There’s something undeniably creepy about kid monsters. The idea that there’s someone wicked beneath the happy moppet facade isn’t all that outrageous to anyone who’s actually been around a real kid. Movies have long recognized the idea. There’s the kiddies in the Village Of The Damned and the adorable Damien of The Omen, even redneck monster kids in Children Of The Corn, now there’s miner zombie kids in Wicked Little Things.
Wicked Little Things would have been on UHF at midnight in the old days. More recently it would have been on the Sci Fi Channel but now it’s right on Netflix for your instant gratification even though it’s TO EXTREME TO BE RATED. There’s a place in my heart for B horror movies. Where else are you going to find the undead romping with attractive girls. Moms are always MILF and teenage girls are always adventurous even though they often have to die for taking their bra off. There’s a bit o screech and some bubbling blood then the credits roll and if you were expecting anything else you should read my reviews before going to the theater.
Wicked Little Things opens in 1913 and there are some plot holes to drive a truck through. Who dug the hole that the evil mine owner forces the cute girl to crawl into with the dynamite. They need a “small one” so even the miner kids couldn’t have dug it. Ok I’m thinking too much. There are bastards who buy up immigrant kids to send them into holes and if they’re not fast enough they just blow them up. Then somehow they turn into zombies. I would have loved something there even if it was just a silly movie excuse like: The mine was on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Cut to the future. We have the standard characters; There’s the overwhelmed mom Karen Tunney (Lori Heuring) and her daughters the whiney teenager (Taylor-Compton) and ultra cute little girl (Chloe Moretz who somehow escaped being cast as a killer) They move back to the mountains of Pennsylvania after dad dies. There they meet the strange guy at the store, the carload of teenagers who must die and the plumber who knows every esoteric detail about the area and doesn’t charge much. Please, I’m expected to buy zombie miner kids AND an inexpensive plumber?
The little girl makes a new friend. She’s not alive has jet black eyes and loves to lunch on human flesh but you know how hard it is to make new friends and they don’t kill relatives unless they’ve been riled up. We don’t actually get to see a lot of the zombie kids. The director says that showing the Wicked Little Things doing wicked things would have seemed too much like child porn. Instead we get atmospheric woods and the descendant of the mine owner being a modern kind of bastard. Real estate developers don’t have much of a need to blow up kids but everyone hates them anyway. Emma disappears with her new chums the zombies and Mom has to save her then the zombie kids eat up the Real estate developer and are free to go sleep in their own beds again.
Wicked Little Things is not going to win the Palme d’Or or an Oscar but it entertained me for a while. What else was I going to do? Turn kids into zombies with Photoshop? There’s something just wrong about whoever turned their adorable little blond girl into a zombie vampire. Worse still is the image of the hand crawling out from under an eyelid. That has nothing to do with zombie kid miners but hey most of the readers of Superficial Gallery just look at the photos so I expect someone will comment on how creepy it is and wonder why it never appears in a scene in the movie.
dina lohan when she was a kid?
I was wondering if someone told James not to rile up the zombies in Pennsylvania.