With an appealing mix of innocence, smarts and homicidal mania, Tilly is a valuable addition to the franchise, and has even more fun when turned into a killer slut Lady Penelope. The commitment to upping the quality is evident in the choice of ex-Hong Kong superstar director Yu (Bride With White Hair, The Phantom Lover), which brings some much-needed atmosphere and action.

The toys have to get to Ray's grave in New Jersey to retrieve a macguffin amulet, so high school runaways Jade (Heigl) and Jesse (Stabile) are conned into driving them across country and, incidentally, getting a Mickey-and-Mallory reputation by taking the blame for the escalating body count! After a lover's argument, the doll electrocutes the babe by tossing a TV set (screening Bride Of Frankenstein) into her bath, and her spirit is transmitted into another doll. She claims the leftover scraps of the doll from that police evidence lock-up where they also keep Jason's mask and Freddy's glove and performs a ritual out of Voodoo For Dummies that gets the now pretty-mangled Chucky walking around again.

Serial killer Charles Lee Ray, whose spirit (the Nicholsonesque voice of Brad Dourif) moved into the body of a killer doll ('The story is so long that if it were a movie it would take several sequels to tell it all,' Chucky sneers), had a hitherto-unknown trailer trash girlfriend, Tiffany (Tilly). Therefore, it's a voodoo miracle that this belated fourth entry, which wisely doesn't have a number in the title, pulls all the pieces together, gives them a couple of unusual spins, and goes all out for yocks and yucks that, for the most part, it delivers. Though a ludicrous boondoggle made it a tabloid hot potato, Child's Play 3 was about the mildest, most redundant splatter sequel ever made.

If ever a horror franchise was written off entirely, it was the Child's Play series.

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