Five-Legged Iguana

WICKED LITTLE THINGS (Review)

In an effort to bring public awareness to eight independent horror productions by christening them with a brand name, After Dark Films spearheaded the After Dark Horrorfest (“8 Films To Die For”) in November of last year, a mini-festival which included in its slate, Takashi Shimizu’s Rinne (Reincarnation).
Now, I got to see Rinne last year, before it had been chosen for the Horrorfest, and I wasn’t too crazy about it. If Rinne was indicative of the rest of the Horrorfest titles, then in all probability, I wouldn’t be too happy with them either.
Still, I figured, what the frack. I should give the other films a fair shake. So I checked out J.S. Cardone’s Wicked Little Things.

Recently widowed Karen Tunny (Lori Heuring, a frequent Cardone collaborator, having appeared in his past films, True Blue and the straight-to-DVD sequel 8MM 2) and her two daughters, Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton, who plays Laurie Strode in Rob Zombie’s upcoming Halloween redux*) and Emma (Chloe Moretz, who was in The Amityville Horror remake and is in the upcoming English-language re-do of The Eye), move into a dilapidated house up in the mountains, left to Karen by her late husband.
No time is wasted before Emma finds a new, apparently imaginary friend named Mary, and Sarah is informed by the local teens that there are zombie children who roam the woods at night. Yesiree, Bob, it seems a mining accident trapped a number of children, burying them alive, and now they wander restlessly, seeking justice for their untimely deaths.
Riiiight.

If the people-moving-into-an-old-rundown-house-where-weird-sh!t-happens scenario sounds familiar, it should. It’s an ancient genre formula, and the least Cardone and writers (Jace Anderson, Adam Gierasch, and Ben Nedivi) could have done was a) make things lively, and b) give us interesting characters we could care for.
They do neither.
There is absolutely nothing here to recommend. It boggles the mind that Ben Cross (who starred in Oscar winner Chariots of Fire and Bernard Rose’s brilliant Paperhouse) is slumming here as Hanks, the requisite mysterious hermit figure who knows a secret or two about the sinister goings-on.

This is about as flat, dull, and uninteresting as they come, with stock characters who devolve into noisy hysterics when the chips are down.
Considering I wasn’t impressed by Cardone’s previous horror film, The Forsaken, and The Covenant—which he wrote—was just plain godawful, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised Wicked Little Things turned out the way it did.
What can I say? Hope springs eternal for the die hard horror fan, and I thought maybe this would be the film that would turn my opinion of Cardone around.
Maybe next time, J.S.

Parting shot: I’ll try not to hold my less than enthusiastic responses to Shimizu’s Rinne and Cardone’s Wicked Little Things against the other After Dark Horrorfest films…
In fact, I’ll even try to overlook the fact that After Dark Films is headed by Courtney Solomon, who inflicted us with the astoundingly horrible Dungeons & Dragons feature, and the forgettable An American Haunting. (Not only is Solomon apparently a lousy director, he also got into hot water recently for the Captivity marketing campaign.)

* It would be wise to keep in mind that Laurie Strode was the role which made Jamie Lee Curtis’ career.