Crew
Director – Peter Carter, Screenplay – Ian Sutherland, Producer – Lawrence Dane, Photography – Rene Verzier, Music – Hagood Hardy, Special Effects – Doug Wardle, Makeup Effects – Carl Fullerton. Production Company – TVA Films.
Cast
Hal Holbrook (Harry), Lawrence Dane (Mitzi), Robin Gammell (Martin), Ken James (Abel), Gary Reineke (D.J.), Murray Westgate (Pilot), Jake Creley (Jesse), Michael Zenon (Matthew)
Plot
A group of five doctor friends head off on a weekend hiking in the wilderness. They wake up in the morning to find that someone has stolen their boots. D.J. has a spare pair of shoes and goes back to get help. Using plastic bags as foot covering, the others decide to head on to the dam in the hope that they can get help there. However, a shadowy figure is tracking them up and begins a deadly assault, laying traps and playing games, killing members of the group and turning the journey into a harrowing trek for survival.
Rituals is a film I had heard about for years. In fact, my first mention of it was a name drop in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981) where he says he heard about it after being recommended it by his agent, although gives no other details. The film has not been widely seen until it turned up on dvd in 2020. It falls into the great era of Canucksploitation that runs all the way from David Cronenberg to Cannibal Girls (1972), Black Christmas (1974), Death Weekend (1976), Terror Train (1980) and My Bloody Valentine (1981), among others. (For a more detailed listing see Canadian Cinema).
The title led me to the assumption that what I would be watching is a film of backwoods occult. The sole still I had ever seen from the film was one with Lawrence Dane strung up surrounded by burning torches – I was thinking it would be maybe something akin to Race with the Devil (1975). This is perhaps not an inapt deduction to make given the title. That said, this is not a film about occult rituals – there is a line in the middle of the film where a delirious Robin Gammell says something about this all being about people enacting rituals of some type but that is the sole reference to any kinds of rituals.
Instead, what Rituals turns out to be is a film giving off strong vibes of Deliverance (1972). There is the same essential plot of a group of men who take a weekend to go on a hike into the backwoods and run afoul of little-seen figures who live there who begin hunting and torturing them. This theme became popular in 1970s cinema and we see variants in other films such as The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). I have named the genre Backwoods Brutality.
Director Peter Carter gets a good deal of effect out just the ordinariness of the five doctors going on vacation, talking shop, throwing around banal banter as they sit around a campfire. It’s the dullest, least interesting stuff imaginable, which makes the film’s slow slide into horror all the more effective – at first the puzzling anomaly where they wake to find their boots missing. The harassment becomes progressively more fiendish – from hornet nests catapulted at them to bear traps laid where they have to cross the river and later the severed head of one of the group left on a stick. Until right at the very end, we only ever see the person behind this once as a distant shadowy figure.
The writing of the characters throughout is terse and bared. As opposed to most of the other works in the Backwoods Brutality cycle, Rituals plays out more as a harsh survival drama. The attacks are not competing to become more sadistic and savage so much as they are ones that wear the party down psychologically. That is the real horror of the film.
Rituals was the second film from British born director Peter Carter (1933-82). Carter went on to make several other wilderness films with Klondike Fever (1979) and The Courage of Kavik the Wolf Dog (1980). His one other genre work was the monster movie The Intruder Within (1981) for US tv.
Trailer here
Full film available here