After meeting the adult Andy Barclay during the post-credits scene of the last movie,
we’re now introduced to his snowy cabin, which gives us little clues
about how his character developed in the 14 year absence after Child’s Play 3.
It’s obvious that he made himself a hunter, and sports an impressive
collection of firearms. Between that and this framed sweater from Kent Academy,
the military school he attended as a teen, it’s safe to say that his time at the school had a
profound effect on him. The latin text at the bottom of the garment says Nunquam Non Paratus,
which translates to: Never Unprepared -- a perfect description of Andy if I ever saw one.
Behind this frame is a secret safe. We only see him punch in part of the combination,
if we assume that each number on the keypad has a unique touchtone,
then we can use sound to figure out what the full combination is: 110011,
which is binary for the number: 3. Kent Academy is the setting of Child’s Play 3, and Cult of
Chucky is the first sequel to Andy’s story in Child’s Play 3, twenty-six years in the making.
It’s probably also no coincidence that the spare Good Guy doll that Andy keeps
has short hair. This not only helps Andy differentiate his doll from the others,
but also might be a nod to the fact that he and the other cadets were
forced to maintain short hair at the academy. Additionally, during one bizarre dream scene,
Nica sees this image of Chucky flash before her eyes. This is Chucky from Child’s Play 3.
Nica was not there for Child’s Play 3, so this has to be for us, the audience.
To learn how one character in this movie might have been connected to the main
character from the Chucky TV series, stick around to the end of this video.
(metal music intro)
Guess what? You’ve been involuntarily committed to another episode of Things
You Missed. The only way to get out of it,
is if you need to watch the previous episodes. As of posting, I’ve covered every Chucky movie.
Cult of Chucky came on the heels of the darker, more serious Curse of Chucky. But
despite having a similar visual style and bringing back Curse’s protagonist -- Cult
kind of falls back to the old ways of facetious jokes and overt references.
Through the good and the bad, I’ll be here to guide you through some of the things you
may have missed. So let us get in -- to some of the things you may have missed.
(mysterious high quality music)
The film opens with Andy on a date, and it definitely feels like a conscious choice that
he’s chosen a red-head woman after living a life of PTSD from this red-headed doll.
It’s possible that Nica, who was also tortured by Chucky, befell the same fate,
based on this off-color joke from her fellow inmate Malcolm.
– You still have a thing for red-heads?
– However, it is not long into the date that Andy realizes she’s aware of his tumultuous past.
– You Googled me.
– Oh, so Google does exist in this world? I only bring it up because they went to
extreme lengths in the last movie to specify that the search engine Nica uses is called
“Internet Search”. And perhaps stranger still, later in this movie,
we find out that Andy uploads content on the famous social media site: “Video”.
The date doesn’t work out, so Andy finds himself home and cracking open a drink from the
fridge. The brand of choice is called “Blady’s”, perhaps a reference to Chucky’s favorite weapon,
his trusty blade. Yeah, Andy’s on that beer and mayonnaise diet right now.
Andy’s safe contains a captured Chucky head, who, despite his situation,
tries to bite Andy, prompting him to ask…
– You wanna play?
– …Which is one of the phrases that the original Good Guy doll says in the original movie.
– Hey, wanna play?
– This is not the only time that Cult of Chucky echoes lines from the past. During
the group therapy session at the psychiatric hospital we hear one of the patients say…
– Chucky did it.
– [Zac] … a line that Andy learned not to say a long time ago..
– Chucky did it.
– [Tommy Pickles] You did it Chucky!
– [Chucky Finster] Yeah, I did!
– So he admits it! Of course, this wouldn’t be a post-Scream Chucky movie if there weren’t some
kind of franchise callback every 5 minutes or so. Let's make sure we’ve got them all covered.
Anyone mind if we start with Child’s Play 1? Oh, you do mind? Well too bad!
At the beginning we see Nica receiving some kind of shock therapy. OK, I don’t even know if that’s
supposed to be a callback, but it’s just nice to see that they invented a shock therapy device that
doesn’t kill you since that… uh… unfortunate Dr. Ardmore incident in the first movie.
