A little girl is given a doll for her birthday, but it's the ugliest doll she or her parents have ever seen and she drops it into the very bottom of her toybox. Yet the doll is alive somehow and in the dead of night lifts the lid of the box and climbs out, grabbing a large knife from the birthday cake, then venturing up the stairs towards the family who are preparing for bed. The father thinks his daughter has left the toy lying around on the landing and picks it up to accuse her, when suddenly the doll stabs him with the knife and they plummet over the balcony. The doll rushes back up the stairs to do away with the mother, and then approaches the daughter's room... but it's all a nightmare that ends when he wets the bed. The doll is called Shitface, and has some pretty notorious parents...
Somewhere along the line, writer Don Mancini's Child's Play series of horror movies turned camp. In Seed of Chucky, not only does Mancini write the script but this time directs as well, and pulls off a minor epic of bad taste; scary it isn't, now the films are out and out comedies, seeing how far they can go with dubious jokes. It's telling that John Waters is among the cast members as it's his movies that are the obvious ancestors of both Bride of Chucky (which he openly admired) and its sequel, and here they gleefully send up Hollywood and its conventions of bastardising material: in this, rapper Redman (playing himself) is casting his own version of The Passion of the Christ and considering over-the-hill actress Jennifer Tilly for the role of the Virgin Mary.
Tilly, of course, provides the voice for the Tiffany doll, the Bride of the previous instalment, but we saw both Chucky and Tiffany destroyed so how will they be brought back? Well, Shitface is their offspring and has somehow ended up as the unlucky member of a ventriloquist act (how this happened is never explained), with the unfriendly Psychs (Keith Lee-Castle). Shitface swiftly escapes when he catches the news that a film is being made of the Chucky "urban legend" and makes his way to the Hollywood studio to meet the parents, but they are just inanimate puppets. Luckily (or unluckily for their victims), Shitface has the all important amulet to bring their spirits back to life - don't ask how, it doesn't make any sense.
Brad Dourif returns as the inimitable voice of Chucky, and Tilly is equally relishable as Tiffany. Now they are joined by Billy Boyd (apparently doing an Oliver Twist impersonation) as their son - or is he their daughter? They don't seem sure, with Chucky calling him Glen and Tiffany calling him Glenda, just to add to the poor soul's problems. When the evil dolls realise they are in Tinseltown, they are delighted - Tiffany has her eye on Tilly's body as the rightful home of her personalilty - and the couple waste no time in bumping off a special effects technician who crosses their path, much to Glen or Glenda's dismay.
Seed of Chucky handles its three rubber maniacs as an ultimate dysfunctional family, with the sort of problems you'd find in abundance on a psychotic Jerry Springer show. Tiffany decides that she's a poor role model for her son and that she should give up killing, which is treated like giving up an addiction - she even telephones the wife of a past victim to apologise and feels all the better for it afterwards (the same can't be said of the wife). Meanwhile Tilly is trying to seduce Redman into giving her the leading role in his Virgin Mary effort, on the very night that Tiffany wants to artificially inseminate her with Chucky's sperm, cueing a load of gags such as Chucky masturbating with Fangoria magazine to provide his sample. Thoroughly ridiculous throughout with ramshackle plotting, the film at least sees Chucky grow to be at ease with himself, and is genuinely funny in an "I can't believe they're trying to get away with this" kind of way, if not as delirious as its predecessor. Music by Pino Donaggio.
