Child’s Play(2019)

After Chucky (voiced by Mark Hamill) kills Karen’s (Aubrey Plaza) unpleasant boyfriend Shane (David Lewis) (whom we find out is secretly married with two daughters) one night because he made Andy (Gabriel Bateman) unhappy, he peels off Shane’s face with a knife and sticks it on a watermelon from his patch, then brings it to Andy’s room and leaves it out for him to see when he wakes up the next morning.

After seeing it, freaking out, and discovering from Chucky that he did this, Andy locks Chucky in his closet and calls his friends Falyn (Beatrice Kitsos) and Pugg (Ty Consiglio) over to come up with a solution on what to do with Shane’s remains. After ruling out telling the cops about it because they would very likely consider a story about his doll killing Shane to be preposterous, they wrap up the face-covered watermelon in birthday wrapping paper and head for the hallway garbage chute, intending to just dispose of it in the trash and forget about it. Unfortunately, as they are heading for the door, Karen enters the apartment and inquires about what is in the wrapping paper. Andy panics and says that it is a present he made for Doreen (Carlease Burke), the mother of Detective Norris (Brian Tyree Henry), for helping him with his homework, and Karen says that they should go deliver it now. She and Andy walk over to Doreen’s apartment and give her the present, and when Doreen is keen on opening it now, Andy is able to convince her to hold off on doing that until his birthday next week in order to give himself time to recover it and dispose of it.

That night, Andy lets Chucky out of the closet claiming that he wants to play with him, but he, Falyn, and Pugg triple-team him soon after and disconnect the power core in his chest, shutting him down. They then wrap him up and drop him down the garbage chute and mutually vow to never speak about what happened to anyone. The following night, Andy goes to Doreen’s apartment to have dinner with her and Norris, and Doreen’s present gets brought up when Norris catches Andy looking at it, after which Doreen gives him the details on it. When Doreen and Norris take a few moments away from the table, Andy steals the wrapped watermelon and runs out of the apartment, then sends it down the garbage chute and starts trying to put the whole horrific episode behind him.

Unfortunately, a series of events occur that sees the doll reactivated and ending up in the possession of Omar (Marlon Kazadi), another kid in Andy’s apartment building. Andy visits Omar’s place after his friend Chris (Anantjot S. Aneja) comes knocking at his door and tells him to check out what Omar got, and Andy sees the doll, but his initial fear that this is Chucky is assuaged after he notices that the doll is functioning perfectly. But, while Andy is hanging out with Falyn, Pugg, Chris, and Omar in Zed Mart the next day, Chucky – who came along with Omar – reveals himself to Andy by telling him that, if he can’t be his friend, nobody can. He eyes turn red, and then he uses his Kaslan product interaction capabilities to interact with some nearby TV screens and plays two pieces of video footage he recorded before murdering Shane, with the first being Shane being hostile towards Andy and the second being Andy’s angry wish for Shane to go away. Andy yells for him to turn off the screens and then attacks him, and Chucky only shuts them off when Omar appears. Andy tries to convince Omar that his Buddi doll is Chucky, but he doesn’t believe him, and after flicking Andy’s hearing aid out of his ear as an insult, they get into a fight. When their other friends appear and Pugg tries to break them up, Andy shoves him into some shelves. Andy frantically tells the others that Omar’s Buddi doll is Chucky and he is controlling the screens, but the screens resume playing their original video, and Karen shows up to try to calm Andy down. Thinking that Andy is losing it, his friends leave him, and Chucky goes with them. Andy recovers his hearing aid, but notices that Omar’s phone fell out of his pocket during their scuffle and takes it home with him.

That night, Andy uses the Buddi app on Omar’s phone to try to keep tabs on what Chucky will do next, and he watches Chucky as he goes into Omar’s kitchen and picks up a knife, but then the signal cuts out. When it comes back on moments later, he sees that Chucky is at ground level and standing behind a tree and watching Doreen, who is on her way to the local bingo hall and is about to get into a driver-less Kaslan Kar. Andy hurries down to the street to try to stop Doreen from going, but he is too late to do so. When she arrives at the bingo hall, Chucky is standing outside, and he uses his capabilities to disengage the airbags and her seatbelt and send her crashing into another car. When this fails to kill her, he gets in the car and stabs her to death with the knife. Meanwhile, Andy tries to tell Karen that Chucky is out killing Doreen right now, but she finds the story too farfetched. She then asks him what happened to their cat, Mickey Rooney, and shows him his collar that she found moments ago, and he tells her that Chucky had killed him, too. He then tells her that he can show her over Omar’s phone that Chucky is following Doreen, and he admits that he took it so he could track the doll’s movements. He pleads with Karen to listen to him because no one else will, but she replies that she is returning Omar’s phone to him and he will be coming to work with her tonight for the midnight release of the Buddi 2 and Buddi Bear lines of Kaslan dolls. A short time after she leaves, Chucky commandeers the TV set and plays a video he recorded of Falyn and Pugg where Pugg voices his suspicion that Andy is legitimately crazy and is Shane’s true killer. Chucky then taunts Andy through the Kaslan electronics all around the apartment, saying that “if they don’t let us play, they all go away”, and he also shows that Karen is on his hit list when he plays a video of her. This prompts him to grab a baseball bat and smash up the electronics (in addition to some other household items) while trying to find him, and he destroys the TV as well when Chucky plays the recording he made of a terrified Doreen just before he killed her. Karen returns as Andy is doing this and is horrified, thinking that her son’s sanity really is slipping.

