- Seed of Chucky is a direct sequel to Bride of Chucky,
following up on the explosive birth of Chucky and Tiffany’s baby seen at
the end of that movie. Like Bride, Seed would continue the trend of metacinema,
drawing our attention to horror movie tropes and not being so subtle about its influences.
Last episode, when I talked about Bride, I mentioned that this new direction for the
franchise was a direct result of the Scream movies having a huge impact on our culture.
- [Tiffany] For God sake Chucky, drag yourself into the 90s!
- [Zac] ...right down to the new Chucky logo containing a spike, much like the letter M in the Scream
logo. The new logo for Seed, which would be used going forward, is slightly changed,
this time the Y is the pointy letter, making it look even more like the Scream logo.
The opening scene pays homage to Chucky’s slasher forefather: Halloween, by showing the
scene through the point of view of the antagonist, just like Halloween’s opening. But having a clear
dependence on Halloween, in a way, is also another example of how Chucky was influenced by Scream,
because if you remember in the original Scream, the movie they all watch at Stu’s
party is Halloween, and many of Halloween’s tropes come up during the events of that party.
- [Randy] Jamie, look behind you. Look behind you. Turn around. Behind you. Be-hind you!
- [Zac] Bride was very much galvanized by Scream 1 and 2, but since then, a third Scream movie was released,
and Seed of Chucky would look to it for further inspiration. To learn how Seed of Chucky was
a mashup of several horror concepts, stick around to the end of this video.
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(metal music)
Welcome to Things You Missed. Seed of Chucky tells the story of the indecisive intersex interloper,
known as either Glen or Glenda. It’s not really clear which name is accurate by the
end of the movie, so I’ll just go with whatever seems appropriate at the time.
The entire plot is set into action when Glen sees the Made In Japan
marking on his wrist that matches the mark he sees on Chucky’s wrist when
the doll appears on TV to promote the movie being made about him.
- [Chucky] ...ck you very much.
(applause)
(Glen gasps)
- [Glen] I'm no orphan after all!
- Which is just wrong. It doesn’t make sense that Chucky would have a Made In Japan mark
because we clearly see the doll was created in a factory in Chicago during Child’s Play 2
and Charles Lee Ray himself was born in Hackensack, New Jersey,
as was Glen who was liveborn in the cemetery at the end of Bride.
That is not going to be my only accuracy gripe, but let’s get into the Things You Missed.
(foreboding music)
After the opening dream scene, we find ourselves in a graveyard, where Santa Claus,
or someone posing as him, discovers he’s been giving Chucky and Tiffany a ride in his sack
of toys. When Chucky comes face to face with the big man, he makes this discovery.
- [Chucky] I knew it! You’re not real!
- This is an ironic thing to say, because throughout Chucky’s entire existence as a doll,
he’s only been able to get away with the things he does because nobody believes that he’s real,
the majority of the public just thinks he’s a regular doll.
This whole scene ends up being part of the production of a movie within the movie.
They have to stop filming due to some technical difficulties in the special effects department.
- Chucky broke again. This is bloody ridiculous!
This a little nod to what famously went on behind the scenes during the production of
the 1975 horror movie Jaws, where the titular shark was an animatronic that
was constantly breaking down and messing up the shooting schedule.
- [Richard Dreyfuss] You could hear this:
(static) the shark is not working. (static)
Repeat, the shark is not working.
- The concept of a Chucky movie being made within another Chucky movie heavily derives from Scream
3. In each of the Scream sequels so far, Hollywood makes a movie adaptation based on the events
of one of the previous movies, which is referred to in-universe as the Stab! franchise.
Scream 3 features
actor counterparts of each major character, and Seed of Chucky goes one step further,
by casting Jennifer Tilly, who played Tiffany in Bride to play herself:
Jennifer Tilly, who is also playing the adaptation version of Tiffany in the movie within the movie.
Seed of Chucky must take place in a world not too different from our own,
because Jennifer mentions that she thinks she should have played Erin Brockovich,
which her rival Julia Roberts won the Academy Award for Best Actress for in 2001.
- And the Oscar goes to...
Julia Roberts!
She also makes reference several times to her own Oscar nomination in the 1994 film
Bullets Over Broadway. Additionally, the Variety newspaper that she reads
features real articles from the world of entertainment in 2004,
and we see a magazine later on mentioning the 2004 Spanish horror film Rojo Sangre.