After the treatment, one of the doctors pricks Nica with a needle and says…
See? From the waist down she’s a pin cushion. Another form of pin cushion is a voodoo doll,
perhaps a reference to the fact that Charles Lee Ray obtained the power
to supernaturally possess a doll using the art of voodoo in the first movie.
Later on, when Chucky has infiltrated the hospital, he finds himself alone
with one of the patients, Claire, who is strapped down to a hospital bed. The way
Chucky scurries around her before taking her out is very similar to how he circles Mike
Norris’s crashed car in the original. When I covered that first film on Things You Missed,
I talked about how I found this Good Guy mascot to be way creepier than the actual Chucky doll.
“Look at this thing. Imagine this chasing after you in a dark alley. Would have been way better.”
Well, I kind of got my wish in Cult, during Nica’s dream / hallucination
scene -- although instead of a dark alley it’s a bright hallway. But seeing this
giant Chucky is probably my favorite part of this movie. Also, take a closer look at the
reflection in the Giant Chucky’s knife. This is the human form Charles Lee Ray,
who we’ve seen in the original movie, and in flashbacks during Curse of Chucky.
Finally, the story in Cult ends with Andy voluntarily entering the asylum to try to
save Nica, but he ends up locked in solitary confinement as a result.
This isn’t the first time he’s been here, as way back in Child’s Play,
he was locked up in a children’s mental facility, and the way he slides into a
sitting position against the wall mimics the exact response he had back then.
But that’s just the Child’s Play 1 references.
We’ve still gotta talk about all the secrets linking Cult to the rest of the franchise,
the hidden text on these tombstones and the rest of the Things You Missed.
(impact)
(eerie music)
When the Chucky cult has expanded to three different dolls, they start to interact with
each other, and share their love of being a serial criminal. Chucky refers to this as “his job”,
which I don’t fully understand, because he’s not getting paid for it, as far as I can tell.
– And I love my job. Especially the look on my victim's face when they realize,
in that final moment, that it's all really happening. A children's toy is actually beating
them to death with a yardstick! Or setting them on fire. Eviscerating them. All actual examples.
– We’ve seen a couple of these. The yardstick is from Child’s Play 2, where Chucky gives Andy’s
schoolteacher a little after school punishment. The fire comes from Bride of Chucky, where we see
him set a cop car ablaze. I don't really know who he eviscerated. It could be an off-screen death.
There are a lot of other Bride of Chucky references though. For example when Claire
is restrained on the hospital bed, he uses an oxygen tank to shatter the glass
ceiling above her, and it is actually the falling glass shards that do her in.
This is effectively the same kill as the one that Tiffany committed at the honeymoon suite
motel in Niagara Falls, where she throws a champagne bottle at a mirror on the ceiling.
The main concept of Cult revolves around Chucky’s new ability to inhabit more
than one body at once. He claims the spell comes from VoodooForDummies.com,
the online version of the spellbook that Tiffany uses in Bride.
At one point we see three Chucky dolls all possessed by Charles Lee Ray’s soul at the
same time, and when Nurse Carlos comes into the room and sees what’s going on,
all of their heads turn simultaneously to face him. The short haired Chucky’s head
does a 180° spin, something that we saw in Bride and nearly every entry since.
There’s another Bride reference not long after, when Tiff arrives and slits the
throat of a cop from behind. This one might actually just be a security guard,
I’m not really sure, but this is the third time we’ve seen her do this.
– Some things never change though. – A true classic never goes out of style.
– The one movie that doesn’t get a lot of love in Cult, thankfully,
is Seed. When I talked about Seed, I mentioned how the opening is very similar to the opening
of Halloween. A little bit of Chucky paying homage to a slasher forefather. Cult also has a beginning
that is similar to Halloween, just for the fact that very early on we see a patient transfer.
Several Halloween movies have a patient transfer at the beginning. In particular,
Halloween 4 begins with Michel Myers being moved to a lower security hospital,
which is exactly what we see happening to Nica when we first see her character in Cult.
