Slasher Summer: Chucky's Top 10 Best Kills - Page 2
#5.
WARREN KINCAID
Bride of Chucky
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#5.
WARREN KINCAID
Bride of Chucky
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Warren Kincaid is not only the chief of police, he's also the uncle and apparently sole guardian for 17-year-old Jade. His protectiveness of his daughter stands in the way of Chucky and Tiffany's plan, so they must kill him. However, when Chucky prepares to go for a simple stabbing, Tiffany chides him for lacking creativity (this movie is meta enough to reference the rating criteria for this very list) and so they devise a more intricate murder involving meticulously laid out nails and an airbag. This ends with Kincaid taking on the appearance of another notable slasher icon before apparently dying. The two dolls hide his body, but it is later revealed that Kincaid is still alive, and eventually, Chucky must kill him again, this time using his more traditional, more stabby methods. In his own words, "A true classic never goes out of style."
#4.
PLAY PAL EMPLOYEE
Child's Play 2
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#4.
PLAY PAL EMPLOYEE
Child's Play 2
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I'm a relatively quiet moviegoer. Even when I'm watching a slasher flick, I rarely make any audible noises. However, one kill that forced me to gasp out equal measures of groaning and laughter was the death of a nameless Play Pal employee during the climax of Child's Play 2. Set in the factory where Good Guy Dolls are mass-produced, the scene focuses a little too heavily on the industrial machine that inserts eyes into the dolls' heads. You know somebody has to die from it, but Andy and his foster sister escape its grasp and clog up its works fairly effectively. That's when the nameless overnight employee comes along, begrudgingly putting his body into the machine in order to unclog it and restore it to working order. Needless to say, Chucky seizes the opportunity to turn the machine on, and the employee is implausibly trapped in precisely the right way to get his own eyes plunged into his skull and replaced with toy ones. It may be predictable and silly, but it's also awesomely memorable.
#3.
MAGGIE PETERSON
Child's Play
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#3.
MAGGIE PETERSON
Child's Play
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The first murder Charles Lee Ray commits as a Good Guy Doll is of Andy's babysitter, Aunt Maggie. It's a long scene that doesn't reveal much of the actual doll, but rather uses jump cuts and P.O.V. shots to build anxiety and more of that Hitchcockian suspense these films are riddled with. While it is tempting to attribute this scene to the opening sequence of Halloween, it more likely draws its inspiration from Jaws, as that film and Child's Play have the same cinematographer, Bill Butler.
#2.
MISS KETTLEWELL
Child's Play 2
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#2.
MISS KETTLEWELL
Child's Play 2
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Few kills are as satisfying as this one. Miss Kettlewell is an elementary school teacher who is, to put it bluntly, a bitch. The new kid (Andy), an obviously troubled boy from a foster home, reacts to another boy picking on him and Miss Kettlewell decides the best course of action is to berate him in front of the entire class on his first day. Then, when she sees profanity scrawled in red crayon over his classwork, she yells at him and gives him detention rather than dealing with it delicately and compassionately the way an elementary school teacher is supposed to. When she finally meets Chucky, and he stabs her with an air pump before beating her to death with a yard stick, it feels so rewarding and deserved, even though it should be horrible to want such bloody vengeance to occur on school grounds. Just try not to think about the fact that it is probably a kid who discovers the body.
#1.
CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN
Child's Play 3
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#1.
CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN
Child's Play 3
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Arguably the best murder Chucky commits is the most thematically on-the-nose. After being resurrected a second time, Chucky's first priority is killing the closest thing he has to a god: the CEO of Play Pal Toys, creator of the Good Guy doll line. This death is another lengthy scene, during which the cynical corporate scumbag, Christopher Sullivan, is attacked and brutalized by his own toys, including a golf club, darts, and a yo-yo. Chucky is delirious with homicidal glee the entire time, and that joy is infectious. If there is one kill that really defines Chucky, this is it.
With his penchant for giddy murder and one-liners, Chucky's more closely related to Freddy than Jason. Still, he's his own man (so to speak), and his kills are notable for the creativity required to have a kid's doll overpower full-grown human adults. Many of those kills are punctuated by a heavy dose of suspense, and thus, as a slasher icon, Chucky is the only one capable of being both frightening and ridiculous in equal measure. Not even Freddy threads that needle as perfectly.
Next week, we'll be looking at a very different horror icon, one who might not even qualify as a slasher. He emerges from a much darker and more grotesque place, and though he is known to deliver a few good lines, those lines are never as funny as they are chilling. I speak, of course, of Pinhead, the last of the icons we'll be covering this summer.
-e. magill 8/3/2017
THE UNAPOLOGETIC GEEK'S
SLASHER SUMMER: | |
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