horror films' stabbing fodder.  The performances are also exceptionally good: the younger Dourif makes for a tenacious heroine, and Elliott a likably boorish male foil.  A Martinez also appears as the family's priest, and factors into one of the movie's more gleefully nasty scenes.

Mancini, in his second feature as director, shows a sure hand at suspense.  He makes great use of the setting, which helpfully includes a leaky roof, a winding staircase and a creaky old elevator.  Even though he's been with the series for six entries now (and has only written two screenplays that aren't Chucky-related), he doesn't seem to have grown tired of it.

The elder Dourif, too, is a major reason that Chucky is still as effective a presence as he is.  Chucky's voice has a unique clownish menace that can be at once enticing for children and disturbing.  It's also nice that Dourif gets to appear on screen this time around, too, as Chucky's former human self, serial killer Charles Lee Ray.  And if his appearance was not inspired by Tommy Wiseau, it should have been.

The movie sags quite a bit in its third act.  Its climax is diluted by backstories and flashbacks which don't contribute much to the story.  The little girl disappears for a long stretch for no particular reason.  And it ends a few too many times: I think you'll agree that there is one perfect moment where it ought to have cut to black, but it continues on for a few extraneous scenes, including one after the credits which strangely seems to negate the one that came before it.

*** out of ****