The Chucky franchise has followed in the footsteps of many other horror franchises out there, such as Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Friday the 13th. It starts with a pretty great movie that’s a hit, then starts to see diminishing returns with increasingly worse sequels. At some point, these series also seem to stop taking themselves as seriously and cross into a really goofy domain, and that’s where we’re at with Bride of Chucky. Child’s Play 2 and 3 might have been a bit less serious in tone than the first movie, but Bride of Chucky is where the series starts going into outright comedy by focusing on Chucky’s personality over anything else.

If you’ve seen anything about Bride of Chucky, or as you can probably see from the title of the movie, this entry centers around Chucky getting a mate. So, the idea here is that the writers have retconned in a girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray, the serial killer whose spirit is inside of the Chucky doll. Why haven’t we seen or heard anything from her until a decade later? Who knows. However, her name is Tiffany, and she resurrects her ex-lover by finding Chucky’s remains and piecing him back together. Chucky comes back to life, and there ends up being some bad blood between the two. So, Chucky turns Tiffany into a doll too, and so now we have two killer dolls on the loose. As usual, though, the plan here is to find a way to turn them back into humans, and so the two find a young couple to try to trick into stealing their bodies.

I find that your enjoyment level for a movie like this is going to depend on what you want out of a horror franchise. If you hate when movies like this start to devolve into comedic territory, then you’re probably not going to like Bride of Chucky very much. I actually like campy movies though, and so for me Bride of Chucky is a step forward for the series. I’ll take a movie that’s self-aware of how dumb it is and makes me laugh about it over a movie like Child’s Play 3 that takes itself very seriously and is just bad for it. For anyone reading this review, I have a simple litmus test to determine whether Bride of Chucky is worth your time. Minor spoilers here, but there is a scene where Chucky and Tiffany have sex in doll form. It’s not super graphic or anything, but it’s definitely there in the movie. Hearing this, what is your reaction? If you’re like me, you’ll find this hilarious, and enjoy watching the movie. If you find this repugnant or stupid or anything like that…well then, Bride of Chucky probably isn’t the movie for you.

Now, the downside to a movie that’s stupid fun is that, at times the movie is just…well, stupid. It’s obviously best to watch this in a lens of not taking it too seriously, but even then there are just some moments that are dumb and go on for too long. Not every joke is going to hit, and so the movie just doesn’t work. There are also moments where the movie still does take itself seriously, and so this is just an awkward mix. While I did enjoy myself enough and think that the movie is worth it for the cheese factor, at the end of the day it’s still not a very good movie.

In the end, I think Bride of Chucky was the change of direction that the series needed at the time. The franchise did eventually start tapping into its horror roots more again in later entries, with a full-on horror reboot just on the horizon, but at this point I think the series just needed to lean into its goofy premise. We have a killer doll with a funny personality? Fuck it, let’s throw in a girl doll to double the fun. Of the previous entries in the franchise, I personally found it to not be as good as the first movie, but definitely better than the third. It’s more on the level of quality of Child’s Play 2, but for different reasons. It’s not the best entry in the series, but it was definitely a welcome change for what it was.

3/5