The End of The Wicked (1999)

The End of The Wicked (1999)
Directed by: Teco Benson
Written by: Teco Benson (screenplay), Helen Ukpabio (story)
Review by: "Machine Gun" Kristin 

I discovered "End Of The Wicked" through a user made list of movies on the website, letterboxd.com. The list is titled: Atrocities, Odditites, Trash, Trippy, Religious, Tinfoil Hat, WTF, The Worst in Film & Video and boy, is it ever. haha. After sifting through over a thousand films in the list, I found some hand painted posters produced in Ghana. I recently researched these strange film posters, which are displayed and preserved in a nice space in Chicago called the Deadly Prey Gallery. There, you can look at the many different types of movie posters, all pretty much the same style, painted in oils onto hand sewn flour bags. The poster interpretations of American films (mostly action and horror) are just as strange as you may have anticipated if you're familiar with other bizarre foreign posters from countries such as Thailand or Poland. The Ghana posters are in wide, gruesome brush strokes and make some movies look way more interesting than they actually are haha. I couldn't help but be reminded of the "The Mutilator" drawing from the art classroom scene in "Ghost World".

"Oh. I thought maybe this was supposed to be your father."

The thin plotline of "End Of The Wicked" consists of a group of Nigerian shape-shifting Beelzebub worshippers with what looks like hamburger meat plastered onto their faces. Their Lord is a white face make up covered man with a hairy bloody chin and Fat Albert's voice. He commands them to retrieve enough blood to fill a lake in 24 hours, although this goal is never achieved. The dialogue is either difficult to understand through bad audio and thick accents, which ends up being really unintentionally funny. In one scene, where a group of children are being initiated into the Satanic cult, a girl is told to "blow up all electronics in your home, drink bleach, glasses and then cause fever and failure to all of the children in your home" 

 

Beelzebub's Glamour Shot

The sets look to be decorated from those terrible large shops that say "antiques", where everything is brand new, dark pink, fake period piece style chairs, and particle board entertainment systems. Bleecchhh. Or better yet, they hired the set decorator from one of those strange religious shows that sometimes pop up on broadcast TV, with the giant desks and potted ferns in the background. I'd imagine this movie is a cross between "Black Devil Doll From Hell" (which I still haven't seen yet) and "Mystics In Bali" for the absurd special effects and bizarre, super awkward perverse scenes. In "Bali", the floating head (with organs intact), eats a baby right out of the womb, whereas in "Wicked", we're assaulted with the visual of main character Chris' Satan-worshipping mother (aka Lady Destroyer) raping his wife with a giant magic penis. Fun! Even better, we're somehow treated to not one, but two scenes involving bloody crotches! Yay! I feel like I should be running down the "drive-in totals" like Joe Bob Briggs there are so many wacky things in this gawd-awful movie. In one scene (brought to life in a GIF I made below), the evil children summon a plate of inedible looking pasta on the back of some poor guy while he's trying to sleep. After they devour it with their bare hands, the man wakes up in major back pain. So gross. Later, this same man is subjected to his eyes literally popping out of his head in a dream and he wakes up blind. I'm not even 100% sure what he did that was horrible to deserve this, but he ends his life by stabbing himself to death. He definitely made somebody in this movie mad. 

"I Wanna RAWK!"

Meanwhile, our main man Chris is (unbeknownst to him) still constantly being tortured by his witch mother throughout this movie. Until he's finally transformed into a goat and his throat is slaughtered. They appear to have actually sawed a poor goat's throat to achieve this scene and it is gruesome and horrible to watch. Speaking of real life horrors, this movie was concocted by Helen Ukpabio. She appears in this film as a pastor who I guess is supposed to save everyone from evil, but that doesn't seem to happen. This film was produced by Ukpabio's company called Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries and it's basically Christian propaganda. She's a wealthy evangelist that apparently through her teachings has influenced many to abandon and sometimes actually murder their children believing that they are in fact witches in disguise. There is a documentary on the subject called Dispatches Saving Africa's Witch Children on YouTube. There's a barrage of very negative press about her career and her bizarre teachings. She was actually banned from entering Britain in 2014 and she has sued the British Humanist Association (BHA) for defamation for basically twisting her words around. BHA's reply: 

“The fact that she is threatening to launch a legal claim for half a billion pounds over an alleged distinction between being accused of exorcising "Satan" or "Vampires" tells you all you need to know about Ms Ukpabio.”

Completely crazy! 

Watch "End Of The Wicked" (in two parts, first part linked here) HERE!

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