This third film in the Child’s Play franchise finds the Good Guys factory restarting up production of the Chucky doll with Chucky coming back to life (again!) and tracking Andy down to a military academy.

And the result is…OK. Not great, but passable. The change of setting is a welcome change, Andy as played by Justin Whalin is very good (he would go on to star in John Waters’ masterpiece Serial Mom three years later and maybe on the back of this film as Waters is a huge Chucky fan) and the amusement park ending is excellent. But there feels like too much padding here that wasn’t the case with the first two films. The writer even admitted that by Part 3, he had started to run out of ideas. Chucky himself is excellent and a demonic living ‘doll’ still has the power to scare me though.

Whilst everyone outside of the UK will think of this film as merely an entry in a horror franchise, this movie has an infamous reputation in the UK. A young boy, James Bulger was lured away from his mother in a shopping centre (this was horrifyingly caught on CCTV) by two ten year old boys and then…If you want to know what happened next, Google it, but proceed with caution. This is one of the most brutal crimes in UK history. It was thought that one of the boys had seen Child’s Play 3 prior to what happened next. It was later proven that he hadn’t but a prominent MP tried to bring in stricter censorship laws here in Britain because of it. He nearly succeeded until the head censor, James Ferman stepped in and stated that the film censorship laws were strict enough as it was and didn’t need being made any more stringent. And he should know.

2.5 out of 5 stars