Child's Play 3

Eight years after Chucky's second demise, the Play Pals company has recovered from the bad publicity of Chucky's murder sprees and resumes manufacturing Good Guy dolls. The company restores the abandoned factory. A splash of blood from Chucky's corpse is inadvertently mixed in with the plastic being used to produce the dolls, reviving him in a new body. Chucky is given to Play Pals CEO Mr. Sullivan. Chucky tortures and strangles him to death with the string of a yo-yo, then uses computer records to locate Andy Barclay.

Now aged 16, Andy has been sent to Kent Military Academy after failing to cope in several foster homes. Colonel Cochrane, the school's commandant, begrudgingly enrolls Andy but advises him to forget his "fantasies" about the doll. Andy befriends cadets Harold Aubrey Whitehurst; Ronald Tyler, an 8-year-old cadet he met while waiting for a haircut at Kent; and Kristin DeSilva, for whom he develops romantic feelings. He also meets Brett C. Shelton, a sadistic lieutenant colonel who routinely bullies the cadets.

Tyler is asked to deliver a package to Andy's room. Tyler realizes that the package contains a Good Guy doll and takes it to the cellar to open it, only to have Chucky burst free from the package. Chucky is incensed to find Tyler instead of Andy, but remembering he can possess the first person who learns his true identity, tells Tyler his secret. Before Chucky can enact the ritual, Cochrane interrupts them and confiscates the doll, throwing it into a garbage truck. Chucky escapes by luring the driver into the truck's compactor and crushing him.

That night, Chucky attacks Andy and tells him his plans for taking over Tyler's body instead of his. Before Andy can fight back, Shelton comes in and takes the doll from him. Andy then sneaks into Shelton's room to recover it but Sheldon awakens to confront him, only to find that Chucky has vanished. Suspecting the doll was stolen, Sheldon forces all the cadets to do exercises as punishment. Tyler and Chucky play "hide the soul" in Cochrane's office, where Chucky attempts to possess Tyler again. However, they are interrupted by DeSilva and fellow cadet Ivers, before Cochrane himself enters a little later. The cadets sneak out undetected, but a knife-wielding Chucky surprises Cochrane, unintentionally shocking him into suffering a fatal heart attack. The next morning, Andy tries to convince Tyler that Chucky is evil, but Tyler refuses to believe him. Meanwhile, Chucky kills the camp barber Sgt. Botnick by slashing his throat with a straight razor after he tries to give Chucky a haircut. Whitehurst witnesses this and flees.

Despite Cochrane's death, the school's annual war games are ordered to proceed as planned, with Andy and Shelton on the same team. However, Chucky has secretly replaced the paint bullets of the Red team with live ammunition. When the simulation begins, Chucky gets Tyler away from his team. Finally realizing that Andy was telling the truth, Tyler stabs Chucky with a pocket knife and flees to find Andy. Chucky then attacks Kristin and holds her hostage, attempting to lure the teams into fighting each other to save her. Chucky forces Andy to exchange Kristin for Tyler. The Blue team shows up and discovers the situation with Chucky, and Shelton thinks that Andy had gone awol to join the Red team, without realizing there is a bigger situation at hand. Suddenly, the Red team descends upon the area and obliviously opens fire with their live rounds; Shelton is killed in the crossfire. Tyler escapes amidst the chaos, but before giving chase, Chucky tosses a fragmentation grenade at the quarrelling cadets.

Whitehurst leaps on top of the grenade and sacrifices himself to save the others. Andy and Kristin pursue Chucky and Tyler into a haunted house roller-coaster at a nearby carnival. Chucky kills a security guard, kidnaps Tyler, and shoots Kristin in the leg, leaving Andy to fight Chucky alone. When Tyler is knocked out, Chucky seizes the opportunity to possess him, but Andy shoots off part of Chucky's left arm, then in the chest causing him to stop the chant, enraged, Chucky attempts to strangle Andy with one hand asking to hand over Tyler, Tyler then hands the pocket knife to Andy, who then cuts off Chucky's right hand, realizing he's defeated. Andy knocks Chucky off the mountain falling and screaming as he approaches a giant metal fan below. Chucky gets chopped to pieces and is immediately killed, as Tyler and Andy watch from above. Afterwards, the police tell Andy he'll gonna have to come with them. Andy assures DeSilva it'll be okay and he's been through this before, she is then rushed to the hospital.

Justin Whalin portrays a 16-year-old Andy Barclay in Child's Play 3

• Justin Whalin as Andy Barclay
• Perrey Reeves as Kristin De Silva
• Jeremy Sylvers as Ronald Tyler
• Travis Fine as Cadet Lt. Col. Brett C. Shelton
• Dean Jacobson as Harold Aubrey Whitehurst
• Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky
• Peter Haskell as Sullivan
• Dakin Matthews as Col. Francis Cochrane
• Andrew Robinson as Sgt. Botnick
• Burke Byrnes as Sgt. Clark
• Matthew Walker as Ellis
• Donna Eskra as Jackie Ivers
• Edan Gross as voice of Good Guy doll
• Terry Wills as Garbage Man
• Richard Marion as Patterson
• Laura Owens as Lady Executive
• Ron Fassler as Petzold
• Michael Chieffo as Security Guard
• Henry G. Sanders as Major
• Catherine Hicks as Karen Barclay (photograph)

Universal Studios had Don Mancini begin writing the third installment for the series before Child's Play 2 was released, causing pressure to him to draft a storyline on such a tight schedule.[8] The film was formally greenlit after the successful release of its predecessor with a release date nine months away.

