"What distinguishes Wicked, Wicked from all other recent psychopathic-killers-loose-in-rambling-old-hotels movies is its gimmick...Duo-Vision is in fact nothing more than split-screen unremittingly applied, as in Chelsea Girls and Dionysus in '69, but never before with such winning simplicity of intention...When you can see both the distant, stalking killer and his intended victim at the same time you have more activity but less anticipation-and consequently less suspense. And the lifting of suspense, which in most such movies functions as an annoying burden upon the audience, is a very real advantage. Wicked, Wicked thus emerges as an oddly pleasant movie about which there is not too much good to say. Everybody is likable-even the killer, who, like most amateur embalmers in movies for the last 10 years, owes a bit to Hitchcock's Norman Bates. And everybody is at least professionally competent."
- Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

"A silly, wretchedly derivative psycho movie in which a hotel handyman (Roberts), sexually humiliated as a child by his foster mother, goes around in a fright mask dismembering blondes."
- TimeOut

"Wicked, Wicked is a great time capsule film. Only in 1973 would a major studio shoot an all-split-screen film, with an unoriginal murder mystery storyline, Tiffany Bolling in two wigs and singing two songs, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes as a beach bum gigolo, and Diane McBain as an early victim, an all organ music score."
- Casey Scott, www.dvddrive-in.com/

"This not very exciting thriller is set in a California seaside resort...This strange feature employed "Duo-Vision," the split-screen technique that so nicely built up suspense in Brian De Palma's terror film, Sisters. Unfortunately, none of the skill shown in that film is evident here, so the technique is reduced to a gimmick...written, produced, and directed by the director of the 1960s TV comedy series "Green Acres."
- TV Guide

"...Richard L. Bare's film pokes fun at every horror, mystery, and suspense film cliché and contrivance in sight. Told entirely in split screen...writer-director Bare uses the gimmick with mostly amazing agility and slickness. But a gimmick is not substitute for style and, though admittedly it is effective for suspense, shock value, and macabre humor, it remains a gimmick when used so consistently...Some modernists believe this is real cinema, but history will prove them wrong. But it is fun."
- Dale Winogura, Cinefantastique

"Disastrous mystery-thriller"
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide