Child's Play

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General		Extras
Category	Horror	Theatrical Trailer (1.85:1, non-16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0)
Rating
Year Released	1988
Running Time	83:30 Minutes
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (49:55)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Selection then Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Tom Holland
Studio Distributor	Fox Home Video	Starring	Catherine Hicks Chris Sarandon Alex Vincent Brad Dourif Dinah Manoff Tommy Swerdlow
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$34.95	Music	Joe Renzetti

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 224 Kb/s) German (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 224 Kb/s) French (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 224 Kb/s) Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 224 Kb/s) Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 224 Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	Yes
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired German German for the Hearing Impaired French Italian Spanish Dutch Swedish Finnish Norwegian Danish Portuguese Polish	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The story begins with a detective by the name of Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon) chasing the Lakeshore Strangler, or Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) as he is more frequently referred to in this film, into a toy store. Mortally wounded, Charles stumbles over a stack of Good Guy dolls and performs what appears to be a bad approximation of a voodoo ritual upon one of them. The skies turn black, and a surge of lightning strikes the store, throwing Mike back far enough to kill any ordinary police officer (but hey, this is the movies).

    From there, we cut to the Barclay household, a quaint little apartment somewhere in Chicago, where Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is about to celebrate his sixth birthday. Like any regular six-year-old, Andy wants everything he sees, but the one thing he wants most of all happens to be a Good Guy doll. Unfortunately, his mother Karen (Catherine Hicks) is a single parent, having been widowed at an indeterminate point before the events of this film, and thus has to struggle to make ends meet. Her best friend and workmate, Maggie Petersen (Dinah Manoff), manages to find a peddler (Juan Ramírez) who has somehow managed to procure a Good Guy doll, and will sell it to her for a discount price, no questions asked. Of course, the doll turns out to be none other than the one Charles Lee Ray performed the bad approximation of a voodoo ritual upon, who goes around calling himself Chucky. When Maggie is killed while baby-sitting Andy, the police become suspicious of Andy's behaviour, while Karen is suspicious of the doll.

    Obviously, the premise of this entire franchise now revels in its obvious silliness, and it is with a great deal of amusement that I recall one of the radio spot slogans that was used to advertise this film ("...when Freddy has nightmares, he dreams about Chucky..."). Since Chucky is a doll that barely reaches the size of a six year old boy, believing him to be any threat to anyone other than a child is quite a stretch, and the makers of this film obviously thought so too, given that only three people die in the entire film. Given that the film only has a running time of approximately eighty minutes once you strain out the end credits, and that there are almost no supplements included in this package, I have extreme hesitation recommending it other than as a rental. Still, if B-grade horror films used to fascinate you about ten years ago, then Child's Play is an average example thereof which will sustain at least one viewing.

Video

    The transfer is presented in the original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and it is not 16x9 Enhanced.

    The transfer is uniformly sharp, at least to the point where important details can easily be made out, but that's the best part of it where detail is concerned. The shadow detail is uniformly below average, with much of the shots in this film being so dark that it is almost like watching a film that was recorded using an old camcorder. While some detail is apparent in the abundant patches of darkness that make up this film, you have to strain rather hard to make such detail out. On the positive side, there is no low-level noise apparent in the abundant patches of darkness.

    Like the luminance of the transfer, the colours are quite subdued, with flesh tones and splashes of primary colours being restrained to the point of almost seeming undersaturated. This is probably as much a fault of the low-budget photography as the transfer, and also a side effect of the darkness, but at least the saturation is consistent from one shot to another. There is no colour bleeding nor misregistration readily apparent in the transfer.

    MPEG artefacts were not an issue with this transfer, which is one benefit of the surprising decision to compress this transfer to an RSDL disc. Indeed, almost the entire transfer has a bitrate of just under nine megabits per second, giving the transfer as natural a look as you'd expect. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some aliasing in train tracks at 32:36, but this was the only readily apparent example in the transfer, and a rather mild example at that. Film artefacts consisted of some flecks on the picture every now and again, which were also quite minor and didn't even come close to being intrusive.

    This disc is presented in the RSDL format, with the layer change taking place at 49:55. This is just after the detective stops his car outside Karen's home, and it is rather well-placed, all things considered.

Audio

    The original English dialogue is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 with surround-encoding, while dubs in German, French, Italian, and Spanish are provided in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. I listened to the English soundtrack, and then I had a listen to the German dub while transcribing my notes into this review. In spite of the fact that the dubbed soundtracks are mono, the English soundtrack didn't really seem any more immersive.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand in the English soundtrack, if only because of its sheer badness, whereas the German dub was difficult to understand because I couldn't stop laughing at it. There were no major issues with audio sync, except for the fact that the puppet's movements and voice seemed to be ever so slightly mismatched.

    The score music in this film is credited to Joe Renzetti, and it keeps pretty much to the tone of the film, with a sense of confusion over whether to take itself seriously, or to merely descend into satire. It is not especially noticeable in context of the rest of the soundtrack, where the sounds of screaming, explosions, and gunshots tend to drown out everything else except the dialogue. Needless to say, I have never heard of this particular composer before I started this review, in spite of having viewed this film a number of times before, and I have doubts that I will ever hear of him again.

    The surround channels are used with some frequency to support the music and special effects, creating enough separation from one channel to another for the film to seem like a reasonable surround experience. Sadly, the use of the surround channels is uninspired and ineffective, with most of the sound effects coming from the front speakers, and those that are redirected into the surrounds are minimal in spite of their frequency.

    On the other hand, the subwoofer had a whale of a time supporting the soundtrack, with all manner of low-frequency effects being supported by the subwoofer without calling any specific attention to that particular channel.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer

Booklet

[Addendum April 28, 2001: We've since learned that the R1 version is actually presented in Full Frame, thus making the R4 version of the disc a winner by virture of having the proper aspect ratio, even if it isn't 16x9 Enhanced.]

    The video quality is good.

    The audio quality is reasonably good.

    The extras are almost non-existent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Dean McIntosh (my bio sucks... read it anyway)
November 18, 2000
Amended 28th April 2001