The Gravedancers / Wicked Little Things Blu-ray Review
Ghosts and zombies and terrified females. What more do you need?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 8, 2011
Typically a glut of horror films is released shortly before Halloween each year, as home video labels want to scare up as much money as they possibly can, especially for sticks in the mud who can't be bothered to actually go out and see a movie in a theater. We had a large swath of horror films released in late September and early October, 2010, many of which I reviewed here for Blu-ray.com. It's rather odd therefore to be getting a whole new slew of horror titles from Lionsgate to kick off the new year, but maybe there's a little known Transylvanian holiday in January they're celebrating. In actuality, these new double features from Lionsgate are all part of the first (2006) After Dark HorrorFest, a national weekend of horror films which has sought to create a brand for titles that would otherwise be consigned to the straight to video market. As their press release rather breathlessly states:
In November 2006, After Dark Films launched "8 Films to Die For: After Dark Horrorfest", an annual weekend-long theatrical event, which featured eight never seen before horror films in 500 theatres across the country. The "8 Films to Die For: After Dark Horrorfest" was a new concept intended to launch a new brand and create the ultimate horror film event of the year which could be repeated and grow annually. Over its three day weekend (November 17-19, 2006), Horrorfest was #10 in the top ten films nationwide for that weekend, grossing over $2,500,000 with an impressive $5,000+ screen average for the weekend. The concept was to create value for titles that otherwise would have been direct-to-video releases which would have shipped on average 25,000 units per title, and in all other ancillary markets. After Dark's PR goes on to state that due to HorrorFest's success, the home video market for these films was unexpectedly huge, with retailers taking well over one million of each title on SD-DVD. Now Lionsgate has upped the ante once again by re-releasing the films in double features on Blu-ray.
The Gravedancers
Shot in North Carolina for a relatively paltry three million or so,
The Gravedancers is sometimes laughable, but has a few scares up its ghostly sleeve. The film actually starts out fairly well, with a prelude which isn't woven particularly well into the overall narrative, but which presents a terrified lone lass (is there any other kind in a horror film?) who is evidently being attacked by some kind of apparition. Her flashlight is on the fritz, and so the opening segment dissolves into darkness as we hear the girl screaming and trying to escape from some invisible force. The force ultimately manages to string the girl up her quickly snapped neck, whereupon she drops an ornate black envelope. And then we're on to the main story.
A year later three friends are dealing with the recent suicide of a close friend. Harris (Dominic Purcell), Kira (Josie Maran) and Sid (Marcus Thomas) take their supposed grief to the cemetery (those with a penchant for spelling errors may want to pay attention to the archway sign over the gravesite), where they find (gasp) an ornate black envelope, which urges them to celebrate life by dancing on the graves. After a few drinks, guess what they're doing? And guess what results in that "burial desecration," as it's later described by the paranormal expert they recruit to help them understand why things have suddenly started going bump and/or aflame at night.
Gravedancers is a callback to the B (or even B minus) horror films from the 1940's through the 1960's. Its low budget
ethos weeps from every pore like a perforated spirit. There's nothing horrible here, but so much is so predictable, and the low budget offers such often shoddy special effects, that it's actually hard not to burst out laughing when one is really supposed to be feeling terrified. A bunch of supposedly scary, horrible things happen to our star trio, before they realize they're being attacked by the malevolent spirits on whose graves they've danced, but even after that revelation, there's frightfully little actually scary stuff that happens.
The "big showdown" at the film's climax has what is arguably the best special effect of the film, a gigantic, spectral CGI hand which grabs Harris and drags him to a grave. It provides
Gravedancers with one really remarkable looking sequence, but the rest of the film is about as scary as that Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man from
Ghostbusters.
Wicked Little Things
Considerably more effective, and decidedly creepier, is
Wicked Little Things, a film which, like
The Gravedancers, plays upon the malevolent spirit trope, but brings in a sort of zombie element as well. This film gets off to a smashingly effective beginning with a nice prelude which takes place in the early 20th century, when a mine is being excavated, and along with the requisite canary, small children are utilized to get explosives into tight places. A little girl named Mary, along with some of her children co-workers (slaves, actually, for all intents and purposes) don't quite make it out of the mine before a rain of rocks and coal comes tumbling down after an explosion.
Segue to the present day, when recently widowed Karen (Lori Heuring) is arriving at her late husband's family home in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, along with her daughters, teenager Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton) and little Emma (Chloe Moretz).
Wicked Little Things has an almost
Deliverance like ambience as Karen and the kids first interact with a decidedly creepy store owner, who seems to have pedophiliac tendencies toward Emma, and, later, some teens from the "neighborhood" (if the woods could be termed that), who wonder if Karen and the kids are living "where the zombies are."
Wicked Little Things is almost a parody of every "kissin' cousin" backwoods joke you've ever heard about marriage between close relatives, as blood relations play a very important role in terms of who is protected from the marauding zombie children of the film, which you've probably already guessed are the "remnants" (for wont of a better term) of the children caught in the long ago mine explosion. Emma's relationship with Mary also plays into the film's ultimate outcome, which has some well staged and moderately gruesome elements.
The best thing about
Wicked Little Things is its consistently unsettling air. Things are just "slightly off" through the film, deliberately so, and they will leave most viewers feeling just a bit disconcerted. There may not be many big, outright "jump from your seat" moments in this film, but in its own quiet and deliberative way,
Wicked Little Things is horrifying and disturbing at the same time. It does manage to eke out a sort of fairy tale happy ending, at least as much as any zombie could hope for.
