The Wretched
The Wretched
Starring John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, Jamison Jones, Zarah Mahler
Directed by Brett & Drew Pierce
Starring John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, Jamison Jones, Zarah Mahler
Directed by Brett & Drew Pierce
The 1980s was a golden time for horror cinema, and even though decades have past, many directors set out to bring that certain magic to the big screen again, but more often than not, fails to deliver. "The Wretched" is one of those films, a mixture of "The Goonies," "It," "Fright Night," and all those other films where a teenager knows something bad is happening in a small town, but no one believes him. While it has the essence of the 80s, the rest of the film is a haphazard concept that's got more than a few plot holes and an underdeveloped villain whose origins you have to actually look up in other sources to fully understand - ultimately, it's a purely vanilla film.
Ben (John-Paul Howard) is spending the summer with his father Liam (Jamison Jones) after his divorce, and he's still having a hard time accepting it, especially when he sees his father with fellow marina dock employee Sara (Azie Tesfai). He befriends fellow employee Mallory (Piper Curda), and notices his new neighbors acting peculiar, especially Abbie (Zarah Mahler).
Ben starts noticing weird behavior from Abbie, which freaks out her young son Dillon (Blane Crockarell) and causes Ben to serve as his protector - until one day he goes to their house and Abbie's husband tells him they have no son. Confused and worried, Ben becomes determined to find out what happened to Dillon, and understand the evil that's taken over Abbie's body.
"The Wretched" is not just a wannabe homage to the 1980s, but also incorporates the now-dated sense of masculinity and misogyny films of that era sometimes included. Ben is front and center in this story, and he's not a likable chap at all - he's stolen drugs from the neighbors, lusts after girls, and is basically an all-around self-centered brat. Yet he's the hero of the film, and it's through his trials that he finally sheds all the douchebaggery, but not before becoming totally unlikable. Likewise, the female characters in the film are purely caricatures of generic female types - Mallory is the nerdy and offbeat friend-turned-possible-romantic-partner, Abbie is the rocker hip mom neighbor-turned makeup wearing, dress donning witch suit (since the witch apparently was stuck in the 80s mindset as well and thought that women should be dolled up), Sara is the sultry homewrecker in Ben's eyes. None of them are given anything more than that, merely set dressings to further Ben's own heroic adventure.
The villain itself isn't fully developed either, as I had to do some outside digging to understand what it really was. It seems that the witch in the film is a slipskin boo hag, an evil vampire-type being that lives in the woods and takes on the skins of its victims in order to feed on their children, and also has the power to make people forget about their children, which seems a very convenient plot point for the film. If I didn't know this outside facts, to me the villain seemed to be some shape-shifting witch that can live in peoples' bodies and kill children, but there's never a moment the film actually talks about it - even after Ben does his own generic research online which only leads him to a Geocities-type page about witches that only really showed a flying animated witch.
What I will say in a positive way about the witch is the practical effects put into making it truly menacing instead of relying lazily on CGI effects. It's pretty nifty seeing the witch emerging from bodies that hearken back to "The Thing," but even that is sometimes muddied by the constant cracking of bones as the witch tries to adapt to its new living situation inside whatever female she gets her hands on. After all the times you hear bones crunching, you just want to give the witch a glass of milk to help strengthen her bones.
The film itself sets up several set pieces and quickly abandons them, throwing in moments that don't make a lick of sense because the moments before it weren't fully developed either, but only seemed to exist to give Ben a way out of a murky situation (you'll notice one WTF moment when you see it, as it literally appears out of nowhere). Not to be undone, the Pierce brothers also decide to throw in a supposedly "mind-bending" twist that also fails to land due to its non-sensical nature and of course its lack of development beforehand.
It's not even worth discussing the performances here, as mentioned previously all the female roles were generic and uninspired, while John-Paul Howard gives us perfect reason for the witch to kill Ben due to his annoying nature, and Jamison Jones performs admirably as Ben's father who's also given the generic trope of the father who doesn't believe a thing his son says because of his son's past mistakes. As I said, the film is totally vanilla - nothing exciting or fun, because nothing was developed to its potential, let alone its full potential.
