It's amazing how a cinematographer, a director, and a few key actors can help elevate a film into the realm of watchable from the depths of drawn out boredom.
Wicked Little Things is the story of a mother and her two young daughters who have just lost their husband and father to an illness. All their savings gone, the only thing the family has left is a house deep in the Pennsylvania hills that dear old dad left to them in his will.
If I tell you that many years ago, a great number of child slave laborers were killed in a mining disaster in these hills, do you think you can figure out the rest of the plot?
The script is not good at all. It has almost no originality and suffers from a complete lack of distinctive personality. We have the weird shop keep, the fellow teenagers that the oldest daughter meets on the second day in town and becomes best friends with by nightfall, the creepy guy who lives out in the woods. There's almost no character in the movie that's not lifted from the hundreds of movies like this that have come before.
And nearly as bad as the unimaginative script is the marmalade like pace at which things move along. Add in a very dark color tone to the movie and for the first hour we have a drab, drawn out, redundant picture.
Then a funny thing happens. The films third act is saved, out of the blue, by some pretty awesome acting, some great cinematography and a director who knows how to use what he has to deliver a final thirty minutes that are much more tense and scary then the films first hour has led us to believe is coming.
When all is said and done I'm not sure that the movie deserves a rating on the plus side of average, but I wouldn't wanted to have missed the last 30 minutes. If you can handle a boring and goofy setup to get to the good stuff, then I'd say give this one a shot.
If you can get past the little things, you just might enjoy the wicked.
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