Rituals...we finally found those shoes...

Rituals DVD by next Tuesday?  By golly!  The original release date from Code Red had it coming out on my birthday, and what a spectacular gift that would have made, but alas it wasn't meant to be.  Criminally underrated and overlooked, Rituals recounts the brutal tale of survival a group of doctors must undergo when they get stuck in the wilderness and hunted by forces unseen....

RITUALS

Rituals is a gritty survival tale about a group of educated physicians struggling in the untamed wilderness against a mysterious woodland foe who steals their shoes.  It’s a rugged, ugly, raw film about the length that people go through to survive and how the ritual of survival disintegrates moral integrity like a Martian laser beam.  It’s a movie reel I could imagine finding in a tackle box in some tool shed rubbing elbows with rusty fishing hooks and worm bait. The print looks like someone actually traveled through the “Green Hell” with the group of main characters.  It’s scraped up, beat up, and smeared with black fly guts; my kind of delectable visual feast.  Slasher flicks don’t need to be pretty to work and the ugly aesthetic of the movie compliments the gritty tale of survival and slashing.

Despite the consistent downbeat mood of the film some hot liquid cheese manages to slip into the cracks of the foundation. I can’t help but laugh at expressions like “gentle boob” or chuckle at the morbid pleasures of seeing Hal Holbrook toss a decapitated head off the side of a mountain like a stinky bag of fermented cow dung.  I loves it, and you should too...seek it scum!