Wicked World (1991)

Director: Barry J. Gillis

Screenplay: Barry J. Gillis

Cast: Barry J. Gillis as Grant Ekland; Maria Delgado as the Nurse; Eddie Platt as Harold

What was my interest in Wicked World? Of course this all stems from Things (1989), a shot-on-video film whose most prominent onscreen figure Barry J. Gillis was the lead, here directing and writing a film. Things is notorious, its entire production stemming from a notion of improvisation, where it was built on limited resources of what was felt to be "cool" or engaging for a group of Canadian horror fans. Improvisation like this on a micro-budget can lead to idiosyncrasies, but Things took this notion to an utter extreme impossible to top. Stemming from wanting to shock a viewer or to keep them on their toes, to seem profound as Gillis has a speak about reading a sci-fi novel about a boy who was as "big as a fridge", because they managed to hire porn actress Amber Lynn and needed to improvise scenes for her, and honestly because I do not think they knew what they were doing for large swathes of it. Alcohol probably played a part, but I do not want to speculate out of respect for everyone in that production as, honestly, it is accidental surrealism in a rare form.

This is pertinent as Wicked World is just as unpredictable. The plot is supposed to be about a serial killer played by Eddie Platt, who is an older man with white hair, that has been left lobotomised after being finally caught, but still likes to spin stories of death in his brain as he is now pushed around by a nurse he does not particularly like.  The corrupt cop who got him finally, played by Gillis, is still grief stricken over the killer having murdered his girlfriend from then, and is not going to take his release kindly. That the killer might be fabricating the truth adds subjectivity to the proceedings but Gillis' cop is still there and tormented by the "Wicked World". Following on from Things having a tribute to Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath, the title is a reference to one of their song, and is the theme in the nutshell about the world being a hostile, miserable place of continuous murder and death. The film itself is not so straight forward and would leave most on the floor trying to accept its logic and technical issues.

Suffice to say even the official release of Wicked World is complicated. Made in 1991, it never had a proper release. With mostly a trailer on YouTube in 2006 the only sight of it, it was only until 2019 that American Genre Film Archive in collaboration with the website Bleeding Skull got the film a Blu-Ray/DVD release with a new director's cut. The Blu Ray format has an irony as, shot on 16mm but edited on video, Wicked World does look like it was shot with Vaseline smeared on the camera lens, there a befitting additional layer of weirdness to a film that could have sufficed on mere DVD.

Its biggest difference from Things is also its biggest hindrance as well as its most compelling detail. Complicated? Yes, but this film is a peculiar one, where it is necessary to bastardise the philosophical term "the banality of evil" by suggesting this movie perfectly encapsulates a curious concept of "the banality of exaggerated evil", where for whatever reason human beings like the exaggerate the worse even outside of art and pop culture. We cannot help to make a fictionalise crime or atrocity more extreme and nihilistic, sometimes with real problematic but even in terms of edgy culture in trying to be bleaker and "more real". Not surprisingly, whilst we never got Wicked World properly until in the next decades, it was being made in the early nineties, about the time after lurid horror films in the eighties on VHS, right around the time just before the controversy over video games like Mortal Kombat, bands as notorious like Cannibal Corpse taking things to an extreme, and controversial cultural items like the Traces of Death series of atrocity video compilations. The world of Wicked World, which is possibly trying to the United States but clearly is Canadian, is one with little happiness, just death. It is not enough for a character to say they have lost faith in the world due to their parents divorcing violently, but that they witnessed one commit suicide by hanging. It might not be blackly comical to some viewers to imagine this in this film's ham-fisted tone, and frankly some of it is bleak even for a desensitised person like myself, but imagine this for a whole hundred plus minutes with the mad ramblings of having been spiked with a narcotic directly through the eyes, the result of which is not necessary funny in even in ironic way but is definitely not conventional.

This is a film where a group of young Canadians spout nihilistic platitudes in the middle of the countryside before their token male gets pervy on the women to take their clothes off for a swim, a film which thinks with its nihilism and its second head in fast succession of each other. It is a film, from Gillis who also wrote the script, that provides an almost showman's sense of over the top bravado in its message, even when the film at the end inexplicably has a text suggesting that some time into the nineties we would all have brain implants soon that would control our violent impulses for the better. God knows where that piece of onscreen text came from, but structure and logic is not worth arguing about, not to dismiss the film but admitting it was probably gestated from a haze. The production, which was documented in a behind the scene work that is on the AGFA release, shows that everyone including Gillis are just likeable ordinary people struggling in a production where an actor cannot stop smirking in a scene of a grocery store hold up, or the camera running out of film. What happens to ideas after creation though, as in all artistic mediums, makes them extremer, odder and more bemusing than their creators may have intended in their need to create, especially when they are making genre material to keep people in their seats.

