Wicked Ones

After moving to a new town, a family learns the town is still in the grip of a brutal reign of terror from a maniacal serial killer a decade earlier that has returned once again to infect more citizens under his spell to carry out a new massacre against the town, forcing them to find a way to stop him.

There's quite a lot to like with this one. Among its better features is the rather enjoyable setup that properly showcases the expansion of the universe set up from the original. Not only opening with the murder of the parents in the town but the series of random and brutal murders that are shown throughout the rest of the area detailing the deluge of copycat murders taking place with those looking to follow the influence of the killer over the townspeople, this one starts off with a rather impressive series of background building on the main killer. With the obsessiveness to stop him and solve the cases that have emerged in the time since that preoccupies the rest of the detectives' time and the secondary storyline of the family arriving in the midst of all this, the main setup to the film comes off incredibly well. This sets the stage for a strong slew of enjoyable and brutal slashing action to come about here. With the concept of the followers carrying out the killers' instructions and rampaging through town like a group of like-minded maniacs, their crazed energy and ruthless behavior make the scenes of their ambush on the transport workers or the confrontation at the brothers' concert feel that much more brutal and impactful. Likewise, the great encounter afterward involving the bandmembers being stalked through the abandoned house the cat-and-mouse chases, and confrontations that occur inside the house where the family arrives to rescue their kidnapped children and try to put a stop to the killer and his followers manage to provide even more fun here with some brutal encounters, some nice bloodsoaked deaths and carnage as well as the revelations about the family connection that provides some of the better elements here that hold this one up overall. There isn't much to dislike here but it does have some issues. One of the most obvious issues is an overlong running time dragged out by several instances that don't really need to be there. The main one is a superfluous romance angle between several of the kids in the band who are going through the usual teenage strife involving the lack of confidence in asking out the girl that's obviously interested in him and spending a ton of time wandering around the backstage area or trying to make sense of the disappearance of their friends which amounts to several points of simply wandering around the building which takes up quite a lot of time here. Slightly more infuriating is the incessant weapon-dropping that occurs in the final confrontation that allows the assistants to constantly get back into the fight despite numerous occasions where the family has the upper hand in the struggle leaving everything to feel like it's being dragged out for no reason. These are the few drawbacks to this one.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, and Brief Nudity.

At the time I saw "Wicked Ones," the rating was 5.2 with two really high, complimentary written reviews. Which made me incredibly confused if we had watched the same movie. But the synopsis is the same and so is the poster, so I guess it's one of those, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," things.

Because honestly, the movie I saw was a high school grade crapfest that was an absolute chore to make it through.

There is so much terrible to complain about it's hard to know where to start. So let's go with the worst offender: the acting. Apparently all the women are graduates of the Shari Moon Zombie School of Acting. The men have no excuse, they're just bad. Are they bad because they have to follow such a dumb script? I don't think so, but I'm sure it didn't help. The direction: was there any? Or were the actors told to just ad lib at will and go with their instincts? And hey, let's do a lot of shots so close to the actors you can see up their noses. One scene was inside the back seat of a very small car where two people were making out while sitting up, and the best camera angle was shooting up towards the roof. The photography: In the same scene the shadows...the shadows.... The bizarre weaving back and forth-what was that about? Is that the new version of shaky cam? I sure hope not because it's just as vomit inducing. The editing: Back and forth back and forth zip zip zip. The special effects: a good bit of the time, it was done off camera...then suddenly here comes sprays of blood. Or just noises.

Trying reeeeeally hard to think of anything positive to say here...thinking...thinking...thinking...Nope, nothing comes to mind.

This is a lousy movie, and I just don't get the love, unless it's mostly coming from the cast or family members. I'm sure they tried their best and you have to start somewhere. But I'd leave this one off your resume if I were you.

After I had watched the first film that was made in 2017, I wasn't really interested in seeing the sequel. Once I found out that the sequel had a higher budget than the first one and had read what the sequel was about, I decided to give it a try. Wicked Ones follows the two main characters, Alex and her boyfriend, now her husband in the sequel, as parents of their three children, and they must confront Collin Miller, (The Wicked One) who is still on the loose, and two unstable serial killer psychopaths who escape during a prison bus transfer (which reminds me of Halloween {2018} . Once their two teenagers fall victim to them and are held captive. This sequel is quite an improvement from the first one. The first film Wicked One was made with very little creativity as I noticed that there are lots of similarities between that movie and the Halloween films. I felt like Tory Jones who wrote and directed both the first one and this sequel, had in copied off of the first Halloween film back in 1978. This sequel is without any doubts a lot more original with way more creativity and this is what the first film should've been. If you were to put Michael Myers in a farm setting instead of Haddon-field then that's what you would have with the first Wicked One movie. You will notice in the first film that Collin Miller rides a horse, which is his source of transportation. In Halloween (1978) Michael Myers's transportation is an old station wagon car. Instead of a car for the first Wicked One we had the serial killer ride a horse. I'm not sure if Tory Jones didn't think that most most film buffs and horror fans wouldn't notice a difference, but yeah, we did notice a big difference in transportation. Wicked Ones is more original in a lot of ways, but there is a problem with this sequel, like the 1981 sequel Halloween II, Michael Myers doesn't drive a car in that movie, he's just travelling on foot to get around. Collin Miller doesn't ride his horse in Wicked Ones, so I do see a similar pattern here. That being said, the cinematography is way better, the acting is also much better, and the special effects are done wonderfully. The music for this sequel is also better than the first movie. Everything is a lot better this second time around. I really do hope that going forward Tory Jones does uses inspiration but he doesn't try to completely get an idea by practically copy another horror movie, but just change the setting and try to pass it off on his own. I'm letting the fact that Collin Miller was on foot in this sequel slide, because there are lots of other parts of this movie that I really enjoyed and had made up for that small similarity. I do want to point out that this is a good example of a crowdfunded horror film in which that when you raise more money and have a longer financing campaign going to get the funds to make the movie, it will for the majority of the time pay off. I do recommend Wicked Ones, you'll have to see the first movie in order to know what's going on and to get introduced to the characters, but just be aware that it's not at all as well done as the sequel. The only aspect in filmmaking that I give the first movie credit for, is having really good special effects and visual effects, but nothing beyond that. All horror fans and horror buffs should watch this sequel.

Written by Bailey Giannini (Film Buff, Cinephile & online film critic)