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Of all the movies you may have expected from this fifth installment of the cheeky doll-slasher flick, a gender-bending pastiche prolly wasn’t one of them. Seed of Chucky opens Look Who’s Talking-style in a woman’s plumbing and soon turns all Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a horror movie about a horror movie being made and what happens when the fake horror turns real. Homicidal doll maniacs Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif) and Tiffany have Hollywood jobs as their own animatronic selves, but when their androgynous, anatomically incorrect spawn—who they alternately call Glen or Glenda (feyfully voiced by Billy Boyd, The Lord of the Rings trilogy’s Pippin)—awakens their demonic possession, he isn’t too keen on his parents’ predilection for decapitation and disembowelment. So they try to become a real family by inhabiting the real bodies of Jennifer Tilly and Redman (as themselves, natch), as Jennifer and her décolletage try to wiggle their way into the Mary role in Redman’s Biblical epic directorial debut. Now, insert some snide metajokes—e.g, John Waters as a “sleazy reporter”—mirthful gore, and a Tennessee Williams moment of arch cross-dressing melodrama, and this 90-minute lobotomy scores a few giggles, but only enough to recommend it to friends you never want to speak to again.

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