Moving to a new house in the woods, and woman and her two children find that the area is home to a group of vicious ghost-like children who are seeking revenge for a past misdeed and must find a way to appease them and end their rampage.This one turned to be quite an above-average effort with a lot to really like about it. One of the better elements with this is the rather creepy leads where which is quite impressive for all sorts of reasons. Not only do they have a creepy air about them being demented children after all, so the make-up is effective but the general sense of their being so many of these kids running around makes for some pretty chilling times. This also makes the action scenes all the more enjoyable by putting these creepy villains into these rather fun and thrilling sequences, as scenes like the attack on the couple in the car out in the forest or the later scenes of the family running through the woods and stumbling upon the different houses certainly makes for some thrilling moments and plenty of action that allows this one to get a lot of rather exciting action scenes among it's creepier elements. The finale in the barn for the most part here is rather fun as the revenge comes to fruition in a series of tense, thrilling chases with all sorts of exciting confrontations and rather chilling action which settles the plot line quite well. That ties in with the opening cave-in and the resulting echoes of that rather nicely, and along with the suspense from the woods and the numerous ghostly whispers echoing through the landscape make up the good points here. There's not a whole lot really wrong here, as about the only flaw to be found is the everlasting angle of whether the kids are ghosts or zombies, and it's not a great job of either. Despite the repeated claims of them as zombies, only their bullet invincibility remains here with very little other evidence to the contrary. Likewise, their use of tools and overall appearance say they're ghosts but none of their other actions scream ghost either and makes the film really confused about what they are. Along with the troublesome point of having a lot of scenes filmed too dark to make anything out, this is really the film's only flaw.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

J.S. Cardone made fame with is first effort as director in 1982 with The Slayer, one of the video nasties. His latest effort was made in 2006, it was this flick here which is suddenly released in 2011 here in Europe. But it's called Carlton's Mine over here. It's weird that it took so long to be available in Europe. It was released under the After Dark Horrorfest label. So I knew that sometimes flicks coming out under that name aren't always watchable.This is one of them that hasn't many to offer. It's low on suspense and on the bloody side. I can't say that it all really got my attention. But I watched it for another reason. There's a really famous thespian in it but he's only in it for a few minutes, Geoffrey Lewis. Too much flicks to mention that he was in. Further on there are some other names in it that weren't really big back then. Chloë Grace Moretz (Emma) was 9 but you could see that see really had it in her so she went on to Let Me In and Kick-Ass. Before that she was Chelsea Lutz in The Amityville Horror. Scout Taylor-Compton went further as Laurie Strode in the Halloween remake by Rob Zombie. Lori Heuring came from Mulholland Drive. Ben Cross is also a thespian coming from for example Chariots Of Fire, he went on to Star Trek as Sarek. The score used in fact the effects used are now dated, I can't explain it but they used it around that time so many times like in Battlestar Galactica, it's a kind of zweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep (going louder and louder), by doing that you knew something was going to happen.It's funny to see big names in this kind of low on everything flick. The acting was sublime and all believable but for geeks in the genre it had nothing to offer or you must see Scout in her underwear and get sticky hands on that part. Still it got an rated 18 on it, maybe it's for one gory killing? All the others were done off-screen.Gore 0,5/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Produced & directed by genre regular J.S. Cardone (is anyone ever going to put out a decent DVD/Blu-ray of The Slayer (1982) or what?) this was one of the seven horror films to premiere at one of those After Dark Horrorfest events & while it's not terrible I wouldn't exactly call Wicked Little Things particularly worthwhile either. For a start the script is pretty slow going, it's over half an hour into the thing before anyone dies, until that point there's exposition & attempts at foreboding which aren't particularly foreboding to be honest & after a solid twenty minutes of nothing happening most people will start to lose interest. The whole film film has the same central core as Aliens (1986) with the mother daughter relationship although here it feels like it's there just to pad things out rather than give the film or it's character's greater depth, the character's generally are walking clichés like the young cute girl who know's something is going on, the creepy store owner, a crazy mountain man who's silly stories & warnings turn out to be true, a cowardly human bad guy there to get it to redress the balance & the flesh eating zombies that feel like they belong in an Asian ghost film as much as a US zombie one. In fact I would say it's more of a ghost film than a zombie film, the ideas & themes of some terrible event in the past, a haunted location, someone wronged reaching out to the living for revenge or redemption or closure are all more prevalent in Wicked Little Things than merely flesh eating zombies rising from the grave. To be honest I thought this was quite predictable, there are no big surprises & at over 90 minutes it goes on for to long with a small body count & there's just nothing that memorable here.Wicked Little Things is a dark film, I am not talking about dark as in a conceptual or thematic sense but as in a you can barely see what's going on because most of the time the picture is black sense. If you do want to watch this make sure you get your hands on a good copy because you will need it, there are many times when it's impossible to see what's going on or what the camera is pointing at & it's just so dark with most of the screen most of the time just pitch black which is a shame since the locations are nice & you can sort of sense a decent atmosphere but the darkness becomes annoying. There's not much gore here & a pretty low body count, people are stabbed with pick-axe's, a pig is killed & there are a few shots of zombie kids eating flesh & guts plus the carcass of a chopped up pig is seen but nothing else & the gore is masked by the darkness anyway so it's difficult to see. Known under the title Zombies: Wicked Littles Things here in the UK this was originally set to be directed by Tobe Hooper & had the working titles The Children (already taken...) & Zombies.

Having spent all of her money caring for her terminally ill spouse, recently widowed Karen Tunny (Lori Heuring) moves with her two daughters Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Emma (Chloe Moretz) to her late husband's run-down family home in rural Pennsylvania, where local legends speak of zombies who roam the woods at night.Just seeing the names of this film's writer and director in the opening credits was enough to send shivers up my spine: Boaz Davidson is the 'genius' responsible for penning the scripts for such STV titles as Octopus 1 & 2, Spiders and Crocodile, whilst J.S. Cardone gave us the godawful 'video nasty' The Slayer and dull vampire flick The Forsaken. With such dubious talent responsible, I didn't expect much from Wicked Little things.And having just finished the film, I'm glad I kept my expectations low.Although the movie looks good at times, with lovely use of the eerie woodland locale, and the cast give reasonable performances given the clichéd drivel that they are working with, the plot is so laboured, poorly written, and derivative that it's impossible to be enthusiastic about. Most importantly, perhaps, the film's killers, undead children who rise each night from the mine in which they died, aren't in the least bit scary, a smudge of makeup, black contacts and some crappy joke shop scars doing very little to add to the sense of menace. Scout Taylor-Compton and company do their best to look afraid of the tiny terrors, screaming convincingly with every confrontation, but their admirable attempts to instill a sense of fear in the audience is to little avail: the little blighters just ain't got what it takes to chill the blood.There are a few lacklustre zombie chow scenes in a futile bid to win over gore-hounds, and the final kill, which sees the victim's blood drench both Compton and Heuring, is suitably tasteless, but on the whole, Wicked Little Things (AKA Zombies in the UK) is instantly forgettable trash—just another clunker in the filmographies of Cardone and Davidson.