Seed of Chucky/What the #$*! Do We Know!?

Tickled to death: Laughs make up for Seed of Chucky's lack of scares

By Anthony Del Valle

If you're looking to be scared by Seed of Chucky--a reasonable expectation since the film's previous four installments seemed to have that aim--then you will likely be disappointed by series creator and debut director Don Mancini's latest effort. But if you're in the mood for some nonsense humor, and have what I assume to be a viewer's typical low expectations, then this tongue-in-cheek look at slasher movies will likely provide adequate pleasure.

Mancini's biggest inspiration is having Jennifer Tilly play herself and spoof her B-movie image. It helps if you enjoy spotting obscure B-movie references, from Ed Wood to Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Doll Chucky (voiced again by Brad Dourif) and main squeeze Tiffany (Tilly) find out they have a doll kid. But because of its androgynous manner--and its being sexually neutral, like all good dolls--the parents can't figure out if they should call the kid Glen or Glenda (Get it? If not, you'll miss half the movie's jokes.) The parents want to impregnate Tilly, who's currently trying hard to wrestle the role of the Virgin Mary in an upcoming epic away from Julia Roberts. When Tilly--slutty actress that she is--plans on seducing rapper/director Redman to get the part, Chucky and wife arrange to knock her out and fill her with Chucky's demon seed.

Most of the good jokes are Tilly's, who's such a good sport about mocking her career and weight that you may want to see her get another Oscar nomination some day (but not for this, please). The movie reference jokes are sometimes clever, too. When Chucky uses an ax to break through a bathroom door and peers into the room with a Jack Nicholson-smile, he says, "I know I should say something, but I don't know what it is.") And the gore--severed limbs, heads, testicles; you know, the usual stuff--is kept in humorous overabundance.

Deep thoughts

With the spate of documentaries now infiltrating theaters (brought on, no doubt, by the huge financial success of Fahrenheit 9/11), it's time to give more thought to what separates a good documentary not only from a bad one, but from a good classroom lecture.

What the #$*! Do We Know!?--the film's actual title, as opposed to the variations the media are using--is chock-full of fascinating information that supports what many of us deep thinkers have long suspected: that realities are often not only self-fulfilling but self-created. Trouble is, while director/writers Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse and William Antz know a lot about stimulating conversation, they don't know much about good filmmaking.

The script wraps its theories around a slight but unifying story about a photographer (played b Marlee Matlin) whose big-city life is financially successful but aimless. The slightest events in her life--a boy tossing her a basketball, people dancing frantically at a wedding, two lovers running off into a corridor for some quick intimacy--have her searching for some kind of meaning to it all. Between these happenings we get a series of lectures about quantum physics, which encompasses everything from time and space to the existence of God.

The film's strength is that a lot of this info, for us lay people anyway, is irresistible stuff. Even though your brain may warn you away from some of the, shall we say, fringe element philosophizing, you're bound to leave the theater questioning the physical world you thought you knew.

Its weakness is that the delivery of the information is so dry, so uncinematic, that a movie seems like the wrong host for this material. (The only time the film turns silly is when it tries to be movie-ish by using cartoon blobs to create dramatic situations.)

Movies are a visual medium, and not even four dimensions of Ph.D.s are going to change that. Not in this life, anyway.