CHILD'S PLAY is a movie that launched a foul-mouthed icon of a demented doll aided by stunning puppetry and animatronic work, and here's the thing I love so much: none of that comes into play until over halfway through the film. The key to the success of the original CHILD'S PLAY is restraint. For the first chunk of the movie, the doll is almost completely inanimate. We'll see his eyes shift, see his hand curl, maybe see him dart by in the background, and that's it.
I’m sure, by now, we all know the plot. A serial killer transfers his soul into a doll at the moment of his death and that doll winds up being sold as a birthday present to a six-year-old boy named Andy who becomes unable to convince anyone that the doll is actually alive, and becomes the main suspect in the murders he knows the doll is responsible for. Just in terms of well-crafted suspense and scares, this movie is a marvel. It threads things out so well and the scene where Karen brings home the doll and realizes it's been moving and talking this whole time without batteries is legendary. The really underrated aspect is how manipulative Chucky is. We only ever hear Andy's side of the conversation for the early part of the movie, but it's so enlightening. He tells his mom that this doll was sent down from Heaven by his father to be his new best friend, which has to be one of the most screwed up things Chucky's ever done.
In a way, CHILD'S PLAY deals with how the adult world is set up not to believe children. Yes, Andy's story sounds like a kid's imagination, but he's unwavering, and when no one believes him, there's nobody for him to go to. He's got one friend and that friend is now trying to possess his body. On a bigger level, CHILD'S PLAY is about the toy boom of the '80s, the Cabbage Patch craze, all of that is the backdrop of the whole movie. Andy is introduced in Good Guy pajamas, eating Good Guy cereal, watching a Good Guy cartoon. Here's a story about a product that could be a direct stand-in for so many things of the time, that's just being jammed down kids' throats until it overtakes their life, literally trying to take over their life. You can tell creator Don Mancini was the son of an advertising executive. Seminal film for the end of its decade.