Wicked World (1991) — Triskaidekafiles

WICKED WORLD

WRITER: Barry J. Gillis

DIRECTOR: Barry J. Gillis

STARRING: Eddie Platt as The Killer
Barry J. Gillis as Grant Ekland
Maria Delgado as Nurse

QUICK CUT: A poor man trapped in his own body, keeps himself entertained by creating stories to escape the only way he knows how.

THE MORGUE

Harold/The Killer - A disturbed man who sees the worst in the world, and he may not be wrong. He is an vengeful man seeking to rid humanity of its worst impulses. But in other news, he’s also trapped in a wheelchair, only able to regale himself with tales of his past deeds.

Grant Ekland - The cop who lost his wife at the hands of Harold, and thought he got revenge, but the killer somehow survived. He is also just as corrupt and damaged and murderous as Harold, so there’s no one good here.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! Here we are in mid March, and many years ago now, around this time of year, I came across a little Canadian export that was kinda terrible, completely fascinating, and I absolutely loved it. That movie was called Things, from the mind of Barry J. Gillis. Well, he's back, or he was back, but now there's a DVD in my hands, of his follow up film, Wicked World. If Things has taught me one thing, it is to expect the unexpected. So let's dive right in.

After some really strange text bits about how horrible the world is, and the potential murder of a wrestler, the movie begins in earnest, with a news recap. But don't worry, we very quickly get to be voyeurs watching a couple making out on a couch.

The makeout session escalates and they start taking clothes off. Right there on the couch. In front of their friends. Hey, it was the 90s!

One of the people watching this go down starts playing with a gun, and I kinda empathise. There are also glimpses of a masked man lurking outside, so one way or another, someone is dying tonight.

…Oh! You’re already booked up, sorry, I’ll go find my own people to kill, sorry!

The one with the gun finally gets bored enough to ask his friend if he's fucking his sister, and dude, you saw what I just saw, so the answer is YES. He gets called a mental case, and that is enough for him to flip the proverbial tables and blow his friend away.

No one seems to react to this, except for the Sandman outside the window. That is, until he points the guns at other people. Talk about bad object permanence.

He caps the rest of his friends, the guy outside invites himself in, and kills the shooter. So...are we supposed to root for this guy n...no wait, he just went down the hall to murder the last person there. If nothing else, the movie starts out strong with a giant pile of bodies, and a lot of moral ambiguity.

And I almost hate to admit it, but each gunshot is...done very well, very artsy. It flickers, mixing images of the gun with the victims, and other stuff, and it is very jarring and a neat effect.

Oh, and if you remember Things, there was some wonderfully hilarious sound work in that. The tradition continues here with every clunky footstep, and an amazing gurgle when the killer kills the killer.

After the credits...yes this was all pre credits!!...the killer prays to god for forgiveness and then immediately goes to kill a woman who insists she's not a hooker. That’s exactly what I would expect a hooker to say…

Following up that random murder, we cut to the killer elsewhere, but in a wheelchair and in a vegetative state. We learn over the course of things that he suffered injuries, got lobotomised, but he still has his mind trapped in the almost lifeless body.

Just keep running, lady! His heart should give out any second now!

He treats everything we've seen thus far as stories, but I'm running with them being real, or else I feel like a lot of wasted time. He's doing this to show that 'through the killer's eyes' what a wicked world we live in.

And from there we jump to a random robbery at a store, with the thief hilariously wearing a plastic bag on his head. How great would it be if, in his own hubris, he is taken down by suffocating on his choice of mask?

It's your pretty typical robbery scenario, if you account for the fact he wraps a chain around the female customer's neck and threatens her life to motivate the clerk.

At one point, he has the pair of them down on the ground, when someone tries to buzz into the store. The clerk says he'll get the door and get them to go away, saying their closed but uhhh...

The…the door is right there. Allow me to explain the concept of ‘glass’ to you…

The person at the door is our killer, who showed up just in time to kill everyone instead of the robber. Just like a man, swoop in after all the work is done and take all the credit.

