Child's Play
Tags: cult

Plot synopsis:
Eight years after the Chucky's second demise in the Play Pals factory, The Play Pals company has recovered from bad publicity brought along by Chucky's (voiced by Brad Dourif) murder spree and resumes manufacturing of the Good Guy dolls. The company releases a new line of Good Guy dolls and recycles Chucky's remains. However, the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray still inhabits the remains, and Chucky is soon revived. Chucky is unwittingly given to Play Pals' CEO Mr. Sullivan, whom he kills with a variety of toys. He then uses computer records to relocate Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent).
Still troubled by his past encounters with Chucky, 16-year-old Andy Barclay (Justin Whalin) has been sent to Kent Military Academy after having failed to cope in several foster homes. Colonel Cochran (Dakin Matthews), the school's commandant, begrudgingly enrolls Andy, but advises him to forget his "fantasies" about the doll. Andy befriends cadets Harold Aubrey Whitehurst (Dean Jacobson), Ronald Tyler (Jeremy Sylvers), and Kristin DeSilva (Perrey Reeves), for whom he develops romantic feelings. He also meets Brett C. Shelton (Travis Fine), a lieutenant colonel who routinely bullies the cadets.
Shortly after Andy arrives, Tyler is asked to deliver a package to his room. Tyler realizes that the package contains a Good Guy doll and, excited, takes it to the cellar to open it, only to have Chucky burst free from the package. Remembering the rule that he can possess the first person who learns his true nature (and that with a new body) he tells Tyler his secret, but just as Chucky is about to possess him, they are interrupted by Cochran who takes the doll away. Cochran throws Chucky into a garbage truck, but Chucky escapes by luring the driver into the truck's compactor and crushing him. That night, Chucky attacks Andy and tells him his plans for taking over Tyler's soul. Before Andy can attack Chucky, Shelton comes in and takes the doll from him. Andy tries to get the doll back by sneaking into Shelton's room, but Shelton catches him in the act. Upon realizing the doll has vanished, Shelton suspects it stolen and forces all the cadets to do exercises in the courtyard as punishment.
Andy unsuccessfully tries to warn Tyler about Chucky. At one point, Chucky lures Tyler into playing hide-and-seek in Cochran's office, where he attempts to possess Tyler again. However, they are interrupted by De Silva and, moments later, Cochran himself. When the cadets leave, Cochran is suddenly confronted by a knife-wielding Chucky. The resulting shock causes Cochran to suffer a fatal heart attack. Chucky later kills the cruel camp barber Sergeant Botnick (Andrew Robinson) by slashing his throat with a razor.
Despite Cochran's death, Sgt. Clark declares that the school's annual war games will proceed as planned, with Andy and Shelton on the same team. However, Chucky secretly replaces the blank paint bullets of the Red team with live ammunition. When the simulation begins, Chucky accosts Tyler. Tyler stabs Chucky with a pocket knife and flees, trying to find Andy. Chucky then attacks Kristin and holds her hostage, attempting to lure the teams into fighting each other to save her. Chucky forces Andy to exchange Kristin for Tyler.
Suddenly, the Red team descends upon the area and obliviously opens fire with their live rounds, with Shelton being killed in the crossfire. Amidst the chaos, Tyler makes a quick getaway, but before giving chase, Chucky tosses a live grenade at the quarreling cadets. Recognizing the danger, Whitehurst bravely leaps on top of the grenade and sacrifices himself to save the others. With no time to mourn his friend, Andy heads off in pursuit of Chucky, with Kristin close behind.
Eventually the chase leads the group into a fake haunted house at a nearby carnival. Tyler tries to get a security guard to help him, but Chucky kills the guard offscreen and kidnaps Tyler. In the ensuing melee, Chucky shoots Kristin in the leg, leaving Andy to fight Chucky alone. When Tyler is inadvertently knocked out, Chucky seizes the opportunity to possess him, but Andy intervenes, shooting him several times. Enraged, Chucky attempts to strangle Andy, but Andy uses Tyler's knife to cut off Chucky's hand, dropping him into a giant fan which mutilates him. Afterwards, Andy is taken away by the police for questioning, while Kristin is rushed to the nearby hospital. Tyler's fate is left unknown.

Review: A great film..
This is an excellent film.
Unfortunately the word subtle, which applies to this film, is used as a negative by the only (at this date) other comment on "Child's Play." Subtle it is, and those who like character studies and evocative camera work, a sustained mood and a finely wrought battle between good and evil will be delighted.
