miscellanium | Entries tagged with rituals

long time no post, but who cares. i'm alive and kicking and that's what matters. yesterday i saw that letterboxd posted a recommendation list of lesser-known summer horror movies and it included rituals! i was so proud and excited (even though i did nothing to make that happen lol) that i just had to watch it again. didn't get to do my yearly re-watch in april because i was in the middle of a big move and job change, all for the better so far, and i'm going camping this weekend so what better choice for a last-night-in-civilization movie than one about a camping trip gone horribly wrong??

it's not as texture-rich a movie as some others i've rewatched, sure, but i still feel as though there's something new for me to chew on every time. it's like a piece of gum that never loses its flavor, with all the pros and cons that implies (microplastics, etc).

this time i came away really wanting to watch picnic at hanging rock (i know, way overdue!) because the sag in energy once jesse is introduced was practically palpable and it reminded me of how the screenwriter hadn't wanted to take that direction originally, but also because that movie sounds like it's more about the relationships and dynamics between a group of younger women than any horror just like how the focus of rituals feels more locked in on the relationships and dynamics between these middle-aged men than the gritty details of their suffering.

( musings on trauma and isolation as themes )

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: work lol

a while back i got my hands on a 2009 issue of rue morgue mazagine where rituals was featured on the cover - the theme of the issue was vhs movies, and an american distributor was also doing a publicity push for its then-upcoming dvd transfer of the film. i finally got around to scanning it, with thanks to

pendulumscale, and it really is a treat of a feature. interviews with dane and many other people involved - ian sutherland, the writer; robin gammell, who plays marty; hal holbrook, harry; ken james, abel; gary reineke, dj - with thoughtful framing and questions by john bowen. the director died suddenly in the 80s so instead of his comments we get people reminiscing about what it was like to work with him.

the scans are a bit hard to read because of the graphic design choice to make it look like it was printed on aged paper - i promise it's not hard to read in person - but i still wanted to make them more accessible to other fans and researchers so i've uploaded them here. if you're into older horror films the "video nasties" bit is also a fun read, as is the rest of the issue, but you'll have to find your own copy to read the non-rituals stuff, sorry!

(the folder with the pdf also includes a couple pages of another interview with dane and sutherland from a different rue morgue publication, this one printed in 2015 and accessible here in its entirety. there's also a neat little look into the production from the art director. it's interesting comparing some of the answers to the same questions several years apart...)

in response to being asked why he thinks rituals works so well as a horror movie, dane said: "That film has a life of its own, and even though it was stifled for a while, it seemed to resurrect itself in the hearts and minds of a lot of people. Rituals has a natural, visceral honesty about it, and I think that's important - that makes it easy for an audience to suspend disbelief and get involved." a natural visceral honesty.... that's exactly what it is i like so much about the movie.

( discussion of the 2009 interview below the cut )

Current Music: leslie miller - he quit me

and i'm bored during an online work meeting so here you go.

i don't remember how i came across this review for rituals but this person thinks that harry and mitzi knew each other since childhood. that doesn't seem right to me - hal holbrook was more than 10 years older than dane, and in the film harry seems to be the only one with any war experience and i think based on the age of the others they were too young for the korean war (obviously) or in school when the vietnam war was happening. canada didn't send troops to vietnam so the draft thing doesn't apply, but still.

the childhood misconception seems to be based on the scene(s) where harry and mitzi talk about their fathers, but it's not far-fetched to me at all that a group of middle-aged friends who went to college together would be aware of each other's families. i already gave their pre-film relationships a fair amount of thought for the fic so let me just lay some of that out here since i said i'd talk about the research background of my fic eventually anyway.