While trying to return to the love of the 1980s, "The Wretched" doesn't develop any of its core concepts, marginalizes the female roles, and gives us a completely unsympathetic hero who we'd rather wish was killed off than being the hero.
The Score: C
Ben (John-Paul Howard) is spending the summer with his father Liam (Jamison Jones) after his divorce, and he's still having a hard time accepting it, especially when he sees his father with fellow marina dock employee Sara (Azie Tesfai). He befriends fellow employee Mallory (Piper Curda), and notices his new neighbors acting peculiar, especially Abbie (Zarah Mahler).
Ben starts noticing weird behavior from Abbie, which freaks out her young son Dillon (Blane Crockarell) and causes Ben to serve as his protector - until one day he goes to their house and Abbie's husband tells him they have no son. Confused and worried, Ben becomes determined to find out what happened to Dillon, and understand the evil that's taken over Abbie's body.
"The Wretched" is not just a wannabe homage to the 1980s, but also incorporates the now-dated sense of masculinity and misogyny films of that era sometimes included. Ben is front and center in this story, and he's not a likable chap at all - he's stolen drugs from the neighbors, lusts after girls, and is basically an all-around self-centered brat. Yet he's the hero of the film, and it's through his trials that he finally sheds all the douchebaggery, but not before becoming totally unlikable. Likewise, the female characters in the film are purely caricatures of generic female types - Mallory is the nerdy and offbeat friend-turned-possible-romantic-partner, Abbie is the rocker hip mom neighbor-turned makeup wearing, dress donning witch suit (since the witch apparently was stuck in the 80s mindset as well and thought that women should be dolled up), Sara is the sultry homewrecker in Ben's eyes. None of them are given anything more than that, merely set dressings to further Ben's own heroic adventure.
The villain itself isn't fully developed either, as I had to do some outside digging to understand what it really was. It seems that the witch in the film is a slipskin boo hag, an evil vampire-type being that lives in the woods and takes on the skins of its victims in order to feed on their children, and also has the power to make people forget about their children, which seems a very convenient plot point for the film. If I didn't know this outside facts, to me the villain seemed to be some shape-shifting witch that can live in peoples' bodies and kill children, but there's never a moment the film actually talks about it - even after Ben does his own generic research online which only leads him to a Geocities-type page about witches that only really showed a flying animated witch.
What I will say in a positive way about the witch is the practical effects put into making it truly menacing instead of relying lazily on CGI effects. It's pretty nifty seeing the witch emerging from bodies that hearken back to "The Thing," but even that is sometimes muddied by the constant cracking of bones as the witch tries to adapt to its new living situation inside whatever female she gets her hands on. After all the times you hear bones crunching, you just want to give the witch a glass of milk to help strengthen her bones.
The film itself sets up several set pieces and quickly abandons them, throwing in moments that don't make a lick of sense because the moments before it weren't fully developed either, but only seemed to exist to give Ben a way out of a murky situation (you'll notice one WTF moment when you see it, as it literally appears out of nowhere). Not to be undone, the Pierce brothers also decide to throw in a supposedly "mind-bending" twist that also fails to land due to its non-sensical nature and of course its lack of development beforehand.
It's not even worth discussing the performances here, as mentioned previously all the female roles were generic and uninspired, while John-Paul Howard gives us perfect reason for the witch to kill Ben due to his annoying nature, and Jamison Jones performs admirably as Ben's father who's also given the generic trope of the father who doesn't believe a thing his son says because of his son's past mistakes. As I said, the film is totally vanilla - nothing exciting or fun, because nothing was developed to its potential, let alone its full potential.
While trying to return to the love of the 1980s, "The Wretched" doesn't develop any of its core concepts, marginalizes the female roles, and gives us a completely unsympathetic hero who we'd rather wish was killed off than being the hero.
The Score: C
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