Editorials
[Remember This?] What The Hell Did You Think Of ‘Seed Of Chucky’ When It Came Out?!
I’m pretty sure I saw Seed Of Chucky on DVD at a friend’s house in Texas back in 2005. I’ve had the movie pegged in my mental catalogue of “seen it” for all these years. So it was a shock to revisit the film recently only to find that it felt like a totally new movie to me. I definitely remembered the opening sequence and the scene where Redman eats dinner with Jennifer Tilly (only to be steamingly disemboweled) had definitely flashed before my eyes on at least one prior occasion… but I drew a blank on the rest of it.
All this is a long way of saying that a few days ago I sat down with Seed Of Chucky only to think… ‘what the f*ck?” It’s funny because Seed – for almost 10 years now – has been held up as a bit of a red-headed stepchild (no pun intended) in the Child’s Play canon. During a recent rewatch of Bride Of Chucky, which I enjoyed, I thought to myself, “hey, this is pretty good. I’ll bet ‘Seed’ is about the same. All the haters just wanna gripe.” Nope. I was wrong. Seed is a completely different animal than Bride despite being an almost direct sequel to that film.
Where Bride added a fresh and funny-ish twist to the standard Child’s Play formula, Seed makes that twist the baseline for its universe – then adds another element of weird on top of it. I can totally get why it’s too much for some people, it’s not really a Child’s Play movie. And it’s not really all that good, either.
That’s not to say that I disliked the film necessarily, I think it’s an admirable failure. In fact, it manages to bravely dive headfirst into the abyss of double-failure by combining two sub-genres notorious for tanking: the horror-comedy and the showbiz comedy. That takes balls. It also reminds me of an era (I hate that 9 years ago is an “era”) where studios were a little more freewheeling with their signature properties. Billy Boyd’s Glen (aka Glenda aka Sh*thead) is a marvel of off-puttingness. At turns innocent and wildly homicidal, it’s hard to get a bearing on him and his doll seems like it was designed in the deepest basin of uncanny valley. But you still kind of root for him – especially when he turns into the cacklingly maniacal Glenda during the film’s climax. I’d argue that the film is worth watching purely for “WTF” moments like this.
But there’s also more than a few legitimate strikes against it. Every single “Hollywood” joke falls on its face, having been done before (and better) by many. The “Jennifer Tilly is a slut” gag is tiresome and oddly lazy for a movie that is otherwise so gleefully irreverent. Still, the overall batsh*t enthusiasm of the film keeps me going even if Seed is a failure when measured up against its own intentions.
What about you? What did you think the first time you saw Seed Of Chucky? And did any of you guys see it in a theater? If so, how did the audience react?
Editorials
‘Malevolence’: The Overlooked Mid-2000s Love Letter to John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’
Written and Directed by Stevan Mena on a budget of around $200,000, Malevolence was only released in ten theaters after it was purchased by Anchor Bay and released direct-to-DVD like so many other indie horrors. This one has many of the same pratfalls as its bargain bin brethren, which have probably helped to keep it hidden all these years. But it also has some unforgettable moments that will make horror fans (especially fans of the original Halloween) smile and point at the TV like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Malevolence is the story of a silent and masked killer told through the lens of a group of bank robbers hiding out after a score. The bank robbery is only experienced audibly from the outside of the bank, but whether the film has the budgetary means to handle this portion well or not, the idea of mixing a bank robbery tale into a masked slasher movie is a strong one.
Of course, the bank robbery goes wrong and the crew is split up. Once the table is fully set, we have three bank robbers, an innocent mom and her young daughter as hostages, and a masked man lurking in the shadows who looks like a mix between baghead Jason from Friday the 13th Part 2 and the killer from The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Let the slashing begin.
Many films have tried to recreate the aesthetic notes of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween, and at its best Malevolence is the equivalent of a shockingly good cover song.
Though the acting and script are at times lacking, the direction, score, and cinematography come together for little moments of old-school slasher goodness that will send tingles up your spine. It’s no Halloween, to be clear, but it does Halloween reasonably proud. The nighttime shots come lit with the same blue lighting and the musical notes of the score pop off at such specific moments, fans might find themselves laughing out loud at the absurdity of how hard the homages hit. When the killer jumps into frame, accompanied by the aforementioned musical notes, he does so sharply and with the same slow intensity as Michael Myers. Other films in the subgenre (and even a few in the Halloween franchise) will tell you this isn’t an easy thing to duplicate.
The production and costume designs of Malevolence hint at love letters to other classic horror films as well. The country location not only provides for an opening Halloween IV fans will appreciate but the abandoned meat plant and the furnishings inside make for some great callbacks to 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. All of this is buoyed and accentuated by cinematography that you rarely see in today’s low-budget films. The film is shot on 35mm film by A&E documentary filmmaker Tsuyoshi Kimono, who gives Malevolence an old-school, grainy, 1970s aesthetic that feels completely natural and not like a cheap gimmick.
Malevolence is a movie that no doubt has some glaring imperfections but it is also a movie that is peppered with moments of potential. There’s a reason they made a follow-up prequel titled Malevolence 2: Bereavement years later (and another after that) that starred both Michael Biehn and Alexandra Daddario! That film tells the origin story of our baghead, Martin Bristol. Something the first film touches on a little bit, at least enough to give you the gist of what happened here. Long story short, a six-year-old boy was kidnapped by a serial killer and for years forced to watch him hunt, torture, and kill his victims. Which brings me to another fascinating aspect of Malevolence. The ending. SPOILER WARNING.
After the mother and child are saved from the killer, our slasher is gone, his bloody mask left on the floor. The camera pans around different areas of the town, showing all the places he may be lurking. If you’re down with the fact that it’s pretty obvious this is all an intentional love letter and not a bad rip-off, it’s pretty fun. Where Malevolence makes its own mark is in the true crime moments to follow. Law enforcement officers pull up to the plant and uncover a multitude of horrors. They find the notebooks of the original killer, which explain that he kidnapped the boy, taught him how to hunt, and was now being hunted by him. This also happened to be his final entry. We discover a hauntingly long line of bodies covered in white sheets: the bodies of the many missing persons the town had for years been searching for. And there are a whole lot of them. This moment really adds a cool layer of serial killer creepiness to the film.
Ultimately, Malevolence is a low-budget movie with some obvious deficiencies on full display. Enough of them that I can imagine many viewers giving up on the film before they get to what makes it so special, which probably explains how it has gone so far under the radar all these years. But the film is a wonderful ode to slashers that have come before it and still finds a way to bring an originality of its own by tying a bank robbery story into a slasher affair. Give Malevolence a chance the next time you’re in the mood for a nice little old school slasher movie.
Malevolence is now streaming on Tubi and Peacock.
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