“The Wretched” suffers from a title problem —
who exactly are the wretched here? — and a
pair of timing ones: It opens when deathly eerie
is baked into a simple trip to the grocery store.
And it portrays almost every adult woman as a
witchy hag, not a great coincidence very close to
Mother’s Day.
It’s packed with sly nods to previous films,
especially to ones by Steven Spielberg —
electronic toys running amok from “Close Third
Encounters of the Third Kind” and a stalking
creature that creates terror at an orderly marina
(“Jaws”). Heck, it’s hard not to think of “E.T.” when
our hero gets onto a bicycle. There’s even a bit of
“Aliens” in the way the creature erupts from the
chest of its human hosts.
But the first half is tedious as it establishes the
players, all stock characters from other summer
romance movies — there are rich bullies, the
cute girlfriends of the rich bullies, an alternative
cool girl and a goofy dad. You know the drill:
skinny dipping and drinking games.
John-Paul Howard is our teen hero here and
watching him try to convince people that their
town is being stalked by a vengeful creature
that lives under a tree is a delight. “Look in
the cellar, dad!” he screams. (Don’t look in the
cellar, dad!)
Howard’s gutsy teen starts to see weird things
happening with the family next door. The mom
(a creepy Zarah Mahler) returns with a deer
carcass she has hit with her car and butchers it in
the driveway.
Mom soon starts cracking the bones in her
body loudly and unnaturally — and wearing
flowing dresses, sure signs she’s been replaced