RITES OF SPRING

2011 / Director. Padraig Reynolds.

Great poster art can be a powerful thing and RITES OF SPRING has some seriously cool artwork. Without knowing anything about it I was suckered by the cool title and a provoking image. Boy was I duped. Perhaps I would be unfair to call this movie a festering bowl of dog snot (thanks RJ) but I calls it how I sees it. The movie combines the home-invasion genre with a hostage/thriller angle crossing paths with a typical backwoods style horror film. It's a big fat mess of cliches and formulas. That's not to say that it hasn't got any great ideas because it's full of decent concepts, good gore and some genuinely creepy imagery... the problem is lousy direction and terrible cinematography... oh and bad acting, woeful lighting and an overblown score. At one point I'm certain an actor looked directly into the camera and almost every shot is handheld... and I'm talking wonky handheld. Even the static landscape shots are wonky. Were this a student film I might have been impressed but as a funded feature film it's pox. --- SPOILER ALERT --- the end scene is lifted straight out of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and the running time is just a tad over 60 minutes (the end credits roll at an ludicrously slow pace to stretch it out to 75 mins).

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