Andy is next seen in the store standing close to Karen as midnight draws near. Back at the apartment building, Falyn notices two cops questioning a tenant outside of Doreen’s apartment and tells Pugg that she suspects that Doreen is dead, then asks if Andy might have actually been right about Chucky. She and Pugg then find and approach Omar, Chris, and two of their other friends, and Pugg tells him to show them his Buddi doll, but he replies that it is gone and he believes Andy might have taken it since he already took his phone. Falyn forces Omar to fork over his phone so she can check the Buddi app, and they all see the video Chucky recorded of Doreen before she got into the Kaslan Kar and realize that Andy was telling the truth after all. They then see that the doll is watching Andy and Karen in Zed Mart in real time and realize that Andy is now in danger himself. Meanwhile, Norris is shown photos of Shane’s face, which was found in the apartment building’s dumpster this morning, and he notices the wrapping paper and draws the conclusion that Andy had murdered Shane.

Falyn, Pugg, and Omar go to Zed Mart, arm themselves with some random weapons, then find Andy and warn him that Chucky is here. He says that he needs to find his mother, but as he goes to look for her, Norris appears and cuffs him. Karen then shows up and demands to know what is going on, and Andy yells that Chucky is in the store and is going to kill her. Just then, the midnight hours hits and the shoppers rush up the main aisle to the big Buddi 2 display, but Chucky stabs Karen’s co-worker Wes (Amro Majzoub) in the neck before he goes out to greet the public in a Buddi 2 costume, and he takes the headpiece off in front of them and sprays blood all over some people. As screams ring out, Norris cuffs Andy to a heavy display bin and heads over to deal with it, and as Andy desperately tries to warn his mother that Chucky is going to kill them, Chucky shuts off all the lights in the store and switches on the Buddi app on everyone’s phones. He then proceeds to cause complete terror and mayhem by first using his capabilities to activate a few Kaslan drones and have them attack the workers and shoppers, killing a few of them, then he initiates the store’s lockdown procedure. Norris takes a drone’s propeller in his neck while saving Pugg from being hit by it and collapses onto the floor. Chucky also activates the Buddi 2 and Buddi Bear dolls and corrupts their programming to make them murderous, so the people who don’t escape out the door get mauled by them. Before Andy himself can be attacked by a Buddi Bear doll, Falyn rescues him by slicing the doll with a gas-powered hedge trimmer and then cutting its head off with a hatchet, after which she uses the hatchet to cut the chain on his handcuffs.

As Andy tries to escape the store with his friends, Chucky gets his attention over the P.A. system and shows him a live feed of a bloody Karen, who is bound and gagged with a rope tied around her neck somewhere in the store. Falyn and Pugg try to convince Andy to leave with them and call the cops, knowing that Chucky is just trying to lure him back in, but Andy leaves them outside and then locks down the store so he will be stuck in there with Chucky, feeling that it is his duty to finish this since it was his fault that Chucky became what he became. Andy then arms himself with the hatchet and hedge trimmer and begins his search.

Andy finds Karen in the stockroom, but then Chucky taunts him again and makes it clear that he intends to get rid of his mother and his friends, then he hits him in the head from behind with a baseball bat. He then raises the forks on a forklift, which has the other end of the rope that Karen’s neck is tied to wrapped around them, obviously as a means of hanging her, then he gets on top of Andy and comes to think that he is “broken” because he is not happy and prepares to cut into him with a knife to “fix” him. Before he can, Andy sings the Buddi theme song to distract him, then takes a toy police car and nails him with it. He then climbs up the shelves and starts cutting Karen’s rope loose with the hedge trimmer, but Chucky surprises him and leaps onto him, and Andy jumps onto the rope. The hedge trimmer falls and breaks on the ground, but as Andy struggles with Chucky, he grabs Chucky’s knife and finishes cutting the rope with it, causing them and Karen to crash onto the floor. Andy grabs the knife again, mounts himself on top of Chucky, and drives the blade deep into his power core, seemingly deactivating the doll. However, after Andy gets up and calls out to Karen while walking away from Chucky, he hears Chucky sing his song, then turns around to see the doll launching itself at him. Suddenly, Norris shows up and shoots Chucky in mid-air, and Karen – having gotten free of her restraints – plants one foot on Chucky’s body to anchor him before tearing off his head, finishing him off. Andy and Karen hug with relief, and police and paramedics are called to the scene, with Karen and Norris being taken to a hospital to get treated for their injuries. As this happens, Andy and his friends take the broken Chucky out back and pulverize his remains before burning them.

In a voiceover, Henry Kaslan (Tim Matheson) – the owner of the Kaslan Corporation – says that his company conducted an investigation into what happened, and they concluded that they shared no responsibility for the horrific events that transpired at Zed Mart. However, as a precaution, they have ordered a recall on all Buddi and Buddi 2 products for the time being. As a bunch of the Buddi dolls are being stored away, one of the dolls’ pupils briefly flickers red before it then smiles….