Meanwhile, back in the sanitarium as he's being wheeled...WILL YOU GET SOME WD40 FOR THAT SQUEAK?? ...Ahem. He sets up the next little murder spree by positing the killer was made fun of as a child, and now all the kids are all grown up, still hang out together, and they and there own children are off to the beach.

...Cool story, still murder.

Yeah. That’s weird. I could TOTALLY get behind this movie doing random “Pop Up Video” style facts of everyone’s crimes, but it is JUST this one girl. Lean into this and I am SO here for it!

I am starting to grok the gist of this movie. Killer sets up a scene, we wander around until it decides to end in murder and bloodshed and gas masks. Drip in some bits of philosophy and nihilism, wash rinse repeat.

This beach scene is especially interminable. While the kills are plentiful and bloody and fun, we also spend a looot of time just hanging out and water skiing and wandering the woods.

But finally the film decides it is time, HALFWAY THROUGH THE MOVIE to introduce the cop to our story. If you watch trailers, he seems like the main character, but the movie is obviously about the killer, and the cop is the antagonist.

We get another flashback, this time to their first meeting, shortly after the killer's daughters committed suicide. Grant stops by, new to the neighbourhood, and flirts with the killer's new wife.

The Sandman is still mopey and terse, and his wife calls him out on his bullshit. So he immediately takes her and his stepdaughter inside and murders them.

Back in the present, the killer continues to ramble as *ahem* Nurse Latino wheels him about. "I ask myself, why is there so much violence in our world? What happened to all the love?"

DUDE you *personally* have murdered TWENTY people in just the first half of the movie!

Speaking of, it's time to meet another group of people we won't care about and wait around for them to be murdered.

This new group of people pairs off for sex and dying, just in time for the killer to show up and mutter about how much he hates life.

Dude, right now, so do I. So. Do. I.

But it's then back to the present with the killer playing on slides and commenting on how much he hates slides. He hates helicopters. He hates life. Look, Marvin the Paranoid Android, I am so sick of people hating everything these days. Spread some positivity.

Meanwhile, the killer gives the cop some backstory of being an adulterer, having a good time, while his wife is at home, and gets targeted by the killer.

Some more wonderfully artsy shots as things flicker, when the killer decides the cop, his nemesis, is having TOO GOOD of a time. It's funny, and again, when the movie plays around with convention, it is at its best.

We then have the killer chasing someone, I presume the cop's wife, and then jump to him on the couch talking with his psychiatrist. Who needs linear progression of time?

The doc decides the world would be better off without the killer, and pulls a gun on her patient, which I am pretty sure is against medical guidelines. But also plays into Harold’s beliefs of how everyone in the world is horrible.

Unsurprisingly, the killer gets the gun, but chooses not to use it because that's 'too easy'...and the then immediately chokes her out.

So then it's off to the cop in the present, still haunted by his wife's murder, which is screwing up his current relationship.

It’s good to be the writer of the movie.

Also some more backstory trickles in as the cop tracks down the killer, with like two dozen shots, and he somehow survived, leading to the hospital and everything else.

But that's not the interesting part. See, he's a bad cop. A TERRIBLE cop who got filmed murdering a group of people just because they were black. Yeeeikes.

The chief actually doesn't care that they did what they did, and even agrees with it, condones it!! JUST DON'T GET CAUGHT! Yikes squared!

"I applaud what you did." UGH.

Look, I know there are cops like that, and even some deeply ingrained systemic issues from root to branch, but…

Our cop hands over his badge and gun, but when it comes to his partner Macready, he instead decides to MURDER THE POLICE CHIEF AND THEN SHOOT HIS OWN BRAINS OUT.

The killer posits what if the killer of his 'story' is getting out today, and the cop finds out about it, heading them on a collision course. Finally.

He declares he's going to finish what he started and kill the killer. His new girlfriend says he can't do that in today's society and I AM SORRY BUT DID YOU NOT HEAR WHAT HE JUST TOLD YOU ABOUT BEING A COP??

And just to prove his point, the cop blows away his girlfriend to show just what he can do today.

