Violent, twisted, and brutally horrifying, WICKED WORLD is a feature film like nothing else you have ever experienced.

A serial killer, a cop, a world gone mad — obscure Canadian slasher film Wicked World has crept from out of the darkness into the light of 2019 with a director’s cut nearly 30 years after its original 1991 release. Written and directed by Barry J. Gillis (Things), Wicked World is a very low budgeted, independent, experimental, and senselessly violent horror film that fits right in with trash cinema — something like if John Waters went on a bad drug trip while touring through Canada and decided to make a revenge thriller.

In Wicked World, the current state of society if comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah, at least in the mind of the serial killer, Harold. Living in the city of Toronto, Canada, Harold chooses his victims at random, killing seemingly innocent Torontonians until he is caught and thrown into a mental institution — but not before having slain the wife of a crooked cop, named Grant Ekland (Barry J. Gillis). Many years, Grant suffers through terrible memories and Harold has since been lobotomized, but when Grant learns of Harold’s impending release, he seeks revenge in order to free himself of his nightmarish existence in one final showdown with the murderer who killed the love of his life.

It looks like Wicked World was filmed guerilla-style on an old home video camera, the content is gory and sexual in an exploitation-film sort of way, and the story is as crazy as the killer inflicting the relentless and random violence. Each kill is like a vignette, all of them connected by the fact that the characters in them were killed swiftly and unexpectedly by a Canadian madman. To some the film may be incoherent, to others, it may be very artistic, and others may just find it so silly and ridiculous that it is charming. I am somewhere at the intersection of these three sentiments — Wicked World is poorly shot, the dubbing in lieu of dialogue is disconcerting, and the special effects of the early 90s do not age well to 2019. It looks like a bad movie, but I very much enjoyed the inner thoughts from the killer — it was interesting that he lamented people committing suicide and constantly asks why is the world so wicked, yet in the same breath, will brutally take someone’s life.

Eddie Platt as Harold was just about the only interesting character, perhaps that is because he is one of the few who last long enough in the movie to get to know. The majority of the cast is so much fodder for our mentally ill killer, they drop like flies, so there is no character exploration and I would compare their acting level to that of actors found in pornos. The inner thoughts of Harold I would liken to the Joker (2019) in that they are reflecting on the current state of the world and its most negative aspects, which leads to an anarchist and homicidal behavior. Besides this serial killer, the film also stars Patti Anne Crossman, Maria Delgado, Kelly Felhaber, Celia Felipe, Mary Grande.

After serendipitously ending up in the hands of the American Genre Film Archive’s executive director, AGFA has announced it will be re-releasing Wicked World with over 30 minutes of content added for a director’s cut. I never saw the original, but most of this director’s cut is just people being strangled by nunchucks or their throat slashed, so I imagine the additional footage is just adding to the body count. At the very least, the body count is so high by the end that Wicked World would make a great drinking game (take a shot whenever someone is killed… which might just make this film more enjoyable!). Due to be released November 12th, 2019, AGFA has dutifully made Wicked World available to the masses with a DVD/Blu-Ray combo filled with bonuses such as behind the scenes documentation, a music video, and more — preorder today!