Scream 3 came out in 2000 and loved to parody real life stuff from Hollywood.
But there’s another horror movie that played even more of a role in influencing Seed, and we
can find it when we look to the title of Chucky movie the being shot in that second sequence.
- [Reporter] We're here in Hollywood where
production is underway… on the new horror flick Chucky Goes Psycho.
The movie they are making is called Chucky Goes Psycho, and this movie,
Seed of Chucky, could be described as Chucky goes Psycho. That is, the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie:
Psycho. In fact, that opening dream scene I mentioned earlier features a woman getting stabbed
in the shower and pulling the shower curtain down as she falls, just like the famous shower
scene in Psycho that I think I’ve mentioned about 100 times on Things You Missed now.
There’s also the fact the the ventriloquist act
Glen is a part of in the beginning is put on by a guy named Psychs.
For this next one, I’ve got to spoil the end of Psycho. It is one of the all time great endings,
so if you haven’t seen it, go check it out first. If you have seen it, you already
know that the Motel operator Norman Bates, has dissociative identity order, a mental condition
causing a person to have multiple identities and sets of behaviour that they switch between at
various times. In Psycho, Norman switches between himself, and his mother Norma Bates, causing him
to sometimes act as a hospitable, civil male and sometimes as an evil, homicidal female.
Chucky’s offspring has a similar disorder. When Chucky and Tiffany first meet the kid,
they’re unable to determine the gender. Chucky names him Glen and treats him as a male,
who isn’t comfortable with any of the killing going on around him. But later in the story,
he switches to female, and assumes the name Glenda, which was given by
Tiffany and the female identity turns out to be a psychotic killing machine.
- [Fulvia] Glen is an angel, an absolute dream. But Glenda…
she's a bad girl, Mrs. Tilly. A very bad girl.
- When assuming the Glenda identity, the child even dresses up in a white dress, just as Norman
dresses up in his mother’s robes. The seemingly endless waterfall of references does not end there
though, and we still haven’t even talked about this book and the rest of the Things You Missed.
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shredded pieces of his body, and that involved her just stapling the
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(mysterious music)
- [Zac] Jennifer Tilly pursues a new acting role as the Virgin Mary, the biblical figure who supposedly
magically becomes pregnant. This could be another example of the movie calling attention to the fact
that it is a movie, because our story in Seed is also about a Jennifer Tilly character’s pregnancy.
She takes a meeting with the director, Redman, and in his office you see a
poster for the movie Scarface, perhaps a reference to the fact that Chucky
has stitches on his face during this arc. Or maybe Redman just really likes Al Pacino huh?
After realizing he’s Chucky and Tiffany’s son, Glen ships himself to the movie studio
in Hollywood, and again, like in Child’s Play 3, we have no idea how he accomplished
this because how did he pack and ship himself if he’s already in the box?
So let’s just look past that. He arrives in a special effects shop and sees other horror icons
waiting there, but his interest is in his parents, and he tries one of the Damballa spells to awaken
them. And as you probably know: it works. Which means these dolls that were being used as props
in the Chucky Goes Psycho movie were the actual dolls from the crime scene in 1999, because Chucky
can’t just spawn into any old Good Guy doll... Not yet anyways. We see the original doll cleaned up
and rebuilt in Child’s Play 2, then that doll is melted down and the plastic is used create a new
Good Guy doll in Child’s Play 3, then the pieces of that doll are stitched together in Bride, and
now it appears that a movie studio somehow ended up with it and turned him into an animatronic.
Chucky and Tiffany come up with yet another plan to try to transfer themselves into human bodies,
but they also need a baby’s body for Glen to
go into. Tiffany doesn’t want to volunteer herself though. Roll it.
- Well, I'm not getting pregnant again, I'll tell you that much. My mother always told me…
"once is a blessing, twice is a curse."
- I think this may be an intentional foreshadowing, because twins eventually do pop out later on,
the first one is the boy, who according to the baby sitter,
is an angel, and the second is the girl, who is described as a very bad girl.
So Chucky and Tiffany knock up Jennifer with a turkey baster. If this movie came out today,
I’d be talking about how it drew influence from Don’t Breathe, but I guess it’s technically
the other way around? I would think that impregnating her with Chucky’s seed would
cause the children to come out half doll, but I guess not. I’m not gonna dwell on it.
