Really Awful Movies

It kills with “unholy precision, with nothing left to chance.” What IT is, is very gradually revealed in Rituals, aka, The Creeper, an underseen and unappreciated Canadian survivalist tax-shelter classic.

It follows the exploits of five bickering doctors dropped by float-plane into the Lake Superior / deep Ontario wilderness for a fishing and male bonding getaway.

Unlike the dilettante weekend warriors of Deliverance, there’s no joie de vivre or camaraderie here: they drink like fish more than they actually fish and deride each other’s professional specialties around a campfire.

Hicksploitation as a genre doesn’t really exist as a cultural phenomenon in Canada. So whereas Deliverance has ruthless, toothless inbreds revealed as the antagonists very early on, Rituals has to chart another path.

Forget Errol Flynn, no one dies with their boots on here.

During a swimming/fishing excursion, the docs return to camp to find someone’s made off with their footwear, and the four who didn’t pack extra shoes are left in the lurch as one goes to seek help and the dam upriver. Why the dam? “Because operations that big don’t run themselves.”

Soon, the foursome left behind is attacked with a trap – a swarm of bees, which ends up killing one of them. They then see a deer carcass strung up by their campsite with a snake wrapped around it like the Rod of Asclepius, the universal symbol of the medical profession. This leaves the medics nothing to do but to sit in the woods, ponder their fate and quote Yeats’ apocalyptic The Second Coming until deciding to make their way upriver themselves. And the river itself provides a danger we won’t reveal here but will haunt our memories.

The legendary Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild/All the President’s Men) is Harry, the wizened backwoods Burt Reynolds, here a crafty Korean war vet. Lawrence Dane is the hyper-rational, heartless Mitzi.

A load of terrific films came out of the Canadian tax shelter era. Rituals, AKA The Creeper looks a bit faded, but is a great example of the raw talent operating during the time and is definitely worth a look. Someone on IMDb said it should be mentioned in the same breath as Deliverance. Boy does it deliver.

***1/2 (out of 5)

Nightmare City, AKA City of the Walking Dead (not that Walking Dead), uses a radioactive deus ex machina – a poorly-explained wellspring for turning victims into bloodthirsty “monsters.” (But NOT zombies, as director Umberto Lenzi took great pains to point out, as we discuss in our NIGHTMARE CITY podcast.)

A couple of journalists are on hand at the airport in the middle of nowhere. (For a movie with “city” in the title, there’s not much in the way of those “urban jungles,” decried by one of the characters.) A mysterious, unmarked Hercules cargo plane gets permission to land and flares are set off.

Soon, the jet is surrounded by cops and military and its occupants ordered out. But these aren’t your usual bedraggled, jet-lagged passengers: they’re monstrous sub-humans (not zombies) who go about killing everyone in their path and replenishing their stores with human plasma.

This development was so newsworthy, it interrupts a hilarious aerobics disco TV variety show with the EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM. The principal dancers bemoan losing out on their “closeups” in poorly-dubbed Lower East Side / Catskills accents, but they lose out on much much more later.

A prominent major who’s banging a gorgeous model gets a coitus interruptus call from Civil Defense, and he’s soon on the case. Sadly for all concerned, the disco dancers are massacred, albeit in spectacular fashion, with boob skewers and axes to the noggin.

In a Dr. Strangelove-like high-level security briefing, generals give us the lowdown that army personnel are to “aim for the brain” as the one undead who’s stayed dead was shot through the skull.

Meanwhile, the hospital is being overrun with zombie, er, monster victims. (“Our sixth emergency in two hours!” That actually doesn’t sound particularly busy.) In response, one of the docs offers this hilarious malapropism, “hold your socks on!” The hungry demons burst into the OR while a surgeon hurls a scalpel at them.

There’s an eye-gouging scene that stands among the best ever committed to celluloid and some unintentionally funny lines (“What are you doing with that gun?”). This partly offsets the slow pacing and blather about being in “the age of the robot,” and whether all this technological advancement was ultimately worth it. The ending is beyond lazy and not up to The Beyond – speaking of eye gouges.

***1/2 (out of 5)

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