Wicked World (1991)

Dir. Barry J. Gillis

The world is a pretty terrible place and many people do many terrible things. Violence constantly plagues us and oppression is omnipresent. This is not a thesis statement, but merely an observation, and a reductively pessimistic one at that, the appropriate response to which is probably, ‘Yeah, ok. So what?’ Barry J. Gillis doesn’t seem to be interested in the ‘how’ or the ‘why’ of it all. Or maybe he is, but with all the time in the world, he could not develop the filmmaking skills to properly communicate his ideas. To try to explain the plot of Wicked World would be a futile endeavor. Even if I could, the plot is irrelevant to the experience. And Wicked World is very much an experience.

The film starts out as a slasher movie, albeit one that has been filtered through the mind of some extra-dimensional alien being. Groups of young people are killed by a middle aged man in a gas mask. He is able to walk right up to these people undetected until he actually touches them. He’s able to strangle them by gently caressing there necks, or gouge their eyes out with a light massaging. At one point he beats a woman so hard with a bat that clip art of a severed hand flies across the screen. These scenes are intercut with the same middle aged man in a wheelchair, vegetative after a lobotomy, narrating and ostensibly contextualizing the rest of the film. Is it reality or just the sick machinations of a depraved mind? He is fed some sort of pudding or yogurt and it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve seen this week. Eventually a crooked ex cop enters the picture to muddle things even more. It would all be mind numbing if it weren’t so incredibly baffling.

This is a film at odds with itself. The blocking and editing fight the framing, giving the audience no sense of space. Two characters might be standing next to each other, at opposite sides of the room, in different rooms. The sound design balanced so that crickets chirping, geese honking, and frogs croaking take priority over dialogue. Machine gun fire, the sound of a crying infant, and random police dispatches in one scene over speaking characters. I think this is to indicate that they are in a “rough” neighborhood, in lieu of an establishing shot. The script feels as though it were chopped up and reassembled at random, jumping back and forth through time, across seemingly random stories and characters. Is this an attempt at pre-Pulp Fiction, pre-Memento style of storytelling?

Anyone who has seen Gillis’ prior opus, Things (1989) might know what they are in for. Please believe me when I tell you that you are not prepared. I was not prepared. Things, while incompetent, has a line connecting Point A and Point B, even though that line zig-zags and loops around. There is the shell of something familiar (a “cabin in the woods” type horror story) encasing all the weirdness. Wicked World is more like several collages of Venn diagrams being constantly shuffled around. There’s a Point A and a Point B somewhere, but I think to find them and understand them is to know Barry J. Gillis’ madness. But if you think your brain can take it, this movie is an explosion of nihilistic SOV mindfuckery; an endurance test you undertake just to say ran the gauntlet and survived.