Finally, we have the last movie, Curse of Chucky. There’s not much in terms of
Things You might have Missed, since, come on, this was only one movie ago. However,
when we first see Nica at the cafeteria in Harrogate Hospital, the scene opens with
a top-down shot on this bowl, it’s gotta be a call back to the dinner scene from Curse,
which used the same camera angle and left the audience to guess whose meal was poisoned.
In addition to its connections to Chucky movies of past, there also seem to be links to the future.
That’s right, I’m talking about the Chucky series,
Season 1, but I’m gonna come back to that later in the video.
First, I want to take a closer look at the opening title sequence. Because we haven’t done that yet.
We are shown various headlines recapping the events of Curse. If you look at the author of
this one, it says LaDonna Kettell Bonham. This is probably a family member of Jermy Bonham,
who is listed in the movie’s credits as the animator of the main title sequence.
The other one is by Surya Cassidy. I’m guessing if you switch those words
around to say Cassidy Surya, you have the wife of the title designer, Martin Surya.
The hospital has it’s own graveyard on site, and there are a bunch more crew reference easter eggs,
including Costume Designer Patricia J Henderson, property master Mark Stratton,
assistant production coordinator Aaron Graham, assistant set decorator Robert Kestler,
accounting clerk Heather Wiebe (deep breath) payroll accountant Tracey Phillips -- first
assistant director Douglas Mitchell, accounting clerk Tammy Gibson and art department coordinator
Donna Jenkyns. Yeah, there are always a lot of crew reference easter eggs when
we’re dealing with gravestones and memorials; I learned that from my Final Destination videos.
Now if you’ve seen my videos on Bride and Seed, you know that that’s when Chucky was
very inspired by the Scream franchise and it’s metacinema tendencies. I explained how each of
those movies does it’s own take on a classic horror film, with Bride of Chucky obviously
doing Bride of Frankenstein, and Seed of Chucky doing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Here in Cult of Chucky, one of the mental patients, Madeline,
believes that the Chucky doll is her baby during an episode of schizophrenia.
– [Chucky] I’m your friend to the end! – [Madeline] You know Chucky,
a boy’s best friend is his mother.
– If you’ve seen Psycho, you probably recognize that line.
– Well, a boy’s best friend is his mother.
– But it would be a different movie that served as kind of the base movie for Cult of Chucky,
only this time, it wouldn’t be a horror movie. Early on, Nica receives a pack of Juicy Fruit
gum from this nurse. This brings to mind a well known scene from the 1975 film One Flew Over
The Cuckoo’s Nest, where the main character, McMurphy, offers his seemingly mute in-mate some
Juicy Fruit, which leads to him discovering that he was faking it, he actually can hear and speak.
Nica’s situation at Harrogate is kind of similar, only she’s not really faking it, she was actually
forced to believe that she’s crazy because nobody else will believe that Chucky is alive.
The character Madeline also tries to snuff Chucky out with a pillow at one point,
which is something that also happens in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,
I’m not gonna spoil it. If those two scenes aren’t proof enough that Harrogate
is based on the hospital from One Flew, Chucky basically calls it out when he shows up there.
– [Chucky] Jesus! F***ing cuckoo's nest.
– Believe it or not, that isn’t the most obvious reference in the movie.
– You sound like Hannibal Lecter. Can't believe they canceled that show.
– I guess the story there is that the creator of Child’s Play and Chucky,
Don Mancini, worked on the Hannibal TV series during its final season,
so he was upset when the show got canceled. However, I guess that his short time on that show ended
up inspiring him to bring Chucky to the small screen -- so maybe it all worked out in the end.
Speaking of which, as Dr. Foley and Nurse Carlos are treating one of the patients,
they engage in a little small talk, which contains an interesting and potentially significant detail.
(impact)
(dark cinematic music)
One interesting aspect of Cult of Chucky is the fact that the killer dolls are not
the only bad guys in this film. There’s also the abusive psychiatrist, Dr. Foley,
who hypnotizes Nica so that she cannot remember their sessions. During one of these sessions,
you can spot Chucky’s shoes peeking out from behind a curtain in the background
as a clue that the possessed Good Guy doll would be intervening before long.
