Welcome to the dollhouse
Strung out on poppets, puppets, and Seed of Chucky.

By Kimberly Chun

Barbie, eat your heart out.

Tiffany, Bride of Chucky

ONE OF THE more popular attractions at the Sony Metreon in recent months hasn't been those love-'em-or-hate-'em dance-fever machines – it's been that stand-alone cardboard poster for Seed of Chucky that allows passersby a chance to poke their head in a hole and stand in as the "seed" of recurring OshKosh B'Gosh nightmare Chucky and leather-clad "bride" Tiffany.

If the above punch line for killer doll Tiffany's Bride of Chucky dressing and makeup scenes – which serve as obligatory foreplay to dating action in all girlie flicks, as the ladies get to consummate their precoital consumerist fantasies – hints at the wish for dolls to become bigger, better, more human, and (shades of that big, old robot doll himself, the Terminator) even superhuman, then the cardboard cutout outside the Metreon theaters touches on a humanoid wish to play at being more like a puppet.

And why not? Puppets are all around us and in the White House. Are we not men and women, or are we being jerked around by invisible masters? How else to explain the many doll- and puppet-related products in the movie houses: Seed of Chucky is only the latest in the short but deadly animatronic line of little people – a faux rogue's gallery that includes the bumbling cap-first-chat-later global cops of Team America, the threatening androids of I, Robot, and the philosophical working 'bots of Ghost in the Machine 2: Innocence.

Only a post-Cabbage Patch generation would find their Frankenstein, and bride, in chubby-cheeked Chucky, whose stitched face has gotten more tortured and grotesque as the installments in his series have become more self-conscious, kitsch-minded, and cruder. Let's say we've never seen so many primal scenes of a child – albeit Chucky and Tiffany's plastic-and-blood spawn, Glen (or Glenda, the most obvious of the many trash-movie references littering Seed) – peeing himself. Add in the somewhat unforgettable silhouette of an anatomically correct Chucky beating off to Fangoria as John Waters, playing born-to-die-badly paparazzi Pete Peters, snaps away outside and snarks about sex dwarves, and more fabulously fake gore – particularly in the form of the most gleeful decapitation of an effects maestro (here, Tony Gardner) since OG Tom Savini engineered his own exploding head in 1980's Maniac – and you can consider these dolls as fun-house mirrors for our dirty little secrets and worst bedtime fears.

Team America's self-righteous puppets and Seed's murderous dolls are also the perfect, almost too obvious metaphor for our seemingly terror-strafed world snatched from our control, no matter how hard we try to bomb it into submission. If only, these puppet parodies suggest, one could stitch up war wounds as easily as Chucky's or tack strings onto a puppet dictator in Iran. On the flip side, cinematic puppets and poppets also provide guilt-free screens on which we may project socially unacceptable emotions (with time-outs for the Kamasutra of puppet sex in Team America). As rigged by their masters, the often uncontrollable rage stems from pathology, as in Chucky's case and his inhabiting spirit's homicidal tendencies (voiced by Brad Dourif, the doll is the crass, cackling evil other to the actor's gentle, passive Vietnam War vet in The Deer Hunter), from a bratty knee-jerk reaction to, say, politically active Hollywood celebs (in the case of Team America), or from injustice or cruelty leveled, often by parents, on these pseudo-children or "little people."

That note is struck in the first Chucky installment, Child's Play (1988). Boy "master" Adam Barclay and the doll look alike, dress alike, sometimes they even sound alike. As unintentionally hilarious as the action gets – as the actors pretend to grapple with the doll and the panicking adults are reduced to firing rounds into a charred, crumbling baby doll Terminator – Chucky makes a ripe vessel for children's anger in all its unsocialized, uninhibited, and outta-hand fury, as unstoppable a mechanism as Arnie's autopilot and less likely to play by horror's rules of engagement.

It's not a stretch to see the through-line from the 1975 made-for-TV Karen Black horror-fest Trilogy of Terror to Child's Play, with the former's furiously chomping, crazed voodoo doll, lovingly nicknamed by some unknown witch doctor "He Who Kills," pitted against a neurotic singleton played by Black, straining against her nagging mother's tentacled grip. "A mother wouldn't even love that face," she says, dissing the devil doll in her first scene and intent on evenly slathering the abuse around. No wonder He Who Kills takes the first chance to bite her ankles that he can. Despite the extremely low-level special effects, Trilogy manages to work itself up into a nice, frothy fight 'n' flight scene as Black rolls her pupils around with silent-film vigor while the unstoppable death-dealing dolly makes hilarious munching sounds and resourcefully saws its way through doors and suitcases. Watching the helpless Black undergoing doll torture via the foot-high He Who Kill's nail file-like spear conjures memories of watching Tippi Hedren getting nearly pecked to death by canaries in The Birds. It makes you want to scream – with frustration.

If Trilogy is the grandpappy of Chucky and his kill-crazy kin (all stamped "Made in Japan" in truly pre-'90s style), then surely their overseas cousins are the somewhat more high-minded Japanese doll- and puppet-fixated films like Masahiro Shinoda's seriously striking Double Suicide (1969), which blends the formality of Bunraku (the refined field of Japanese puppet theater) and one of its staple dramas from way back (1720!), Chikamatsu's Double Suicide at Amijima, with Japanese '60s mod experimentation (reminiscent of that of Nagisa Oshima, who shot his own Double Suicide in '67) and French nouvelle vague verve. As a middle-class merchant and courtesan struggle against society's strictures and inevitably choose murder-suicide as the ultimate escape, Shinoda foregrounds the puppetry – and by extension, the forces of social control – by surrounding his actors with the traditionally black-draped, and ninjalike, puppet masters who guide, support, and ultimately control the action.

Its immediate descendent is director-comedian-actor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's somber and beautiful Dolls, a 2002 trilogy of not-quite-terror-filled tales about the ties of love that bind, which recontextualizes the Double Suicide story line in the form of a runaway striving salaryman and his insane girlfriend, reduced – or elevated – to the lot of forever-tethered homeless waifs. Much more aggro is Hideyuki Kobayashi's 2003 cheapo-video gothic Lolita fetish fantasia, Marrionnier, which dispenses with the suicide plot altogether and simply turns to the utmost in female objectification: here, a doll sicko murders random cuties and turns them into big, hideously dressed dolls. Those allergic to lace and long crimped hair may want to stay home. Perhaps Marrionnier isn't a huge leap beyond Shinoda's and Kitano's fatally romantic couples. Leave that to the smooth, goth-crock Möbius strip of Ghost in the Machine 2, which name-checks "Ghost in the Machine" essayist René Descartes, among others, in lieu of humanizing character development (check your humanity at the door, the film appears to posit, it's for suckers) – though it does make you a little nostalgic for the simpler just-keep-feeding-and-killing pleasures of Chucky and Tiffany. Imparting a bitter taste in one's mouth with its zealous yet hermetic twisted kicks (much like the 2002 stateside human doll-making mondo-oogey indie May), claustrophobically obsessive projects like Marrionnier make puppet-on-puppet intercourse look downright staid.