So Wicked World is comically over the top and in the post-slasher film boom of trying its best to be lurid. The prologue does not suggest where the plot will go but definitely warns of what to expect, in which a party of four involves the brother of one female character watching her and her boyfriend having a very explicit lovemaking session from the nearby chair, the actress one comfortable with doing a nude scene down to merely the bottoms of her underwear being only pulled down at the back, which has to be mentioned because the scene of titillation is long and stretched further than in any other film. It has the absurdity of our killer, Eddie Platt in a gasmask, standing outside the window watching on but not having to get his hands too dirty as the brother decides to shot almost everyone else in a psychological breakdown. This exaggeration is the film encapsulated, but it will get nastier, and a lot more haphazard and chaotic with the editing and sound.

The story is a string of horror story tropes, really a collection of murder scenes strung together with only a bit of drama, not really connected together. A lot of dialogue was audibly post dubbed, and the soundtrack (the sound design, not the music) in general is cacophonous and a mess. The scene with the nihilists in the woods, to give an example, has geese noises so loud in the audio mix it could by itself cause a viewer without the fortitude of this cinema to lose their mind if they have not already.  It would be mean to talk about the technical issues or plotting in gory detail, but it does have to be warned (and alerted to) that they are a very distinct part of this film's personality, for better or for worse. Also, to be honest, this is still better put together than Things, so it is a subject which eventually becomes subjective in one's personal taste of films, especially as someone who has watched Things enough even its scenes of red lighting bleeding over the videotape images are part of the experience.

Whilst Things was continually funny to the point of whimsy in what strange idea it got fixated on, like a moth to a lightbulb, Wicked World has all its naive nihilism to contend with, which can be humorous when our killer confesses on a slide that "I hate slides. I hate helicopters. I hate life.", but also can be nasty in an off putting way with its attitude. It is here where moral issues come to mind. Gillis' film has the sense of baffled madness, but aspects which without stepping back or ironically view them are problematic if thought about. This is where a group like Bleeding Skull, the individuals who uncover no budget oddities like this, skirt a line in strange cult circle; that whilst we thankfully have an adult view of this material, coming into them with a caution of their potential issues, we can sometimes not fully deal with them in between cool sounding proclamations of them being fun cult films when it is vital to bare these concerns in mind.

One unsavoury and misguided aspect is the anti-political correctness speeches, which considering the film was shot in the early nineties was around the time when this subject was becoming a bigger issue. They were still on Gillis' mind however long after as, in one of the endless onscreen white text quotations on black that end the film, he quotes film maker Nick Palumbo (director of Murder Set Pieces (2004)) from the DVD box of his own work. I am someone who has concerns about political correctness when it dodges topics deliberately rather than discussing them frankly, but likewise especially from the late 2010s it comes evident that people hide behind the term "freedom of speech" without realising it both comes with responsibility and that it is an excuse for being an arsehole for many. It comes as a solipsistic childishness, especially as rants against PC culture are also juvenile, as a transgressive artist would just get on with their work even if it ever caused them difficult to work, whilst making really lurid and extreme splatter cinema is not the same as even a genre based filmmaker like Shinya Tsukamoto. That the killer says some of this, but other characters as well, makes it really confusing as well what the actual opinion is of this subject.

Circling back to the whole issue of the exaggerated evil, unfortunately alongside this there is one scene which comes off as misguided, not because anyone in the production has malice, but Gillis clearly thought of having a scene out of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992), a year before it was even made, of a corrupt cop only for the presentation and tone to make the choice ill advised. Definitely not dressed as American cops, Gillis' character and another actor are playing the worse of police in as over-the-top fashion as you would expect, but with one little detail where they and their police chief are racists, targeting a trio of non-white characters, with racist language involved does become jarring in how nasty it is. It is a reminder that it is one thing to depict the worst in humanity in cinema, even if the result fails, but that it feels like Gillis was exaggerating as in the same way his characters' nihilism is, or in the decision for death scenes to cover the screen in digitally added gore and limbs. This raises some concerns.

This is the aspect which makes it difficult to fully appreciate Wicked World in general. I will say I enjoyed the film, but it is so obsessed with being bleak and "real" about the way the world truly is that it is not a charming film to get along with, curdled to an extreme. As with the scene mentioned in the paragraph before, or the anti-PC rants, the film is not going to be like Things, a film that for all its gore and attempts at nastiness was just fun. That is not to say the Wicked World experience is not mad as a box of frogs though, as it certainly joins the older film in mangling one's consciousness whilst experiencing it. With the exception of the music which, even the cheesy and sexist glam metal, is actually good from a group of composers, everything else in the film is just experiencing a series of hallucinations. Some of them are dark, like Gillis himself pounded on by a gang of people wanting to make him a martyr, or some deeply silly moments like the dialogue. Even the end credits are likely to drive people off the tipping point, a rarity in abstract cinema I have covered, as they are at least over five minutes long if not longer, with at least two songs used in full and in the director's cut continuous cutting to an image of a goose, going on the point of absurdity. Despite the film itself being difficult and to proceed to with caution, Wicked World is a dumbfounding experience in terms of wondering how it ended up as it did.

Abstract Spectrum: Atonal/Bleak/Chaotic/Illogical/Maddening/Mindbender/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High