Boy will never match Chucky
POINTS: 3
Yes, the boy doll in The Boy is actually quite creepy. Mostly because it looks lifelike and ghostly at once. The eyes, the gaze, are pretty unsettling — it surely outdoes Annabelle. The bad news is that The Boy, by William Brent Dell, is never creepy — not by a fat chance. No matter how hard it tries, it will never match any Chucky movie, not even the mediocre ones.
Great (Lauren Cohan, who plays Maggie in The Walking Dead series) is a US babysitter hired to take care of 8-year-old Brahms (whom she thinks a real boy) in a large manor in England. So no wonder she’s shocked to learn that Brahms is actually a life-sized doll.
The fact that its “parents,” an old weird couple, do treat him as though he were a flesh and blood boy, is beyond belief. That’s why they give Great a set of rules to be followed while taking care of him/it. Of course, she occasionally disregards them and mayhem ensues. And yes, Brahms was once a human boy whose life ended tragically, as you might have guessed.
So there you have a classic setup for a doll horror movie. And while the overall premise is absolutely overworked, The Boy still had some potential. But not if the whole affair was to be taken seriously in a realistic vein, because the disoriented script takes so many turns, verisimilitude sinks, and the only way to pull it off is to go for something way bizarre, a bit grotesque, and largely campy. But not once does the director acknowledge this. And don’t get me started on the turn of the screw in the ending, which wrongly insists on leaving the supernatural aside.
Other missteps include ineffective scares (sometimes even risible), the absence of a disturbing atmosphere, barely sketched supporting characters, scarcely convincing performances (except Lauren Cohan, but she can only do so much with a character that’s dramatically inconsistent to the point of implausibility), a manor that’s not spooky, and no suspense at all. By the way, the ending also suggests the possibility of a sequel.
Now, that’s scary.
@PablSuarez
