I must have seen Child’s Play 2 early in the 90s, one of my free rentals when I was working at a video store. But I hadn’t watched it since. But feeling a itch that needed a scratch I decided to dig into the franchise.

Child’s Play 2 sees poor Andy (Alex Vincent) put in a foster home after his mother is temporarily institutionalized (off-screen) following the events of the first film. So that introduces us to a whole new family… Hello Jenny Agutter!! And there’s Christine Elise in one of her first roles.

Andy is having some problems dealing with the horrors of the supernatural, considering he was menaced by a serial killer trapped in the form of Play Pal’s Good Guys Chucky Doll, voiced sinisterly by Brad Dourif.

The company puts Chucky back together, determined to get ahead of any bad press Andy and his mother can throw at them (though they were laughed off by the police). And surprise, surprise, Chucky awakes and starts to kill again.

He needs to find and sacrifice Andy before he is completely trapped in the doll’s form. So the hunt begins, in this very short film, by one hour twenty, the credits are about to run. Still, I do like that not only on this film, but all of them, the scripts come from the same person, Chucky’s creator Don Mancini.

Conveniently enough, there’s another Good Guys doll, which Andy hates, and Chucky replaces with himself. And, the body count starts to climb.

Andy, and his temporary foster-sister, Kyle (Elise) will have to find a way to stop Chucky (at least for this movie). And that leads them back to the Play Pal’s factory, which seems like a bit of a nod to the original Terminator film.

A lot of the film is shot from Andy’s perspective, the camera kept low, at a child’s height, akin to what Spielberg did for E.T. There’s also a lot of cartoon like colours, most notable on the Play Pal sets. It definitely leans towards the kid angle, while still allowing Chucky to embrace his foul-mouth and murderous intentions.

The film could have taken it’s time a little more, let the characters breathe and develop a bit. Instead we tumble from on murderous sequence to another, and while Chucky and his creators get lots of screen and scream time, the rest of the cast seems to get a bit of a short shrift.

Kevin Yagher who designed the Chucky doll, is able to put the creation through its paces, and it looks fantastic. The articulation, the performance that is created shines. It’s wonderful. And despite Andy’s mom not being in the film, the actor who brought her to life, Catherine Hicks, was onset fairly regularly… she had met and married Yagher on the first film.

We’ll see what happens when the franchise leaps forward to Andy’s teen years in the next film, Child’s Play 3.