Child's Play 2 Review
I don’t think I was ever meant to understand what made the 80s a cornucopia of ideas and imagination. Yeah, they gave us Reagan, an awful STD pandemic, the obvious 1981 events in the UK, The Chernobyl disaster, and the San Francisco earthquake, just to name a few that defined the era at its worst (and that’s just excluding morbid celebrity deaths). But in the ashes of these events we got pretty much everything mentioned in “I love the 80s”, from music to action movies and even toys in terms of Rubik’s cubes and, of course, video games. So naturally, for better and for worse (depending on your feelings towards the genre) horror movies were all but exempt. Some were very much trying to mature out of the 70s exploitation phase that preceded them, others just straight up found a way to bring it back in a manner that adapted with those times. From subtle films that made them all the more personal (and, by default, humanly relatable) like Friday the 13th or Heathers, to movies which straight out cut loose (pun probably intended given how the Bacon vehicle was released in this same era) with their ideas such as Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Hellraiser, Predator, An American Werewolf in London, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, to even movies that were good as one time deals like Night of the Comet, Killer Knows from Outer Space or pretty much anything adapted from that guy who’s state is famous for its main import on Lobsters, this decade had it in spades.
So if they ever made a time machine then the 80s would probably be the recommended era to take notes on in terms of how to unlock your creativity if not harness it. Which is why it hurts to remember how if the 80s were indeed about living in a more agreeably oblivious moment then the 90s would be more of a buzzkill for that era (like all succeeding decades are, really) despite still finding something relatively beautiful in the mundane. This is what Child’s Play 2 tries to do, all things considered. Make no mistake: the movie came out in 1990, so its production value is still based on a holdover of those same exuberant 80s. However, as I mentioned in my review of the first film, whatever charm and inspiration it was supposed to have ended once the “twist” was revealed.
It was really no different to when disco was born and died before its decade was even over (despite its equal debatability). As for the movie itself given how seriously it’s worth taking (especially if you make it long enough to see the image of Chucky talking with Joanne in the front seat of a car) then you realize this is just the first movie directed by the great Michael Cooney. Or, to wrap it up, feel free to make a better movie yourself, I'll even provide the title:
"Résumé of Chucky".