Mancini initially wanted to introduce the concept of "multiple Chuckys" in the movie, but due to budget constraints the idea was eventually scrapped.[9] Mancini later used this concept for the 2017 sequel Cult of Chucky. It also was intended to open with a scene of a security guard portrayed by John Ritter frightening off a group of trespassing children at the Good Guys factory by telling them scary stories about Chucky. After Mancini decided to make Andy Barclay 16 years old, he considered recasting the role with Jonathan Brandis before hiring Justin Whalin. Before Jack Bender became director, Mancini wanted to hire Peter Jackson.[10]

Principal photography began on February 4, 1991, at the Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. Further filming took place in California at Los Angeles and the Universal Studios Lot in Universal City. The carnival scenes were filmed in Valencia, California.[1] The puppeteers made the doll speak using computer technology to control its mouth movements to align with Dourif's prerecorded dialogue.[10][1] N. Brock Winkless IV returned to work as one of Chucky's puppeteers,[11] as did Van Snowden.

A tie-in novel was later written by Matthew J. Costello. Just like Child's Play 2, this novel had some of the author's own parts. In the beginning (unlike the film's), in the Play Pals factory, a rat scours for food and chews on Chucky's remains. Blood then leaks out of the remains and somehow leaks into another doll. Chucky's death in this book is also different. In the novel, Andy shoots Chucky in the chest and causes his body to fall to the floor, and watches his head shatter to blood, metal and plastic.

Child's Play 3 opened in second place behind Dead Again to $5.7 million over the 4-day 1991 Labor Day weekend, which the Los Angeles Times called "slow numbers".[12] It finished its theatrical run with $15 million in the US, and a total of $20.5 million worldwide.[2]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 23% based on reviews from 13 critics, and an average rating is 4.50/10, making it the poorest reviewed film in the series on the site.[13] On Metacritic it has a score of 27% based on reviews from 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[14]

Chris Hicks of the Deseret News called it "perverse" and criticized the film's plot.[15] Caryn James of The New York Times called the Chucky doll "an impressive technological achievement" but said the film "misses the sharpness and dark humor" of the original film.[16] Variety called it a "noisy, mindless sequel" with good acting.[17] Richard Harrington of The Washington Post wrote, "Chucky himself is an animatronic delight, but one suspects the film's energies and budget have all been devoted to what is essentially a one-trick pony."[18] Stephen Wigle of The Baltimore Sun called it "fun for any fan of the slasher genre".[19]

Series creator Don Mancini said that this was his least favorite entry in the series, adding that he ran out of ideas after the second film.[20] He elaborated further in 2013 stating that he was not pleased with the casting, feeling Jeremy Sylvers was too old for the role of Tyler and Dakin Matthews was not the "R. Lee Ermey" archetype he was looking for in Colonel Cochrane.[21]

Mancini would not make another entry in the Chucky series until seven years later, with Bride of Chucky. In a 2017 interview, director Jack Bender also dismissed the film by calling it "kinda silly".

Child's Play 3 was originally released on home video in North America on March 12, 1992 and on DVD on October 7, 2003. It was also released in multiple collections, including The Chucky Collection (alongside Child's Play 2 and Bride of Chucky), released on October 7, 2003;[22] Chucky - The Killer DVD Collection (alongside Child's Play 2, Bride and Seed of Chucky), released on September 19, 2006;[23] Chucky: The Complete Collection (alongside Child's Play 1 and 2, Bride, Seed and Curse of Chucky), released on October 8, 2013;[24] and Chucky: Complete 7-Movie Collection (alongside Child's Play 1 and 2, Bride, Seed, Curse and Cult of Chucky), released on October 3, 2017.

A suggested link with the film was made after the brutal murder of James Bulger. The killers, who were ten years old at the time, were said to have imitated a scene in which one of Chucky's victims is splashed with blue paint. Although these allegations against the film have never been proven, the case led to some new legislation for video films.[25] Psychologist Guy Cumberbatch stated, "The link with a video was that the father of one of the boys – Jon Venables – had rented Child's Play 3 some months earlier."[26] However, the police officer who directed the investigation, Albert Kirby, found that the son, Jon, was not living with his father at the time and was unlikely to have seen the film. Moreover, the boy disliked horror films—a point later confirmed by psychiatric reports. Thus the police investigation, which had specifically looked for a video link, concluded there was none. Despite this, the film remained controversial in Europe, and both Sky Television in the United Kingdom and Canal+ in Spain refused to broadcast the film as regular programming.[27]

The film was followed by Bride of Chucky in 1998, Seed of Chucky in 2004, Curse of Chucky in 2013, Cult of Chucky in 2017, and the TV series Chucky in 2021.

In 2009, the climax of Child's Play 3 received its own maze at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, entitled Chucky's Fun House.

This is not the first time Chucky has been featured in Halloween Horror Nights. Curse of Chucky has been slated to receive its own scarezone in the 2013 lineup.[28] Since 1992, Chucky has starred in his own shows, Chucky's In-Your-Face Insults and Chucky's Insult Emporium.

• Dolly Dearest, another 1991 horror movie about a killer doll released two months after Child's Play 3.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Child's Play 3

• Child's Play 3 at IMDb
• Child's Play 3 at AllMovie