Also, I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but when Jennifer calls up her
assistant, she’s writing fake fan mail letters, because Jennifer had mentioned
earlier that she’s basically jealous of the narcissistic pleasures of Hollywood stardom.
Meanwhile, Tiffany wants to get rid of her addiction to killing to set a good
example for the baby and this book tells her she needs to make amends
to those she has harmed. We see her dial up a woman that she had widowed in the past.
(dialing)
- [Woman on phone] Hello? - [Tiffany] Good morning.
Is this Ruth Bailey? - Speaking.
- The widow of Robert Bailey? - Yes, who is this?
- She’s speaking to the wife of the police officer we saw her kill in the opening scene of Bride,
(startling scream)
whose full name we later see on a news broadcast to be Robert Bailey.
Amazing how they can callback to a small detail like that,
yet they’re unable to remember the entire crux of the movie:
the fact that the dolls are not able to drive themselves. It kinda makes me crazy,
because if it was possible to drive a car with two dolls, then Bride doesn’t even need to exist.
- Oh sure, I’ll steer and you can work the pedals. WE’RE DOLLS YOU DOPE!
- I can't see anything. Maybe we should slow down?
- No, you're doing great!
- And the book that Tiffany reads on kicking her addictions is just so poorly put together. They
have this paragraph on the back, which was clearly just copy-pasted from somewhere,
and it just cuts off mid sentence once it’s filled up enough space on the cover.
And then the page she’s reading, which is supposedly page 166 even though it clearly isn’t,
is the exact same text. We can clearly see all the other pages are blank,
because the page she’s reading has colored bars on the top,
but the other pages in the book don’t have that. This is just sloppy filmmaking.
There’s also a shot later where Tiffany is just
****ing huge. Like of like that one shot of Chucky in the original movie.
You may remember one of the gags in Bride of Chucky was that Tiffany is a fan of tradwife
TV personality Martha Stewart. In Seed, we see a follow up on that.
- [Anchorwoman] It’s D-Day here in San Quentin. Who’d have thought it would ever come to this?
- [Tiffany] They’re executing Martha Stewart this morning.
- This is a reference to what at the time was a current event, but today,
may be forgotten. Martha Stewart went to prison in 2004 for investment fraud
and lying in court, so this is just a kind of funny escalation of that.
At one point we see a bunch of phone numbers listed on Jennifer’s landline. They are all
nine digit numbers, as opposed to the usual 10 digits required for a phone number in the US,
but the names are what interest me. The first one is Gate, which I imagine
is the number for the front gate of the movie studio, and the last one is Joan,
the name of her assistant. The others are just first names, but they do all correspond
to the names of crew members that worked on this movie. They’re all common names,
so they might not be crew reference easter eggs, but I’m gonna go ahead and assume that they are.
The story winds down after Chucky decides, he actually doesn’t want to transfer into a
human body anyone… despite spending the last 5 movies trying to do so.
- I’m one of the most notorious slashers in history, and I don’t want to give that up.
Because of Chucky’s hesitation, police are able to save the real Jennifer Tilly and get
her to the hospital, where funny enough, nobody believes her story about the dolls being alive.
In this sense, she’s kind of the spiritual successor to Andy Barclay.
And like Andy, she’s not in the clear just yet at the end of the
movie, because Chucky shows up and smashes through her door with an axe,
a clear reference to Jack Torrance’s most famous scene in The Shining.
(Shining-like orchestral music)
- I can’t think of a thing to say.
One of these days I’ll have to make a compilation
to every The Shining reference I’ve pointed out in a movie.
In the end, Chucky loses his limbs, just as he does in each of the original 3 movies,
and gets his head cut off just like in the first one. But this is a clue about the epilogue,
because if you’ve seen that first movie, you know that cutting off Chucky’s head
isn’t enough to finish him and Glen would find that out five years later.
(stinger and scream)
Alright, I made it through Bride and Seed. I didn’t think I could do it.
There were a lot of long nights of alcohol and self-mutilation and pouring bleach into my eyes,
so if you liked these videos, it would mean a lot if you shared them online.
The playlist on the left will eventually contain the next episodes of Chucky Things
You Missed where I’ll cover Curse and beyond, so make sure you don’t miss out on any of those
by subscribing to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ringing the deathbell for all notifications,
RIP Martha Stewart, I'll see you in the next one. Assuming we both survive.
(spooky dance music F yeah)