Review: The Dark And The Wicked

Image courtesy of RLJE Films.

Bryan Bertino's "The Dark and the Wicked" starts out promisingly enough, but it's soon clear that the film has nowhere to go, eventually devolving into a series of derivative and repetitive events that become gorier and nastier as they go along, but simultaneously less interesting and not particularly frightening.

The film's early scenes are goosebump inducing enough. On a desolate farm in the middle of nowhere, an older woman (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) tends to her ailing, bed-ridden husband and oversees the daily chores. Something is amiss. Bells clang in the night, the herds of goats seem frightened and something appears to be lurking on the perimeter.

The woman chops carrots - in that type of up-close manner they love to do in horror movies that I've come to loathe - on a cutting board and hears the scrape of a chair behind her. She turns around and the chair - but nothing else - is facing her. Like I said, something seems off.

The woman's two grown children - Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) - arrive to help out, but end up providing little help at all. Then, something horrifying and devastating happens - and the siblings are left wondering what to do. Meanwhile, strange phone calls take place, people show up at the house and then later claim they were never there and Louise has a scare in the shower.

All of this could have made for a creepy horror movie - especially after the eerie, well shot and atmospheric opening scenes, but "The Dark and the Wicked" becomes more dull as it plods along. A home nurse gets into the mix as well as a priest and some other characters, but they are there for obvious reasons - mostly to suffer or contribute to the mind games. 

One of the problems involved in the picture is the seeming lack of logic to why anyone behaves the way they do, or what exactly is tormenting the characters in this film - or why. As the film gets bloodier, it becomes less interesting, and the gore seems to be there to try to keep horror movie fans from abandoning the picture altogether. The final scene provides no further clarity and goes out more with a whimper than a bang.

I'm sure the movie is meant to capture the mood of the horrors of a family witnessing death, but there are likely more compelling ways to do so - within the confines of the horror genre - than what takes place here. This is a good looking film with a director that seems to have a mastery behind the camera, so it's a disappointment that "The Dark and the Wicked" offers so little else otherwise.