Touches You

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The main reason to watch this film would be the story as it gives a refreshingly fresh take on the Zombie genre.The Carlton's had owned the land for generations. On that land were forests, houses, and a mine. Deep in the mine were buried the Carlton's darkest injustice. But some transgressions don't stay buried... These ones are on the hunt for retribution.The Carlton's used child labour down in their mine and one day an avoidable incident caused the deaths of most of the youngsters. Carlton was cleared of any wrongdoing and was never prosecuted for the deaths. The event was ruled a tragic accident.Wanting revenge, the children now walk the woods looking for Carlton and his bloodline...Enter Karen (Lori Heuring) and her two daughters, Sarah (Scout Taylor- Compton) and Emma (Chloe Grace Moretz), who move into a property on Carlton land. The house had been left to their husband and father, who had passed away leaving them in enough debt that they had to sell their home. The house is one of the most oppressive I've ever seen. It's dark and foreboding. The door is open and blood has been painted on the door.It's not long before Emma has made a friend in Mary... The trouble is, nobody else can see Mary.The director, J S Cardone (of The Slayer - reviewed on this blog) does a winning job of creating atmosphere, tension, and suspense at all the right times in the movie. The night scenes in the moonlit woods are lovely, verging on beautiful, they do give an eerie feel to the location and situation. However, as I stated in the review to The Slayer, it appears he also likes dark houses. It's actually brighter outside in the woods by moonlight than it is in the house with all the lights burning. It's just as annoying here that the light of an electric bulb only radiates a couple of feet. There are some wonderful iconic and haunting shots of the children in their miner's garb carrying their work tools, which they use to dispatch anybody they run into.The actors all give good performances, though, at times, both Ben Cross as Aaron Hanks and Martin McDougall as Mr Carlton ham it up, but they do reign in the piggies after a short while. Not one actor or actress stands out above the rest, they are all fair at making their characters believable. Though I do have a fondness for Geoffrey Lewis, especially after the hauntingly eerie rocking chair scene in Salam's Lot that stays with me today. He is good as the irascible plumber Harold.It's the story that's the star in this film, though, and that is a very unusual thing to say about a horror film. It's the fresh take on the Zombie mythos, in some ways it harpers back to the original Zombie, where a spell or a curse would resurrect the dead. They then become unstoppable until the curse is lifted has run its course. The course here is the revenge of the children on the Carlton bloodline.I would recommend this to all horror fans or the casual viewer looking for something respectable in the genre. You could do worse.

During the early 1900s in a rural Pennsylvania mine, a group of children used as workers are killed when a dynamite charge is used unsafely while they're inside. Now in modern day, pretty widow Karen (Lori Heuring) and her two daughters, young Emma, (Chloe Grace Moretz) and teen Sarah, (Scout Taylor-Compton) move into a recently inherited property in the area. Soon supernatural occurrences begin to happen and Karen finds out that the vengeful children still inhabit the woods at night sating their hunger for revenge by devouring anyone foolish enough to be out there after dark. Worse yet, her family may be tied to these ghouls in a much deeper way then just living in their domain. Director J.S. Cardone gives the film a nice atmosphere and keeps a story that might have gotten silly appropriately creepy. Cinematographer Emil Topuzov gives the film a nice visual style and makes use of the dark Bulgarian woods (which stand in for Pennsylvania) and the old house our characters occupy. The cast does well too with Heuring giving depth to the strong willed mother trying to start a new life for her girls and now faced with an unnatural horror. As the girls, the young Moretz is good as Emma, who one of the dead children is drawn too, and Compton plays the rebellious teen very well. They are joined by genre vets Geoffrey Lewis as the local handyman and Ben Cross as a hermit with ties to the flesh eating specters. The film's not perfect, the pace is a bit slow, though, I feel that is deliberate, and some of the plot elements are a bit cliché' for this type of flick (ominous warnings from the local eccentric, local teens ignoring the legends and going in the woods at night) . But, one can forgive some of the flaws and familiarities as the film provides enough chills and there is some decent gore too. Overall a spooky little horror flick that never tries to be more then what it is. More like 6.5/10

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.

Wicked Little Things starts as single mother Karen Tunny ((Lori Heuring) & her two daughters Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton) & Emma (Chloe Moretz) arrive in the small community of Abbytown in Pennsylvania to move into an old mountain side cabin she inherited through her late husband. Although a little run down the cabin is nice enough but some of the locals are a bit strange including their neighbour Aaron Hanks (Ben Cross) who talks of evil things in the woods at night which seem to go back to a mining disaster in 1913 when several children were killed in an explosion & they still live on as flesh eating zombie kids who roam the woods at night seeking vengeance on the mines owner, soon enough Emma is talking about imaginary friends & Karen finds out for herself that the stories are true & the killer zombie kids are real...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.Although set in the US in Pennsylvania this was actually filmed in Bulgaria & to be fair the locations look creepy but it's a shame that it's so dark you can't really see them that well. The acting is OK, Geoffrey Lweis turns up in a small role while the majority of the rest of the cast appear to be Bulgarians whose names I can't pronounce.Wicked Little Things is a modest film, it has it's moments I suppose but the predictable plot & dark photography stop it from being anything more than average at best.