It's Difficult NOT To Enjoy This Movie

Better Late Then Never

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

It's not the best idea to assume movies are good off of their titles but with the fantastic namesake of Wicked Little Things, there had got to be a little hope going into the film. So as part of the first compilation of After Dark Horrorfest films, the marketing gave every opportunity for this film to succeed like many others after it. The film didn't however get the notoriety it might have deserved being an original zombie flick that brought together a few stellar female leads. The talent of Chloe Grace Moretz is undeniable even as a child and the film also featured Scout Taylor-Compton just as she was getting hot as an actress.Along with the creepy on screen presence of flesh eating zombie children, thanks to terrific make-up effects, there was a well-constructed back story that set the tone. Potential was definitely available for the filmmakers to do something special but in the end there were a lot of little things that hampered the movie. Dialogue was sub-par, poor lighting with some extremely dark scenes and also a couple supporting characters that didn't flow with the storyline. Wicked Little Things may impress some viewers when the film is watched with little anticipation, worth a shot.

A widow and her daughters move into the inherited family home and get terrorised by "zombie" kids from the local Carlton mining disaster that occurred many years earlier.You know very early from the off that we the audience are going to be asked a lot of as regards character behaviours and rationales. The grieving mother moves herself and her daughters into what can only be described as an isolated pig sty, and right from the off all the warning signs are there for them that all is not well in this part of town.Story unravels in standard revenge from the grave formation, but the setting is very much in the film's favour even if the core story is not. Creepy forest, crumbling abodes and the spectre of the mine disaster ready to unleash its secret. The kids themselves are actually ghosts who eat meat, human or animal, so it was a tenuous marketing strategy to be calling it a zombie film.However, the kids themselves are splendidly ghoulish, pale faced and dark eyed, these very much are creepy kids. Low tone cinematography and gentle pacing help the mood considerably, and cast performances are fine given that the writing saddles them with weak dialogue exchanges and drawn out sequences obviously used to extend the running time. A teen romance strand involving the eldest daughter also just feels like filler.A modest spooker but certainly watchable enough, atmosphere and location setting ensure this is the case. 4/10

Produced & directed by genre regular J.S. Cardone (is anyone ever going to put out a decent DVD/Blu-ray of The Slayer (1982) or what?) this was one of the seven horror films to premiere at one of those After Dark Horrorfest events & while it's not terrible I wouldn't exactly call Wicked Little Things particularly worthwhile either. For a start the script is pretty slow going, it's over half an hour into the thing before anyone dies, until that point there's exposition & attempts at foreboding which aren't particularly foreboding to be honest & after a solid twenty minutes of nothing happening most people will start to lose interest. The whole film film has the same central core as Aliens (1986) with the mother daughter relationship although here it feels like it's there just to pad things out rather than give the film or it's character's greater depth, the character's generally are walking clichés like the young cute girl who know's something is going on, the creepy store owner, a crazy mountain man who's silly stories & warnings turn out to be true, a cowardly human bad guy there to get it to redress the balance & the flesh eating zombies that feel like they belong in an Asian ghost film as much as a US zombie one. In fact I would say it's more of a ghost film than a zombie film, the ideas & themes of some terrible event in the past, a haunted location, someone wronged reaching out to the living for revenge or redemption or closure are all more prevalent in Wicked Little Things than merely flesh eating zombies rising from the grave. To be honest I thought this was quite predictable, there are no big surprises & at over 90 minutes it goes on for to long with a small body count & there's just nothing that memorable here.Wicked Little Things is a dark film, I am not talking about dark as in a conceptual or thematic sense but as in a you can barely see what's going on because most of the time the picture is black sense. If you do want to watch this make sure you get your hands on a good copy because you will need it, there are many times when it's impossible to see what's going on or what the camera is pointing at & it's just so dark with most of the screen most of the time just pitch black which is a shame since the locations are nice & you can sort of sense a decent atmosphere but the darkness becomes annoying. There's not much gore here & a pretty low body count, people are stabbed with pick-axe's, a pig is killed & there are a few shots of zombie kids eating flesh & guts plus the carcass of a chopped up pig is seen but nothing else & the gore is masked by the darkness anyway so it's difficult to see. Known under the title Zombies: Wicked Littles Things here in the UK this was originally set to be directed by Tobe Hooper & had the working titles The Children (already taken...) & Zombies.

Having spent all of her money caring for her terminally ill spouse, recently widowed Karen Tunny (Lori Heuring) moves with her two daughters Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Emma (Chloe Moretz) to her late husband's run-down family home in rural Pennsylvania, where local legends speak of zombies who roam the woods at night.Just seeing the names of this film's writer and director in the opening credits was enough to send shivers up my spine: Boaz Davidson is the 'genius' responsible for penning the scripts for such STV titles as Octopus 1 & 2, Spiders and Crocodile, whilst J.S. Cardone gave us the godawful 'video nasty' The Slayer and dull vampire flick The Forsaken. With such dubious talent responsible, I didn't expect much from Wicked Little things.And having just finished the film, I'm glad I kept my expectations low.Although the movie looks good at times, with lovely use of the eerie woodland locale, and the cast give reasonable performances given the clichéd drivel that they are working with, the plot is so laboured, poorly written, and derivative that it's impossible to be enthusiastic about. Most importantly, perhaps, the film's killers, undead children who rise each night from the mine in which they died, aren't in the least bit scary, a smudge of makeup, black contacts and some crappy joke shop scars doing very little to add to the sense of menace. Scout Taylor-Compton and company do their best to look afraid of the tiny terrors, screaming convincingly with every confrontation, but their admirable attempts to instill a sense of fear in the audience is to little avail: the little blighters just ain't got what it takes to chill the blood.There are a few lacklustre zombie chow scenes in a futile bid to win over gore-hounds, and the final kill, which sees the victim's blood drench both Compton and Heuring, is suitably tasteless, but on the whole, Wicked Little Things (AKA Zombies in the UK) is instantly forgettable trash—just another clunker in the filmographies of Cardone and Davidson.