WICKED LITTLE THINGS: DVD Review

Directed by J.S. Cardone. Starring Lori Heuring, Scout Taylor-Compton, Chloe Moretz, Geoffrey Lewis, Ben Cross

This film got a limited U.S. theatrical release in the summer of 2006 as one of the 8 Films to Die For in the After Dark Horrorfest, and it actually started life as a Tobe Hooper film (director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist) called simply Zombies. The Zombies poster, an evocative image of a little girl zombie shambling through the woods, was floating around the internet for years and wound up being used to promote Wicked Little Things, with a variation of that poster being used on the DVD box cover. Based on what director J.S. Cardone says in his audio commentary, I suspect the poster may be all that remains from the initial concept.

Karen Tunny (Lori Heuring) and her daughters Sarah (played as a believably bitchy teenager by Scout Taylor-Compton, who will be appearing in the upcoming remake of Halloween reprising the role originated by Jamie Lee Curtis) and Emma (nine-ish Chloe Moretz who was in the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror) move to a remote mountain town in Pennsylvania to fix up and hopefully sell the house Karen's recently deceased husband left to her. The house is filthy, having lain empty for decades, but Karen is financially strapped and has nowhere else to go. Mr. Hanks (Ben Cross), a creepy old man living in a nearby shack anoints Karen's door with blood, and a developer tells Karen that he's the actual owner of the house and that she must vacate to make way for a new ski resort. Unknown to Karen and her daughters, a nearby abandoned mine was the site of an early 20th century cave-in, in which several child laborers were killed. Those children, now flesh hungry ghouls, still roam the woods at night carrying their pickaxes and shovels, and God help anyone who crosses their path.

The film is a bit of a hybrid combining the basic structure of a ghost story with the mechanics of a zombie film, managing to be both creepy and gory. Shot in Bulgaria, Wicked Little Things takes full advantage of its deep woods setting, giving us some of the creepiest forest at night scenes in recent memory. The film's director of photography is to be commended for the way he makes the woods come alive.The movie suffers from a few a few of those horror movie moments when people do stupid things just to move the story along. The scene in which Karen wanders into an abandoned and dilapidated old mansion had me rolling my eyes, and the idea of a woman moving her family into a house she has never seen before stretches credibility. Enjoyment of films like this often depend on how forgiving the viewer can be. In this case, Wicked Little Things has more than enough going for it to counter balance characters doing things that will have you smacking your head. Reminiscent of creepy little kids in films like the classic Village of the Damned and the 80s schlock-fest The Children, Wicked Little Things delivers on the scares despite the occasional lapse in logic.