( charlie day pepe silvia moment )

i want to write another fic for these guys eventually, so having a timeline is helpful for me even if it's not a granular one. thinking about crack crossovers helps me flesh things out a little more, and also it's just fun! all these doctors with dubious ethics.... let's put them through hell, lol. but herbert west clearly has no interest in learning from any of his mistakes, lmao, while mitzi's instinct seems to be more along the lines of cutting his losses and running. relentless pursuit versus self-defensive flight.... it's a dynamic i revisit a lot in fiction and for good reason.

anyway, ian sutherland really did a great job sketching out the characters and their relationships so i think if a person misunderstands something about the character dynamics they weren't paying enough attention, or jumped to a conclusion and didn't let later interactions change their understanding. and i'm not just saying that because i've watched it several times, i promise XD it's been a few months now since the last time i saw it, see, i can be normal about it! and besides i have to work on some other fics this weekend (ao3 exchange/zine deadlines) so a rituals rewatch will just have to wait.

*eta 12/1/22: gammell would have been around 40 or 41 when the movie was actually being filmed, since he's a few months older than dane (sept 1936 vs april 1937), but i feel like it's still reasonable to use the actors' ages for the other characters since we don't have anything else to go on. and also i don't think it makes a huge impact on my fic whether marty is older or younger than mitzi - they're very close in age and that's the main thing, imo.

Current Mood: working

so...in my last post i mentioned i was working on "an extremely niche fic for an obscure film many people have never heard of".... well, i finished it! and i've been experiencing the very particular flavor of embarrassment that comes when something speaks to you in a way that makes you feel exposed, like when you can't decide if you wish you could be a character or if you want to bang them. but it's been my philosophy the past couple years to fight that feeling and just have fun and be proud of what i'm making even if it's not perfect (embrace cringe, be free, etc) so i'm sharing this fic around.

it's on ao3 but i may do a kind of post-mortem of it on my fanworks comm in the near future. i remember really enjoying reading about some of the research that'd go into longer fics back in my supernatural days so it might be fun to do something similar, though i think my focus will be more on why the fuck did i write this LOL. world's first fanfiction for the film and it's porn. it's not what i would call a pure pwp, though, since i couldn't resist throwing in some character study/references to the film.

but anyway, if this is gonna be my niche, i gotta embrace it the same way i've been embracing my thirst for lawrence dane haha. will i write more about these characters? knowing me, and knowing i've been fixated on the film for five months now, yeah, probably. it's just a matter of time, same way it was with this fic, though to be fair this one is the result of a dare. and i've had a couple people on discord tell me they enjoyed the fic without knowing anything about the film other than what they read on wikipedia, which is as encouraging as it is flattering. (i did include a link to a little album of screenshots at the top of the fic so people could know what kind of faces to visualize if they wanted, haha.)

click on the image below or click here if you want to give it a shot! comments more than welcome on dreamwidth and/or ao3, of course.

Current Mood: embarrassed
Current Music: pulp - this is hardcore

the two-part review i posted of rituals isn't a true review in that i don't really go in-depth about the substance of the movie. but my spouse pointed out that i don't usually want to watch the same movie over and over, so that got me thinking.... it's not just horny reasons (though that's certainly an element, lol) and it's not an arthouse film like, say, the man who fell to earth, where there's many new details to pick out on every rewatch. of course i've noticed some new details, but after watching it around 10 times since march i can say that it's not nearly as richly textured as some of the other movies i've put on repeatedly.

i'm sure i've said this before but i have a special fondness for flawed stories, especially as a fanfic author, since the flaws mean there's more for me to analyze from both a narrative and a craft perspective. but that isn't really it either. i can think about a flawed story without rewatching it so much. after all, i've given decades of thought to yugioh: duel monsters (the original series) and haven't actually rewatched/re-read it very often.

like everyone who grew up with yugioh and still carries the original series in their heart, i was shocked to learn about takahashi's sudden death. the core messages of the original series resonated a lot with me growing up, and as cheesy as it might sound one of my first significant friendships was a direct result of a shared interest in yugioh. we grew apart a long time ago but i've seen comics from her online that acknowledge the connection we had, and it's touching to know that it made an impact on her too in some way. i wouldn't be who i am today without that friendship. this is part of why i love the arc-v spinoff so much too, since my favorite character in it wouldn't be who he is by the end if it weren't for the main character accepting him as a friend. takahashi's death still doesn't feel real - leonard nimoy's death hit me harder even though (or in part because) i'd been bracing myself for it - but the impact his story had on me has only felt more and more real in the days since.

