Rituals is Canada’s answer to Deliverance. Therefore, this is the weekend they didn’t play ice hockey.
Or go curling. Up to you.
Maple-flavored stereotypes aside, Peter Carter’s film follows five surgeons in matching terrycloth fishing hats. They helicopter in to a forest for a weekend of roughing it — and certainly get just that. When their boots disappear overnight, followed by a beehive ambush and more playing-for-keeps activity, it becomes clear someone — or something — is trying to kill them … and does.
The great Hal Holbrook (Creepshow) serves as the Voice of Reason among the tortured crew, right from his opening-scene inquiry of “Is it ethical?” Despite him asking that during his unlikable colleagues’ breakfast discussion of penile-enhancement surgery — complete with X-rays! — those three words ring throughout as Rituals’ theme, especially when the doctors’ common, credulity-stretching thread comes to light. Let’s just say their antagonist has unrivaled organizational skills (and could forge a successful career as an event planner, if only he didn’t look like Chris Elliott in Scary Movie 2).
Rituals has its freeze-dried, alcohol-doused, head-on-a-stick moments. What it doesn’t have is the power to keep one engrossed for the whole of the trip. Repetition becomes the doctors’ sixth unofficial member of the group — or fifth or fourth and so on, if you want to adjust the number in real time. One physician’s tearful, on-the-fly eulogizing of another is odd, to say the least: “He was a boob … such a gentle boob.” Rituals isn’t always gentle, especially in its cabin-set climax, but lacks the sphincter-clutching suspense of other, better wilderness horrors. —Rod Lott