We get more ranting about hating political correctness, as the nurse shoves tapioca pudding all over his face, and the cop slowly approaches.

Since we need to pad out some more runtime, we sneak in some random murders of more random people, and before we can wrap things up, the killer tries to make himself 'the hero' by justifying his actions because of the earlier suicides.

We finally see those acts, and nope, sorry, no amount of tragic backstory justifies the sheer amount of slaughter I've just sat through.

But at LAST the cop shows up, kills the nurse because why not, and then blows away the killer.

Mmm, gun oil good chaser for the tapioca pudding.

Now, the movie COULD end there, maybe a little more and end it with Grant putting the gun in his own mouth for the ultimate in nihilism.

So of course that is not what happens. Instead, he bumps into a guy in a wheelchair who tries to mug him, so he beats him up. An act which is definitely not beneath the murderous, racist, dirty cop.

Which just incentivses the half dozen or so other people in the very crowded alley, to pile on top of Grant. I almost feel like he incited this riot so he could be visited by the spirit of instant karma.

Some other random dude shows up though, blows away all the attackers, helps Grant, and hands over the gun, so we can wrap this up with that ultimate nihilism I was hoping for.

Or so you would think, because there are then 8 minutes of credits. This movie goes on so long I think it might start back up again.

WHY WILL THIS MOVIE NEVER END.

It's a beautiful day in Toronto and you are a horrible goose

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: It’s not terrible, and for the source material, it looks pretty decent.

Audio: Sounds fine enough for this sort of thing.

Sound Bite: “So Brad…are you fucking my sister, or what??”

Body Count: …Holy shit. That’s all I have to say.
1 - Just past six minutes in and Brad gets his face blown off
2 - Guy gets shot
3 - Then his girlfriend
4 - Killer gets killed by gas mask man
5 - And then he kills the girl in the shower
6 - The not a hooker gets strangled
7 - Then he kills the store clerk
8 - And then the robber
9 - And then the woman
10 - One of the beach people gets beaten with a baseball bat
11 - Girl gets her eyes gouged out
12 - Guy making out gets strangled
13 - Another girl gets her neck slit open
14 - Kills his wife
15 - And his stepkid
16 - Girl gets axed
17 - And the man she was about to ride
18 - Redhead guy gets crushed under a barbell
19 and 20 - Couple dancing gets strangled at once
21 - Girl in the bathroom gets stabbed in the neck
22 - Smothers his psychiatrist
23 - Random woman killed on tape?
24 - And another beaten
25 - One of the witnesses gets clubbed
26 - then the other
27 - Macready shoots the chief
28 - And then himself
29 - Cop kills his girlfriend
30 - Killer strangles a girl with nunchucks
31 - And then her roommate
32 - And then the guy who's there too.
33 - One of the killer's daughters kills herself
34 - Then the second
35 - And then the third
36 - Nurse Latina gets shot
37 - The killer finally dies
38 - One of the attackers is shot
39 - And then another
40 - And another
41 - And another
42 - And another
43 - AND ANOTHER
44 - ANd yes another
45 - And finally one more
46 - Grant kills himself

Best Corpse: I’m partial to the girl getting her eyes gouged out, but I am feeling overwhelmed.

Sex Appeal: They sneak in boobs here and there throughout the movie.

Drink Up! Every time some weirdness appears on screen.

Movie Review: Huh. I’m not sure how to feel about this movie. It’s no budget, but also feels like there’s a lot to unpack here. I feel like someone was going through a lot and it led to this bleak, strange movie. There’s a lot going on, linear time can get fucked, and there’s not a lot that makes sense at the end of the day. Spewing forth from the troubled mind of a killer doesn’t help. But I am here for nihilism, I am here for an utter bloodbath, and this is almost an artsy movie. It is NOT for everyone, but if you like WTF movies, this is worth checking out. It is definitely an experience. Four out of five plastic bags.

Entertainment Value: It is certainly entertaining, as you try and puzzle out what’s going on. Lots of kills to keep a body entertained. And plenty of strange things going on. Four out of five question marks.