Curse of Chucky (2013)

The sixth entry in a franchise about a plastic doll with a body count, Curse of Chucky arrives with modest ambitions and a surprising amount of craft. Don Mancini, who has written every installment, steps behind the camera and strips the series back to the grim, single-location slasher template of the 1988 original. A paraplegic woman named Nica, played by Fiona Dourif, watches her estranged family get picked off one by one in a cavernous old house. The film is patient, atmospheric, and largely disinterested in making a statement about anything beyond the mechanics of a good kill. That restraint is the point. This is a horror movie that wants to scare you, and it mostly does.

There are gestures toward a wider social consciousness, though none of them are pressed. Nica is a wheelchair user and the film's most competent character, a casting decision that carries quiet weight for a genre that rarely bothers. A same-sex affair surfaces between two supporting characters, treated as a sordid reveal instead of an identity. A Latino actor appears in a supporting role and the film says nothing about it, which is either admirable or simply incurious. The flashbacks to 1988 serve continuity, not history. Nobody lectures. Nobody eats the rich. The Good Guys doll remains a doll.

What we get, then, is a lean and mean piece of franchise maintenance, well acted and unexpectedly tense, with a final girl who earns her survival through grit and an axe. It has no sermon to deliver and no agenda to advance, and in an era of horror films that arrive pre-loaded with talking points, that absence reads almost as a novelty. A modest, competent chiller. The doll does the rest.