Wicked, Wicked

"Wicked, Wicked" was a film that I waited with such anticipation to see at the age of 12 - after seeing the promo trailer on television and the poster in the theater my curiosity was aroused.

I loved films as a child - any film. As long as it seemed like an event. I was not big on classics at the time so my catalog was being developed. I don't think that at the time it was supposed to be a great film.

It was fun however. And later in 1976 - when my parents owned a theater I persuaded my father to get "Wicked, Wicked" as a second feature for "Demon Seed" - it is a fun film and only for the excitement as "Earthquake" has Sensurround as a gimmick - "DUO-VISION" was the gimmick.

See it for the excitement - not for the logging into your classic diary. It does make you laugh and wonder about the time period. Not much different from today - I have walked out on several of todays movie, while sitting through all of "Wicked, Wicked" as a child.

It is fun!!!

I can hardly begin to express what a disgusting, worthless piece of excrement this film is. When you consider how much talent there is in film-making, to know that a major studio (admittedly, on its last legs) funded this garbage makes you want to grab a sharp implement.

Why is it so awful? All right (deep breath):

1. The split screen. It's distracting. It adds nothing to the narrative. It isn't used to make a point (as Tarantino does in Jackie Brown). It's just there as a selling feature.

2. The performances. God help us.

3. The script. God continue to help us.

4. The story itself. Who the hell thought this would be an original idea?

5. The child abuse sequences. So appallingly exploitative, so unworthily sickening, so POINTLESS...I wanted to throw something at the TV.

6. The tacky tone. The sexual puns are puerile beyond belief. The Farrelly brothers would never have stooped this low.

7. The theme song. Still stuck in my head after about 10 years. GO AWAY!!!!

There are plenty of other reasons why this obscenity should be thrown into the Pit of Hell, but I really can't bear to go any further. Every copy of this should be consigned to fire, and everybody involved in it should be taken outside and shot, their bodies burnt, their ashes buried and the whole site concreted over.

If this diatribe persuades people to go and see it, it has failed in its mission. Don't ever employ its maker to do anything again, I implore you.

The least enjoyable bad film ever made. Can I give it a minus score, please?

Wicked, Wicked is unique in that it is shot entirely in DUO-VISION (a gimmick of early 1970's cimena). Brian DePalma used this technique with great success in both Carrie and Phantom of the Paradise. The problem here is that Richard Bare is no Brian DePalma and the story is completely idiotic.

the one saving grace of this film is the moment at which the duo-vision becomes "uni-vision" during the climactic moment of the story. You have to see it to appreciate the greatness of that one shot. Perhaps the director came up with that idea and then made a whole story around it?

This movie has several strikes against it from the outset. First off, is the split-screen ("duo-vision") gimmick, which is effective when used sparingly by filmmakers like Brian DePalma (or going WAY back silent French filmmaker Abel Gance), but is pretty annoying when used extensively (check out the ill-advised sequel "More American Graffitti"), and likely to give many viewers a splitting headache. Then there is the killer who is stalking a seaside hotel. The movie not only makes no attempt to hide his identity from the start, but the clues he leaves along the way are so incredibly obvious that you want to scream at the protagonist (a dimwitted, womanizing security guard)for not being able to figure out who he is. Finally there's the wretched theme song ("Wicked, wicked, that's the ticket. . .") that was apparently actually sung by actress Tiffany Bolling, who should have stuck to stripping off in bad movies like this (and speaking a stripping off, Bolling takes her usual gratuitous shower in this movie behind a particularly opaque shower curtain, just to add insult to injury).

Despite all this though, I kind of enjoyed this movie. It has an enjoyably nasty sense of humor, and only in the 1970's could anyone possibly get away with making a wrongheaded experiment in cinematic ineptitude like this and still have it backed by a major studio (MGM). As for those who find this misogynistic or offensive, check out a couple other Tiffany Bolling vehicles/feminist treatises "The Candy Snatchers" and "Centerfold Girls" sometime!

What I find so great about the horror genre is that, even though I've seen over 2500 films of different sub genres and numerous countries already, I keep stumbling upon crazy stuff nobody ever heard about. Even more incomprehensible – especially in the case of "Wicked Wicked" - is how come these movies are still so obscure and unloved? Now this certainly isn't a masterpiece of film-making, but nevertheless I would have expected a movie with such a peculiar gimmick to have some sort of loyal fan-base or at least enjoy some recognition at horror internet forums. Well, apparently not. "Wicked Wicked" remains underrated to this date, but hopefully a proper DVD-release will change that one day sooner or later. Make no mistake, however, the plot of this film is extremely rudimentary and straightforward all in favor of putting the emphasis entirely on the "Duo-Vision" gimmick. This is just a fancy term to say that the split-screen effect lasts throughout whole film. Unlike I feared, this gimmick isn't as irritating as I thought it would be, but nevertheless it's only truly creative in a handful of situations.

There are a couple of highly disturbing murders taking place in a fancy Californian seaside hotel. Beautiful blond women are brutally stabbed by a maniacal culprit and their bodies dumped around the hotel. Former policeman turned security agent is asked to investigate discretely, but the bodies keep piling up at a fast pace. The case gets more personal when his beautiful blond ex-wife arrives at the hotel to put up a singing show.

I don't really know why I bother to keep the killer's identity secret and even somewhat mysterious, because the film itself certainly doesn't. The culprit takes off his mask and exposes his face after the second murder already; probably to illustrate once more that the whodunit aspect of the film really wasn't the producers' main priority. And yet, despite this premature and regrettable revelation, there are multiple tiny plot components that are interesting and worth analyzing. For example, the sub plot about the hotel owner's reluctance to inform the police and his attempts to avoid negative publicity predate the similar "Jaws" plot with nearly two whole years. There's also a bizarre but engaging and original resemblance between this film's main characters and the ones from Gaston Leroux' immortal horror tale "The Phantom of the Opera". There's a pretty imaginative, yet typically rancid 70's and massively perverted twist regarding the culprit's motives to kill blond women near the end (which I really loved) and there's a neat supportive role for Spaghetti western regular Edd Byrnes as a moonlighting lifeguard. If you ever have the opportunity to watch "Wicked, Wicked" – and apparently it's occasionally programmed on TCM – please do so! It's far from being a great film, but it's definitely unique.