If you like the garbage that passes for horror in most of today's bloodfests and loud, non-stop, effects-driven films, well - don't bother.
Robert Preston and James Mason, two A-list actors, knew good material and both give performances that rank highly with the best of their careers.
This film was directed by the great Sidney Lumet, and reveals what is usually best about Lumet's work: great acting, sustained mood, the ability to confine the action to one setting and exploit it for all it is worth, attention to detail and precise pacing that builds exactly as it should.
This unheralded gem deserves a DVD release soon!.
The prime of Mister Paul Reis.
Among Lumet' s monumental filmography ,"child's play" must be ,even more than the overlooked "the group" ,the movie nobody knows or loves to hate .Personally, I have always thought that Lumet is particularly at ease when he directs films the action of which takes place in an enclosed space: a tribunal in "12 angry men" ,a bank in "dog day afternoon" a train in "murder on the orient express" a house in "deathtrap" or "long day's journey into night" the Strategic Air Command in "fail safe" ,a prisoners camp in "the hill"....."Child's play " happens entirely in a boys high school but the students are not often on the screen ;unlike some naive works such as "dead poets society" ,the nice modern beloved teacher (Robert Preston) is not the one you think he is ;he is a distant relative of the "good" teacher Miss Brodie in "the prime of miss Jean Brodie ";whereas the old maid was urging her students to fight for "noble " causes such as Spanish fascism,hercolleague uses them to put his old "pal" James Mason down,to drive him crazy;his motives are very obscure (the fact that he wants to teach the twelfth graders is not really convincing and one could write that "some people who do not fit get the only fun they get by putting people down ",as John Prine sings ."So cold ,sometimes it looks so cold" .Women (apart from a nurse) are completely absent and no one among the secular staff has a girlfriend or a wife ,even the young naive gym teacher.Beau Bridges is a bit clumsy and as a sports teacher ,well...besides he lacks charisma and his dramatic range is ineffective in the scene when he blames his colleague (just compare with young Pamela Franklin playing opposite Maggie Smith in a similar scene at the end of "Miss Jean Brodie").All in all,when you cannot mention it in the same breath as Lumet's works I mention above ,if you like this director,you should catch it :James Mason is excellent in his part of a fallen pitiful Latin teacher (you can also notice his subject had already begun to lose the prestige it used to have in ancient times) and Robert Preston is all the more scary since he remains cheerful or straight-faced.A flawed but nonetheless worthy work .Like this ?
try these....."Unman,Wittering and Zigo" (McKenzie,1971)"The prime of miss Jean Brodie (Neame,1970).
Not that bad!.
Chances are you will never have an opportunity to see this film as it hasn't been on TV for ages.
However, I wouldn't say it is as bad as some of the comments.
I thought it was well acted, but the ending left the viewer confused about exactly what had happened with the boys.
The fates of two of the three major characters are also left to the viewer's imagination.
Robert Preston and James Mason made interesting foils.
Mason managed to make his character a man to be despised and pitied.
Preston was also quite capable in his role - all sweetness and light with increasingly malevolent undertones.If it had been as dull as described in some of the other comments, I probably wouldn't have been able to stay awake since I watched it in the wee hours of the AM..
Very slow building, tense, yet superb mysterious drama!.
If you're the type of movie watcher who prefers to be entertained without having to really invest in the film (and that's absolutely fine) then this movie is probably not for you.
I'm fortunate in that I enjoy all types of film from juvenile slapstick such as Top Secret to classic epics like The Godfather.
This particular film builds very slowly and although there's little "action" in the first third, it's well written and acted and the you can feel the tension build.
Without giving too much away, it's brilliant how convincing one of the main protagonists is due to the quality of the lines attributed to him in the screenplay.
Although I personally believe this movie deserves a wider audience, I fully understand that it will not appeal to a significant number of viewers.
Recommend if you appreciate slow paced, well acted drama..
Good 70's mystery.
Sidney Lumet manages to engender great tension in this curious tale about a group of satan like kids and one of their masters.
Reasonable acting with an intelligent script produces satisfactory results.The only thing missing here is a lack of focus on the mechanics of how the boys behaviour is merely down to a local cult or if something more sinister is at work; however it may have been the writers intention to leave us in two minds regarding this aspect.Definitely worth watching.
Harold Hill meets Mr. Chips.
Apparently at this exclusive Catholic prep school even the civilian teachers have to be officially celibate.
In Child's Play the focus of the film is on an intense rivalry between a pair of civilian teachers who have no outside attachments, save for James Mason and his dying mother.
