Horror movie fails to get the pulses racing
The Wretched
(15,95mins)
The wild child lady next door, who sports tattoos and chugs beers before gutting a roadkill buck, is possessed by the spirit of a malevolent woodland spirit in The Wretched.
Opening with a 1980s-set sequence replete with Rubik’s Cube and Etch-a-sketch, set incongruously to Joypopp’s 2011 synth-pop track Desire, Drew and Brett Pierce’s creaky horror thriller is a grab bag of genre tropes and slickly spliced second-hand material.
Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Hitchcock’s Rear Window, David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Japanese horror Ring serve as inspiration for a predictable script that helpfully signposts every narrative detour including a lingering close-up of a corkscrew on a kitchen table to tip us off how one character is likely to meet their grisly end.
Disbelief is suspended several feet off the ground for the initial set-up.
When a traumatised child tries to warn his father that something is amiss with his mother, the old man casually quips: “You should have seen her at Burning Man! Mum’s always been weird.”
Thinly-sketched characters struggle to earn our sympathy as they fall under the spell of a parasitic dark force that crawls under the skin of its victims to seek out a new unsuspecting host.
It gives stomach-churning new meaning to an inside job.
Troubled teenager Ben (John-paul Howard) arrives in Porter Bay to stay with his father Liam (Jamison Jones) following a literal fall from grace.
The lad broke his arm jumping from a two-storey window after his neighbours caught him stealing their Vicodin prescription.
Ben must spend the summer rebuilding his father’s shattered trust by working at the local marina.
Instead, Ben becomes fixated on Liam’s next door neighbours, Abbie (Zarah Mahler) and Ty (Kevin Bigley), who have a young son Dillon (Blane Crockarell) and baby (Owen Thomas Pierce).
The children vanish and Ty blithely denies all knowledge of his tykes’ existence.
An upside-down A symbol carved into the neighbours’ home leads Ben to reliable online resource Witchipedia and the legend of a dark mother (Madelynn Stuenkel), who feeds on forgotten children in a subterranean lair.
Ben ( below ), becomes convinced that the hellish hag has possessed Abbie and will prey upon other youngsters in the neighbourhood like spunky marina co-worker Mallory (Piper Curda) and her little sister Lily (Ja’layah Washington). Shot largely in flashback to facilitate one satisfying twist, The Wretched is uncomfortably torn between Ben’s awkward rites of passage, including a nervous skinny dip with a beautiful girl, and his battle royale with ancient evil.
Howard is a likeable, flawed hero and make-up effects are convincing but jump-out-ofseat shocks are in depressingly short supply, particularly in a climatic showdown shrouded in night-time gloom.
A hoary coda doesn’t make sense in light of earlier events but does provide the Pierce brothers with a flimsy hook for a sequel.
The Wretched is available to watch or download on most streaming platforms