It’s not until later in the movie that we learn Chucky can inhabit multiple bodies,
but there is a clue in Madeline’s room. She has drawn many sketches of the Chucky doll,
and one of them has eyes with huge pupils, which in the previous films,
is what happens when Chucky comes to life, meaning that Madeline has seen this happen.
If you’re paying close attention to the calendar date of each event,
you may have also known that there has to be more than one Chucky. Andy figures it out before we as
the audience know. I explain this in full detail in my Andy Barclay Horror History.
Speaking of Andy, he’s on his way to the asylum to try to save Nica and the others,
and he receives a strange call from… someone.
– [Tiffany] Tiffany… Jennifer… even I lose track.
– She leaves a one word clue from Chucky, and Andy is supposed to know the meaning of it.
The word is “disembowel”. Andy’s plan is to hide his gun inside the short haired Chucky
to get it into Harrogate, and disembowel him to get it back once inside. However,
Chucky and Tiffany don’t know that. So what’s the deal here? This part has always confused me.
The best sense I can make of it is that Chucky was threatening Andy,
basically implying that he plans to disembowel him, and it’s just an ironic coincidence that
Andy turns the tables on him. If anyone has a better explanation, let me know.
Also, when he does break open the Chucky doll, we can see all the brains and guts and stuff,
even though this Chucky doll has only been alive for like under an hour. It seems like
the amount of time it takes for Chucky to turn human can be really inconsistent. For reference,
in Child's Play 2, it takes about 48 hours for Chucky to turn human after being reincarnated,
but in Curse, he doesn’t turn human for the entire movie.
But let’s get back on topic. Dr. Foley. He’s about
to give some kind of treatment to Claire when he says this.
– [Dr. Foley] Hey how’s Jake? – [Carlos] He’s hanging in there. Thanks.
– [Zac] The next Chucky installment would be the Chucky TV series, where a character named Jake Wheeler loses
both of his parents. My first thought here was that Carlos somehow knows Jake Wheeler,
and Dr. Foley is asking how Jake is holding up after the death of his father. However,
after spending all day trying to piece together the timeline using the new information from
Season 1, I think maybe it’s possible that he was asking about Jake’s mother, who would have died
two years before Cult, in 2015.
If you're confused at all about the Chucky timeline, watch this video where I explain all of it.
Of course, another possibility is that Dr. Foley is asking about a different person
named Jake. And I agree that that is the easy explanation, but it doesn’t account for this part,
where Chucky knocks out Dr. Foley and tries to get Nica to finish him off with the bottle.
– [Nica] I’m not a killer.
– This is part of a different voodoo ritual where Chucky’s aim is to corrupt an innocent and get
them to kill. In other words, Jake Wheeler wasn’t the first one he tried to corrupt,
it was actually Nica. At the very least, this proves that Don Mancini kind of knew
what was going to happen in Season 1 at the time he made Cult. So it’s not
out of the question that Dr. Foley was actually asking Carlos about our Jake.
Also, the actor that plays Dr. Foley is Michel Therriault. He also plays Lexi’s dad,
Nathan Cross in the TV series. It’s definitely a different character,
so maybe the character he plays in the series is a relative of Dr. Foley,
which would further connect these two communities. But that's just speculation.
However, since Chucky is unable to get Nica to kill for him,
he does the next best thing and takes over her body.
And this obviously leads into the events of Season 1, but first,
we gotta talk about that post-credits scene. For the first time since Child’s Play 2,
we see Andy’s former foster sister Kyle, and when she appears, she’s wearing the
same hat and outfit that we saw her in when she first appeared in that movie.
Chucky and Tiffany do leave the hospital. But…
– [Nica] He’ll come back. He always comes back.
– [Zac] And so will I. In the next Chucky episode of Things You Missed, where I’ll be covering Season
1 of the Chucky TV series. Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, RING the
deathbell and select all notifications and I will see you in the next one. Assuming we both survive.
(spooky dance music)