rituals (1977) - part 2 of 2

this is a great, great movie if you like seeing middle-aged men beat up and pushed to a breaking point

In the mosquito-infested clearing north of Toronto where the final scenes of a movie thriller called Rituals are being shot, Lawrence Dane hangs, turning slowly in the windless night. He is dangling from a crossbar, eerily lit by klieg lights. His blood-streaked face is twisted in agony as he prepares for his Big Death Scene. The agony is not entirely feigned: the special body harness he wears cuts deeply into his flesh. “How does it feel, lad?” inquires actor Hal Holbrook. “Well,” Dane replies wearily, “it ain’t Peter Pan.”

-- "The face is familiar but you can't place the name? It's Dane, Larry Dane" by Ron Base for Macleans magazine, 1976

since this is part two i won't go over the rating and the plot again. (here's part one if you missed it, do please read that first if you haven't already.) obviously there will be more spoilers here, but one, if you think spoilers completely ruin a story then was it a good story in the first place? and two, this movie is over 40 years old lmao

the escalation of events in the second half is paced very nicely - the only point at which the pacing suffers is in the last few scenes, where we could have used a little more time to expand on the antagonist so there's not room to ask "but why now/why these guys specifically?" like, we can deduce a lot from what they give us, but i would have liked knowing what happened between the antagonist's trauma and the present day because i was left wondering why he apparently(?) hadn't tried anything before. was it just the first time he'd encountered doctors after being recovered enough to do anything about it? perhaps, but it's been decades.... maybe his isolation working to protect other people? his brother? these are all pretty different potential explanations. i feel like the narrative steps just a little too close to the line between letting the viewer figure things out versus withholding too much and confusing people.

that said, i still highly recommend this film because in my opinion that's not a severe enough shortcoming that it substantially impacts one's ability to enjoy the overall thing. like, you can still come away with a fundamental understanding of what happened, etc. and sometimes when media is flawed i find it more compelling since yeah, it does leave me asking questions even if they aren't the ones that were intended. and then of course there's the terrific performances from everyone involved.

highlight of the second half of the movie: it's very brief and mostly unseen but he pukes at one point and it was an unexpected treat uwu

screenshots and further commentary under the cut. several images have been altered to try and compensate for the poor film preservation, but i'm not a professional image editor lol. warning for gore and other violent imagery, and discussion of a homophobic slur

( i just love this movie so much )

dane was quoted in a 1981 profile of the actor gordon pinsent as saying that “hollywood has a kind of aura about it, a kind of place where you cannot rid yourself of the feeling that one day you might wake up and be 65 and waiting for the phone to ring.” that sentiment is part of why he moved back to canada, he explained, and I'd like to think that despite the rather tortured distribution history of rituals it was still a project he could remember as a high point of his canadian career.

there's more i could say but this post is long enough as it is. as always, feel free to leave a comment!

other reviews i drew on, in addition to the ones linked in the first half:
http://craneshot.blogspot.com/2010/12/if-you-go-down-to-woods-today.html
https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74643
https://www.mondo-digital.com/rituals.html
http://sonofcelluloid.blogspot.com/2011/11/rituals-1977.html
https://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=7036&sid=3f1f13f8e3000210f61bf1549ac40c83