Cult of Chucky (2017)

Seventh entries in long-running horror franchises usually arrive as obligations, and Cult of Chucky arrives as something closer to a shrug with a body count. Don Mancini returns to direct his own creation, confining the paraplegic survivor Nica Pierce to a medium-security asylum where a therapy doll becomes the instrument of a fresh round of decapitations. The ensemble is more varied than the genre requires, with actors of colour scattered through the patient roster and a wheelchair-using lead who does the heavy lifting. None of this is argued for. It is inherited, the residue of a franchise that has been quietly assembling a mixed cast since the late eighties.

The queer currents are harder to miss. Jennifer Tilly's Tiffany returns with her usual appetite, the finale pairs the possessed Nica with Tiffany for a charged drive into the night, and at least one reviewer reached for the phrase deranged psycho-lesbian clinches. A reference to the genderfluid Glen was cut, which tells us where the film's nerve ends. This is subtext in exploitation clothing, not affirmation. Nica remains a formidable survivor and Tiffany a scenery-chewing antagonist, but the series has been doing that for two decades, and no thesis accompanies the bodies.

Where the film is most revealing is in what it declines to do. The asylum is stocked with patients, including a man with dissociative identity disorder, and the setting treats mental illness as gothic furniture, a place for jump scares and self-harm imagery. There is no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no class grievance, no body acceptance, no historical argument, and no sermon. It runs ninety-one minutes and spends them on drills, high heels, and compressed air canisters. The result is a lean, self-spoofing slasher that knows exactly what it is. Sometimes that is enough.