Sometimes a great promotional gimmick is reason enough to make a movie and this certainly proved to be a successful strategy for director William Castle who made box office hits out of low-budget horror thrillers such as Macabre (1958, admission included an insurance policy from Lloyds of London against death by fright), House on Haunted Hill (1959, a glow-in-the-dark skeleton swooped over the audience at a key point in the movie) and The Tingler (1959, selected seats were wired and vibrated when the title creature got loose in a movie theatre). Not all promoters have been as lucky as Castle though and Wicked, Wicked (1973), produced by William T. Orr and writer/director Richard L. Bare, features one of the best movie gimmicks of its era but was poorly distributed and has languished in obscurity for years.

Filmed in "Duo-vision," Wicked, Wicked opened with the announcement, "You are about to see a new concept in motion picture technique...in this process you will witness simultaneous action through the use of a double screen...an experience that will challenge your imagination!" The dual screen technique was actually nothing new; Andy Warhol had already explored that possibility in 1966 with Chelsea Girls which required the projection of two separate movies onto the same wide screen. Brian De Palma refined the concept further in Dionysus in '69 (1970), a filmed version of the Greek play The Bacchantes, shot entirely in the split screen technique, and he also toyed with the "Duo-Vision" idea in key scenes in his 1973 thriller, Sisters. Even Hollywood experimented with dual and multiple screen techniques in such films as Grand Prix (1966) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). But Wicked, Wicked exploits the split screen gimmick more effectively as a narrative device than most films that have utilized this visual approach. Often the movie is more fascinating for what it attempts and the visual possibilities it raises than the actual narrative which is a psychological thriller about a demented killer with a blonde fetish running amok in a sprawling resort hotel with secret passageways.

Released by MGM in 1973 during the waning days of the studio, Wicked, Wicked bore some similarities with its psycho-killer-in-a-creepy-hotel plot to Paul Bartel's Private Parts. The latter film, released in 1972, was such an embarrassment to the studio due to the kinky content that they released it under the alias Premier Productions. It failed at the box office and so did Wicked, Wicked, even though it bore the MGM logo and had great selling points. It also has a LOT of problems. For one thing, it dispenses with building any suspense about the masked psycho who savagely stabs and kills a female hotel guest in the first fifteen minutes of the film. Despite the introduction of several oddball characters, there is no attempt to hide the obvious fact that Jason (Randolph Roberts), the hotel handyman, is the murderer. The movie is also hampered by screenwriter Bare's inane dialogue that barely rises to the level of a daytime TV soap opera and the ensemble acting is so uniformly bad, even with such veteran performers as Arthur O'Connell and Scott Brady in the cast, it becomes immensely entertaining. In fact, Tiffany Bolling as Lisa James, the imperiled nightclub singer, is the film's prime guilty pleasure, whether she is screaming in terror, performing excruciatingly awful cabaret tunes by Philip Springer & Irwin Levine (they will get in your head and never leave), or arguing with her ex-husband Rick (David Bailey), a disgraced cop who is now working as the hotel's private eye.

All of the flaws only add to the oddball charm of Wicked, Wicked and the "Duo-Vision" process is consistently engaging, only reverting to the single frame widescreen format during scenes of sex and death. Like Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), the movie cleverly implicates the viewer as a voyeur in the proceedings and underlines the visual obsession with striking dual compositions: a sweaty bodybuilder working out as the hotel manager stares intently at him from behind venetian blinds; Jason retrieving a severed arm from a hallway as a group of hotel merrymakers wind their way toward him through the corridors; a flashback scene in which the ill-fated Lenore (Madeleine Sherwood) describes her husband's accidental death which is actually revealed to be an assault with a deadly weapon. At times, director Bare is so literal-minded in his deployment of "Duo-Vision" that he renders any intended irony as null and void, such as the scene where Rick and Lisa discuss their failed marriage. "After you left," Rick confesses, "I did a little drinking...maybe more than a little," and, in juxtaposition to the cozy couple, we see a flashback of the drunken Rick, crawling face down on the floor.

Wicked, Wicked was the last feature film directed by Richard L. Bare and one of the few in his filmography which also included the 1968 cult adventure I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew starring Gardner McKay; Bare was much more prolific in the world of television, having helmed countless episodes of Green Acres, Cheyenne, Maverick, Broken Arrow and other series. His other claim to fame is the comedy shorts series he created with actor George O'Hanlon for MGM featuring the character Joe McDoakes, which ran from 1942 to 1956 and featured such titles as "So You Want to Give Up Smoking," "So You Want to Learn to Dance" and "So You Want to Be a Gladiator."

While TCM's airing of Wicked, Wicked may not result in a revival of interest in "Duo-Vision" or any retrospectives of Bare's or Bolling's films, it stands as a unique pop culture artifact of its era. Viewers may be struck by the film's final revelation of Jason's corpse-strewn attic which mirrors the grotesque climax of Narciso Ibanez Serrador's La Residencia (1969, aka The House That Screamed) and, if you listen carefully to the press reporters clamoring for an interview with Lisa at the film's end, you'll hear one of them shout out, "Who do you think is the Zodiac Killer?", a reference to the mysterious serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco area between 1968 and 1970. By the way, the Grand View Hotel in Wicked, Wicked is actually the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego; it is now a very expensive luxury resort and was previously used by director Billy Wilder as a prime location in Some Like It Hot (1959).

Producer: Richard L. Bare, William T. Orr
Director: Richard L. Bare
Screenplay: Richard L. Bare
Cinematography: Frederick Gately
Film Editing: John F. Schreyer
Art Direction: Walter McKeegan
Music: Philip Springer
Cast: David Bailey (Rick Stewart), Tiffany Bolling (Lisa James), Randolph Roberts (Jason Gant), Scott Brady (Sgt. Ramsey), Edd Byrnes (Henry Peter Lassiter), Diane McBain (Dolores Hamilton).
C-95m.

by Jeff Stafford