Thoughts on Brad Dourif

Recently, for some reason, I felt like watching Brad Dourif in movies/TV. He’s just one of those actors who has a strange but magnetic quality to him, and I felt interested in watching his acting. So I watched a Tales from the Crypt episode, and Curse of Chucky.

The Tales from the Crypt episode was from 1993, titled “People Who Live in Brass Hearses,” and featured him and Bill Paxton as brothers. Paxton plays an ex-con who wants revenge on his old boss that turned him in, and plans a heist at the ice cream warehouse where he had worked. He makes his brother be a part of it, and his brother seems to have a developmental disability and a hair-trigger temper, plus a poor memory for following directions, so it seemed like a really bad idea to have him as an accomplice on a heist. Paxton was great at playing a gleefully sleazy character, while Dourif excelled at playing a character who was both childlike and deeply disturbed. As predicted, the heist doesn’t go off as planned, and it was a lot of ridiculous fun to watch.

I put on Curse of Chucky afterwards because I had heard good things about it, and it was a really solid horror film, and great in staying in continuity with the original Child’s Play and taking off from where the awful Seed of Chucky left off. I really appreciate how Dourif never half-asses his performance as Chucky, and always gives a fully passionate voice work no matter the quality of the film. The character may be a misogynistic serial killer in a doll body (the doll says “bitch” way more times than I’d like to hear), but Dourif makes the series engaging, my favorites of the series being Child’s Play, Bride of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, and the last 15-20 minutes of Cult of Chucky. In addition, his daughter Fiona excelled a lot as the heroine in the last two films, really bringing a grounded reality and likability to her character, and it does amuse me in scenes between father and daughter when they are playing killer and potential victim, just giving so much energy between the two of them.

In addition to these roles, I also really liked Dourif a lot in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Alien: Resurrection, though I know he’s done way more below-the-radar genre stuff that I haven’t seen but would probably like.