the Rites of Spring

Director Padraig Reynolds first full length film Rites of Spring for the most part works well with it's meager budget thanks to camera work head and shoulders above what normally gets pumped out in the low-budget straight to video fare. Reynolds would have found it beneficial to turn the screenplay over to some one better skilled to handle it as the dialogue is hard on the ears. Budding scream queen Anessa Ramsey from the Signal and Yellow Brick road has one of the better performances here though it seems the director just let her default to ad lib standard victim dialogue and her character shows strength not really believable for a 5'1" 90 lb woman to posses.

Supporting actors preform in varied shades of bad, the gangster of sorts sub plots could have lent it's self to more opportunity for torture... or actually any I mean if you are trying to humiliate a guy and you have his wife tied up next to him. The monster motives were little iffy...ok a lot. So we have a red neck out in the middle of no where, who must be a pagan of some flavor holding a poor man's wicker man like ceremony to appease gods or what not, and if you know me you know i pay extra attention to the occult details when they pop up in horror, the mythos here was bland and unexplained which made every thing else that followed less believable.

The monster, while i am glad to see an ancient something that is not your run of the mill monster, was a slasher who carried a farming implement and had less of a personality than the thing from Jeepers Creepers which is what this movie most closely resembled to me. Some of the standard conventions were broken as the wander off and get picked off one by one stereo type wasn't prominent. The gore could have been laid on thicker. I mean if you are making a horror movie in this day and age , you gotta know the bar has been raised when you have shows like True Blood on tv.

This elevated it self on a production scale to be a greater quality than some of the hideously low budget efforts I come across online, so it's watchable and not bottom of the barrel though , Anessa aside the acting is on the weak side and the writing lacks any attention to detail. if you like low budget horror and are one of those people who has a hard time finding anything new, then it was more watchable than Midnight son, but not very compelling and never scary. The boobs quota low though there is one scene where a girl gets her clothes cut off as she hangs in a barn with a goat mask on that i thought was the films best moment. Otherwise I would say the movie was a let down.