Wicked Little Things, another of the eight films from the After Dark Horrorfest, is about a family of three females who move to an old house in the middle of the woods. Little do they know, the house is located near the location of a mine disaster many decades before where several children were killed. Those children now come out at night to feast upon anything that's living and to enact revenge for what was done to them.

Lori Heuring and Scout Taylor-Compton star as probably the best looking mother-daughter duo in quite some time. They both deliver pretty good performances (for a horror movies) in what is one of the better Horrorfest movies of 2006. The zombie children are quite creepy at times, even though up close their makeup isn't anything to scream about (their faces are just really white). Director J.S. Cardone makes the film work with some great camerawork, most notably some scenes where he shows the children swarming through the woods from a distance.

Wicked Little Things does take a ridiculously long time to get going, as the movie spends nearly half its running time, if not longer, alluding to what is to come. The movie drags quite a bit in the beginning, though it's never really boring... just slow. Of course, the younger daughter gains an invisible friend and keeps getting lured to a dark mine - not only does this offer Cardone a why to create fake tension and hold off on the real stuff, but it also isn't very realistic: at her age, even the younger girl would know not to go wandering off through the woods repeatedly to play in an abandoned mine.

Still, once the deaths start to occur, the movie picks up its pace tremendously. There is a fair amount of quality gore, and the blood flies everywhere (almost to the ridiculous point). Of course, it's never explained why the spirits of miner children became zombies rather than something else, but maybe it's better that way.

Wicked Little Things isn't a spectacularly memorable film, but once it gets going, it is relatively entertaining. It would certainly rank in the top two or three of the Horrorfest films I have seen thus far (with two of the eight remaining).

Review by Erik Samdahl.