So they indulge in this rivalry for the approval of the students.
And Robert Preston who dusts off a bit of his Harold Hill persona from The Music Man is winning hands down.Child's Play, a David Merrick Production on stage ran 342 performances during the 1970 season and starred Pat Hingle and Fritz Weaver in the roles that Preston and Mason essay here.
Preston is a charmer as Professor Harold Hill was, but his charm is laced with malevolence.
For reasons I'm not sure whether for money or prestige Preston turns the students against Mason, he wants Mason out to move up in some kind of seniority system.Mason makes it real easy.
A stiff demanding pedagogue he's Mr. Chips before Robert Donat's marriage to Greer Garson humanized him.
He's way past the age of retirement, but other than a terminally ill mother this guy has no life.
Going to teach gives him an excuse to get up in the morning.
Both these guys are a pair of real closet cases.
Both are obsessed with the young male preppy kids they teach, Mason just does not know how to relate to them.
Preston does and he uses his influence with them to produce some terrible consequences.
Caught in the middle of all this is new gym teacher Beau Bridges who once went to this school.
He knows both men from his years there, but learns a whole lot more once he becomes a faculty member and learns disturbing stuff about both.Child's Play is smartly directed and photographed by Sidney Lumet.
Pay attention to some of the deep focus cinematography involving all three of the players I've named in joint scenes.
All three register facial expressions that help move the story along immensely.I think a lot was left out of the play coming over from Broadway, but still Child's Play is a fine film with great performances from the leads..
"Right Here in River City....".
When I was younger, this movie hit major cities but never made the small burg where I live.
Beau Bridges was able to play young innocent roles then.
I loved it most because the Catholic Church was playing host to., really, this wonderful horror movie.
It was shot like many horror shows I've seen.
Quality was as good as the Haunting of Hill House, a very high quality horror film of the early 60s.
I was happy to see it just starting on Fox Movies channel when I arrived home tonight.
I was riveted.
Loved the give and take all the way to the end.
But the end was a turnabout like a hundred similar turnabouts, with the obvious turned upside down by a revealing, riveting end piece.
Yes, I wanted a surprise ending.
But beyond that, as a lapsed Catholic since first grade, I enjoyed seeing the Church get what amounted to what in the seventies would've been an unfair bashing.
I went to Catholic school for five years.
I'd endured the enormous fear the Church sold then.
Recent statements by Pope Francis and errant priest scandals in dioceses everywhere have brought home the realization that all Catholic dioceses in the world have been subject to priests taking up with children, men, women, anyone walking, really.
The Church in America is taking a steep dive in members as we speak because of the new understanding.
The Church was founded in the First Century.
Priests at first married.
The Church divided into different branches, the new branches not part of the Roman Church.
By the 4th century celibacy was becoming mandatory in the surviving Roman Church.
But it didn't become uniform until the 11th century.
Given the nature of human beings I think one can assume a great many priests began violating the celibacy rule immediately.
Covering up scandals has likely been part of the duty of Catholic dioceses for centuries.
The backdrop of a boys school run by the Church is not accidental in Child's Play.
Schools run by men in the priesthood have inherently had great potential for scandal, whether driven by sexual scandal or something else..
Shallow and pointless exercise disguised as frightening horror film.
Not even heavy names like Sidney Lumet, James Mason and Beau Bridges can make of "Child's Play" everything that it should be.
Halfway through a more experienced viewer like me will think of similar and better executed examples of the same story: the disturbance between the students of a boy's school after one dangerous incident after another involving injured students are deeply concerning among teachers who'll investigate the case to later find out things are not what they appear, and one of them might be the source of all this trouble.
In this grandfather of films like "The Faculty", we follow the rivalry between a tyrant teacher (James Mason) hated by everyone versus a more likable guy (Robert Preston), and in the middle of this is the new PE teacher (Beau Bridges) former student of the place, now trying to uncover the mystery involving the students and their deadly beatings on some of their classmates, and also the threatening letters given to the menacing master.
A movie with such divided line of classes shouldn't keep distant at one of them and focus mainly on the other.
This should be like "Gosford Park", following from the top of the pyramid to the lowest level.
The frightening students are given one horrific scene here and there, most of the time they're in the background of the whole action and let's face it, they suck as actors with those emotionless expressions that doesn't cause anything after a while.
One dimensional at its worst.
And while we have time to see the teachers and the headmaster dealing with the case everything is incredibly slow, sickening and overplayed.
