Wicked
(1998)
[DVD Info]

Ellie Christianson (Julia Stiles) is a moody teen. Her mother is cheating on her father with the neighbor, and she doesn’t seem to care much for Ellie. Her father isn’t really there for her and replaces real parenting with presents. The boys at school call her ugly and she has a bratty sister. One night Ellie hears her parents arguing about divorce. The next morning Ellie and her mom fight about the hooker-like makeup she’s wearing. After Ellie and her sister storm out of the house someone breaks into their home and her mom is beaten to death by a tragedy mask.

After her mother’s death, Ellie tries to seduce her father and takes on the role of the bossy mother and nagging wife. She also begins to show homicidal tendancies when she tries to strangle her sister during a fight. It turns out that her father Ben (Billy Moses) was cheating on his wife with the housekeeper Lena (Louise Myrback) and he ends up marrying her not long after. Ellie doesn’t take this well and she hatches a plan with her late mother’s former lover Lawson Smith (Patrick Muldoon) to run away together. However, when she threatens her father with telling his new bride the truth about their relationship (and the location of a mole that no one but a lover would know), she blackmails him into breaking up with Lena. Who was behind the murder of Ellie’s mother? Will they kill again?

Pulling out someone’s hair is considered attempted murder.
Sex makes you forget everything.
Money means nothing when you’re good with your hands.
Doing it with your daughter will always come back to haunt you.

"When I was little I hit my brother over the head with a hammer. If I had killed him my life would have been totally different." ~Ben in response to a friend’s concern of Ellie trying to strangle her sister.

Bah! The whole plot was a mess!

This movie was based on the Electra complex (the opposite of Freud's Oedipal complex). It was loosely based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, the guy that killed his father and married his mother (anyone else take Greek Mythology in highschool?), but it’s the opposite of that what Freud called the “Electra Complex” where you want to kill your mother and marry your father. That aside… This flick was…ok. First, the whole incest plot was strange. Not because it’s incest (hey…I loved Flowers in the Attic) but…before her mom dies, Ellie doesn’t seem to have any sort of sexual feelings for her father. He just acts like Ellie is his favorite and whatnot. Then, when the mother dies, suddenly Ellie can’t wait to jump into her father’s pants. She’s always forcing herself on him. It’s rather irritating. Why didn’t the dad be like “hey…that’s gross. Knock it off.” Instead he feeds into it by letting her sleep in his bed and she dresses up in her late mother’s clothes and serves him dinner. Suddenly there’s this “plot twist” and they’ve slept together before. He really doesn’t seem like he lusts after his child. When did it happen? Recently? When she was younger? Is it an on-going thing? All she really says is that there’s a mole on his left butt cheek. Oh well. Basically if you don't know the Greek myth then that part of the movie makes no sense.

The next weird thing was her relationship with Lawson. They were together one night, he calls her obsessively and tells her he loves her. That would suggest that they’ve been seeing each other for a while, but every time they interact in the movie she acts like she barely knows him. Also, why would he go from the mother to the daughter? She’s, like, 14 in this movie. Ew. So, you can check off incest and pedophilia on your lists. Really, not a lot happens in this movie. It’s a slow and boring murder mystery. There’s a lot of putzing around before the movie goes anywhere. I think I’ve seen too many of these types of movies because I was pretty sure who the killer was right away. The killer ended up being “the person who seems like they have absolutely nothing to do with it” plot twist. It’s basically pulling crap out of thin air. It reminded me a lot of Poison Ivy but with incest. I wasn’t impressed. With incest, midnight golfing, underage drinking, bludgeoning, bossy step moms, weird dirty suitcases, extreme eyeball close-ups, history repeating itself, pedophilia, promises of graphic sex scenes with no delivery, and a cameo of the movie Carnival of Souls, the jury gives this flick:

(Unimpressed)

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