Year released: 1977
THE CHARGE: Having a title so vague that I'm forced to watch the movie to figure out what the hell it means.
THE EVIDENCE: We all have rituals that we go through. It could be in the form of a daily routine or activities centered around a particular religion. It could be an OCD-like need to makes sure all the doors are locked whenever you leave the house. The movie reviewed today examines such rituals and... wait! No it doesn't! In fact, after watching this movie, I still don't know what the hell the title has to do with anything I saw.
Rituals opens with five doctors bickering in a diner as they prepare for a camping trip in the Canadian wilderness. Their camp site is a remote location only accessible via a seaplane that has to land in a lake miles from the site. The only way the camp could be more remote, or more Canadian, is if they had to travel there on mooseback.
At the camp site, the men bicker some more and indulge in copious amounts of weed and alcohol until one of the men throws a blow-up doll at another, at which point they all start dancing in a circle around the campfire. Just to remind you, these men are doctors. Why a doctor would think to bring a blow-up doll to a camping trip is left entirely to the viewer's imagination. I would offer some guesses but I try to keep this web site PG-rated.
The horror begins when many of the campers' boots go missing. This is the trigger for everything that happens in the movie from this point on: missing boots. Fortunately, one of the doctors thought to bring a spare pair and after chastising the others for not doing the same, starts hiking to a hydroelectric dam several miles away to get help for the rest of the crew and their tender tootsies.
Frankly, they look more like Monty Python without the sophistication.
Night falls and, with Dr. Spareboots still gone, the remaining campers are awakened by noises outside their tents. They emerge to find a deer's head impaled on a spike. Suspecting foul play, they wrap their feet in tarp and start hiking in the direction of their comrade. Hal Holbrook, who you probably know best as "that guy from that thing", becomes the de-facto leader due to the years his character spent fighting in Korea. That 1/6 of the movie's budget was reportedly used to pay his salary probably enters into that decision as well.
The remainder of the movie becomes a sort of Canadian Deliverance, as the woefully under-prepared hikers fight the elements while figuring out that someone's stalking them. Some of them think it's Dr. Spareboots while others suspect it might be a former patient that was one of their "mistakes". That fact that they can't narrow down which patient it was, or for that matter who's patient it was, tells you all you need to know about their level of competence, so there's no sympathy when some of the doctors end up taking dirt naps as the movie goes on.
Everything leads to an unusually dark ending. I don't mean dark in tone. I mean dark as in "absence of light". The last ten minutes of the movie were apparently lit by candlelight and it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on. A couple of characters yell out helpful clues like "I've got a gun!" and "My artery's been severed!" But last I heard, movies were intended to be a visual medium, so I was as disappointed with this ending as Chris Christie realizing he just ate the last Cheeto in the bag.
I've seen horrors you can't believe... like this movie. Twice!
Rituals was later renamed "The Creeper" when the film entered public domain, and was probably changed after distributors realized that nothing ritualistic at all happens in the film. But nobody really does any creeping either, so it was a lateral change at best.
Yet for all of its flaws, Rituals does have some bright spots. There's some amazing outdoor cinematography in a few scenes, a surprisingly progressive and welcome treatment of a gay character, and I recognized that guy in that thing as being a legitimate actor. But these little moments aren't enough to save the film from a story that could have been told in half of its 100-minute running time. They just lift the film from being an outright suckfest to a resounding 'meh'.
THE VERDICT: Rituals is GUILTY of being a meandering exercise in futility filled with unlikable characters and so utterly devoid of plot that the filmmakers couldn't even come up with a decent title to summarize it.