Bridges gets sympathy from us because like him we're entering into a new thing, wanting to get answers on events that seem unexplainable; Mason gets more credit than he ever deserved it, not only from the titles giving him as a lead when he's not but also credit from many critics who praise his performance.
Not only his character isn't sympathetic (even when he should be after getting more and more death threats, we should feel something for him but we don't due to its emotional overreactions) but we sense that he is too performatic, representing on a play and never being the character.
He's a trained dictator and not the dictator, lack of embodiment ruined his acting in this film.
If "Child's Play" deserves a little of recognition is because of Robert Preston playing the cool teacher.
The more the film develops, the more he changes into something he's not, a part rarely played that grows on you.
Probably the good remembrances after watching this film is because of him.
I disliked this yet it was almost enjoyable.
First of all there's no lesson learned in here.
Movies with teachers in the main roles commonly features some rewarding (or not but they do try) lesson or a useful teaching.
By those standards, what do we get?
There's little devils in the school working for a great devil with a noble purpose?
Quite alright.
Unappealing drama, stiff horror with few pleasant and thrilling moments but it doesn't go too far with a predictable plot underworked ruined by its lack of action.
This proved to be a wrong project for Lumet, he's good in conducting filmic play adaptations but this one adds almost nothing to his resume.
He didn't had the touch for the horror and it's a meaningless play so why do it.
Might have been successful on Broadway (as it was played at one time) but as a film doesn't deliver much.
Doesn't deliver at all.
Just leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
Subtle and not very good.
I haven't seen this in years but here's what I remember.Dull horror film about the strange behavior of students at an all boys school.
James Mason as a teacher thinks Robert Preston (another teacher) is trying to drive him out (or crazy).
Beau Bridges tries to figure it all out.You think that a film which has young students attacked (one is blinded, another is tied up and hung from a statue) might at least be disturbing...but it's not.
It's dull, slow and it's pretty obvious who the villain is (he's always lit to look evil).
Also, for a PG film, this is pretty grim stuff.
It all leads to an unsatisfying ending which never truly explains what's going on.
Also Preston, Mason and Bridges are at their worst.
I caught this on TV years ago and had trouble staying awake!
A rightfully forgotten horror film.
Skip it..
Grueling actors' piece.
Idealistic new gym teacher at an all-boys Catholic boarding school, his alma mater after graduating there nine years ago, is warned by one of the priests on arrival that the students have changed over time, their attitudes towards each other have become malicious and their violent actions touched by evil.
Overcooked melodrama from Robert Marasco's Tony-winning play is, at its core, a battle of wills between two veteran instructors: one, a sagging-faced, paranoid old taskmaster (James Mason) whom the students deplore and the other (Robert Preston) a gregarious, glinty-eyed teacher who has rallied the students to his side.
When these men face-off, the material hints at something headier than what director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Leon Prochnik really hope to present: the dehumanization of young men into soldiers of misfortune.
Broadway showman David Merrick made an inauspicious debut here as movie producer, and his first mistake was to hire Lumet as director.
Lumet, who specializes in his keeping his actors riled-up on-screen, wants to give us the shakes with bloody beatings, an eye-gouging and a desecration in the church (underlined by Michael Small's "scare music"), scenes which are nasty and unpleasant to sit through--and also time-consuming.
The real drama, between Mason and Preston (with Beau Bridges caught in the middle), is nearly buried under the morass.
Though ultimately too theatrical to feel honest, the performances by the principals are at least polished by the actors' professionalism, bringing substance to a picture caught in the balance between melodrama and its own horror-movie subtext.
The soul leaves and doesn't return....
Sidney Lumet's fascinating, ambiguous fight between good and evil.
Robert Preston and James Mason are teachers at a Catholic school for boys fighting for the collective soul of the student body.
On the surface, Preston is the angelic one, while Mason is evil incarnate...that shifts as new teacher Beau Bridges slowly unravels what's really going on.
The film is slow but never lethargic with terrific performances by Preston and Bridges and an absolutely brilliant turn by Mason (he hasn't been this neurotic and pathetic since LOLITA).
Preston was reportedly a last minute replacement for Marlon Brando and, while he seems the least likely choice, he pulls off this dramatic role with ease..
Nice idea but poorly delivered.
*minor spoiler*Boring so-called thriller about a seemingly possessed bunch of students.The direction is totally unimaginative, while most of the characters are paper-thin.
The students are like muppets with no personality at all during the second half of the film, despite signs at the beginning that they would play a significant role in the story - which unfortunately never happens.
Beau Bridges is at his most unconvincing, but then again, the script doesn't help him much.I'd say you better avoid this.3