so what does yugioh have to do with a relatively obscure canadian movie from the 1970s?
( lots of thots )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: pulp - help the aged

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

Current Music: the rural alberta advantage - drain the blood

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 5/5 (and the movie itself is a 5/5 as well)

i stumbled across this movie entirely by chance - it was on shudder and happened to be playing when we started up the tv, right at the tail end of a pretty brutal scene. at first i didn't want to watch it because of that, lol, but my spouse convinced me to since it was visibly from the 1970s and i generally have an easier time with older horror films (they're the horror buff, not me). maybe they regret that now that i've watched it five times since the beginning of march, haha.

this is the performance of his career. a real tour de force. which isn't to say it was all downhill from here, of course, but he inhabits his character so completely that i never once thought to analyze his acting the first time i watched this. mitzi is a fully-realized character and dane brings ian sutherland's already organic-feeling dialogue to life. it's a good script, though the mechanics of the story itself could use a little polishing, and the little details that dane and the other actors bring to their roles make it easy to believe that these characters have known each other for a long time. we don't need to be hit over the head with it; just tagging along for the hike is enough. according to dane the majority of the film was shot in sequence, so the exhaustion they embody as the narrative progresses is real enough and only enhances their performances.

the ensemble cast is phenomenal but it wouldn't work nearly as well without holbrook and dane tying it together, and the juxtaposition of their suffering with these sublime landscape shots makes for a very compelling film.

the plot: let's get one thing out of the way - if you look this movie up you're bound to find people comparing it to deliverance. (apparently dane himself acknowledged that comparisons would be inevitable but knew that they were doing something different.) maybe this is a controversial opinion but rituals is a far better film - there's no homophobic rape scenes and no "villainous redneck" stereotypes. there's a fleeting instance of homophobia, sure, but it's literally one line snapped during a moment of frustration. (side note: that's the scene that cemented the idea of mitzi/dane as my oc maurice, since maurice is a self-hating closeted old-school homosexual and would have said the exact same thing. while we don't learn that kind of information about mitzi and we don't need to, thinking about him like that is still interesting/amusing to me.)

this thoughtful review gets into the plot very nicely so i won't rehash the details here. do give that link a read if you're interested in the film - my focus is on dane/mitzi rather than a "proper" review.

rituals is arguably more of a suspense/thriller film than a horror film, at least in the sense that horror is commonly understood today, but the rawness of the situation is visceral either way and the sparing use of gore is quite effective. the emphasis is on thoughtful character studies, not shock value, and that helps it hold up better than certain other films. it's not a perfect movie but it's a damn good one nonetheless (and perhaps even because of its flaws, since there's more openings for someone to sink their analytical teeth into).

unfortunately, dane's audio commentary is inaccessible to me so if i remark on anything that's already covered by the audio commentary then you can blame people's reluctance to provide closed captions for "bonus" material (if the film itself warrants captions then it stands to reason the other material included with the home release should as well, assholes). anyway, buckle in! rituals can be watched on the streaming service shudder, if you have a subscription, or for free on archive.org as well as youtube, so if you want to check it out before reading the rest of my post go for it. just make sure you watch the version that's closer to an hour forty, because if it's shorter then that's the version where a distributor cut out a bunch of character development fsr.

(the person in the comments on archive.org who's complaining about the bickering is dumb because that's the best part of the movie imo. it's so funny sometimes in a way that doesn't detract from the high stakes, since it feels realistic. like of course these guys who are scared and upset and already have strained relationships aren't going to be having a great time!)

highlight of the first half of the movie: grr bark bark etc he is so sexy when he looks condescending

screenshots and further commentary under the cut. several images have been altered to try and compensate for the poor film preservation. warning for surgical gore and other violent imagery

( long post is long )

and that concludes the first half of the film! saving the juicy slur scene for next time lol. after i write up part two i'll link it here. i just have a lot to say, ok, but pls feel free to go ahead and share any thoughts/questions you might have!

part two is here