 |
| Oooooo the woods is spooky. |
Hey, how about that? We finally got to some suggested material. I do love delving into the stuff I wouldn't otherwise, as I don't know what to expect. So it was when I loaded The Ritual up on Netflix. What did I get? Well, it's not the greatest movie ever, but it does what it sets out to do for better or worse. What is it trying to do? I dunno. Blair Witch meets The Thing is the vibe I get from it. Blair Witch because it's an hour or so of people being lost in the woods and losing their shit while spooky things happen all around them. The Thing because it's an all-male movie, and thus you get a horror movie about manly men, proper lads, dealing with spooks and ghosts. Or ancient bastard-spawns of Loki. Yeah, we'll get to that. Patrick Troughton's grandson is one of the lads! That's neat, I suppose. Well, let's see what we can dive into here. This movie's all about getting you when you least expect it, and the opening does that in spades. Just some guys going to the liquor store for some vodka, and oops there's a robbery going on and whoopsie one of the lads is dead. So now, in his memory, they're doing the thing they said they would do and hiking in Sweden. Some bad decisions later, we're all stuck in the woods with weird runes carved in the trees, animals hung up and gutted, spooky cabins with idols, spooky noises... Yeah, the whole lot. It's got an atmosphere to it and a bunch of weird shit, I'll give it that! The first hour of the movie is proper unsettling, with people getting sporadically picked off when you least expect it and nightmares plaguing the group... particularly our main guy, Luke, who froze in the liquor store while his pal Rob was killed. Predictably this leads to bitterness which comes out at the worst time, a lot of angry men, blah blah blah miss me with that shit. what's more interesting to me is Luke continuing to have surreal nightmares where the store and the woods blend together. Somewhere in here is a story about grief and guilt, but it's a little overshadowed by the spooky nature.
And then creepy cultists who turn the goddamn movie into torture porn. They sacrifice the one remaining guy that isn't Luke, and really needle it. They beat the shit out of him and torture him, then he sees his wife as he's tied up for sacrifice but PSYCH it's the monster. This thing must feed on fear and misery or something. What the hell is it? A Jotun, we're told. Some big spooky deer monster thing, we see in the end. It's implied it gave the creepy cultists eternal life? And there's a room full of spooky zombies upstairs in their cabin? What the hell is going on here? It's weird to complain when I love my ambiguity, but the movie's tiptoed just enough into the realm of explaining shit that I want it to follow up on it. It never does, though. Hell, why can't the deer thing leave the woods? Luke gets out and roars at it in a hilarious scene, but it doesn't chase him to gore him or anything. It feels almost wrong to be nitpicky like this, but the rest of the movie's tension is at its best when you don't know jack shit about what's going on. Throwing a bone in regards to explanation only calls attention to the rest of the plate, you know? I'll level with you. I'm fighting off a fever so I don't have anything else to really say about this one. I'd like to wrap it up. The Ritual is a very good hour long movie that happens to be 90 minutes long. The cultist stuff? Miss me with it. The spooky woods stuff? Okay, yeah. You got me. It's interesting, if nothing else. Maybe fire it up to see for yourself.
No comments:
Post a Comment