What I find so great about the horror genre is that, even though I've seen over 2500 films of different sub genres and numerous countries already, I keep stumbling upon crazy stuff nobody ever heard about. Even more incomprehensible – especially in the case of "Wicked Wicked" - is how come these movies are still so obscure and unloved? Now this certainly isn't a masterpiece of film-making, but nevertheless I would have expected a movie with such a peculiar gimmick to have some sort of loyal fan-base or at least enjoy some recognition at horror internet forums. Well, apparently not. "Wicked Wicked" remains underrated to this date, but hopefully a proper DVD-release will change that one day sooner or later. Make no mistake, however, the plot of this film is extremely rudimentary and straightforward all in favor of putting the emphasis entirely on the "Duo-Vision" gimmick. This is just a fancy term to say that the split-screen effect lasts throughout whole film. Unlike I feared, this gimmick isn't as irritating as I thought it would be, but nevertheless it's only truly creative in a handful of situations.
There are a couple of highly disturbing murders taking place in a fancy Californian seaside hotel. Beautiful blond women are brutally stabbed by a maniacal culprit and their bodies dumped around the hotel. Former policeman turned security agent is asked to investigate discretely, but the bodies keep piling up at a fast pace. The case gets more personal when his beautiful blond ex-wife arrives at the hotel to put up a singing show.
I don't really know why I bother to keep the killer's identity secret and even somewhat mysterious, because the film itself certainly doesn't. The culprit takes off his mask and exposes his face after the second murder already; probably to illustrate once more that the whodunit aspect of the film really wasn't the producers' main priority. And yet, despite this premature and regrettable revelation, there are multiple tiny plot components that are interesting and worth analyzing. For example, the sub plot about the hotel owner's reluctance to inform the police and his attempts to avoid negative publicity predate the similar "Jaws" plot with nearly two whole years. There's also a bizarre but engaging and original resemblance between this film's main characters and the ones from Gaston Leroux' immortal horror tale "The Phantom of the Opera". There's a pretty imaginative, yet typically rancid 70's and massively perverted twist regarding the culprit's motives to kill blond women near the end (which I really loved) and there's a neat supportive role for Spaghetti western regular Edd Byrnes as a moonlighting lifeguard. If you ever have the opportunity to watch "Wicked, Wicked" – and apparently it's occasionally programmed on TCM – please do so! It's far from being a great film, but it's definitely unique.
