The opening title of the paper Rites of Spring tells us that five teenage girls went missing on the first day of spring in 1984, and that a string of other girls were missing again on Kalends the following year. spring days, and this removal continued annually for the next twenty-four years. We are never told what state this happened to be, although the movie, with its shots of crops, dilapidated barns, and rusty water towers, is clearly somewhere in the Midwest, perhaps Iowa or Wisconsin. We know the name of the town, ironically Hope Springs, because of the car crossing. But they never know; He reports that no bodies were ever recovered. What an omen. This could perhaps play into the cliché of horror movies as a dramatization of the incident. We will never know for sure, since the words “inspired by true events” were not used in the advertisements.
The futility of applying logic to this movie is not lost on me, but I am forced to wonder about the multitude of Fountains of Hope. Given that it had been twenty-four years since the same day, you’d think someone somewhere would have noticed a copy in its incipient form, and therefore been led to extract it from there. At least you think all parents are ashamed to let their daughters into their custody. But not; not only is the hope of the community still thriving, but it also seems as if no one is aware of what has happened over the past few years. The opening scene, in which two twenty-something women leave a bar after midnight and are immediately abducted by a hooded man in a chloroform-soaked cloth, makes it clear. So is the scene in which the two men enter the old house and discover a hidden room with dozens of pictures. and a newspaper clipping pinned to the wall.
Here the film splits into two parts. In one, two kidnapped women (Anessa Ramsey and Anna Bryan) wake up to find themselves hanging by their hands in a dusty old barn. Their captor, a man known only as Peregrine (Marco St.) enters the room. and asks one of them if she is clean. He then collects samples of their blood, and throws them into a pit, at which point some soul awakens from sleep. Afterwards, the Stranger cuts off all the clothes of one of the girls, covers the head with a goat mask; and gives a sponge bath. How tiresome is his literal use of the term “world.” During these moments, the two women scream, shout, hyperventilate, ask each other what will happen to them, and promise not to leave the other behind. We also see a Pilgrim praying in a decorated living room with toy horses and using a goat skull to pay tribute for a wasted crop .
In another plotline, a boy named Ben (A.J. Bowen) is drawn into a scheme to extort money from a wealthy businessman named Ryan Hayden (James Bartz). Paul (Sonny Marinelli) is cold-hearted and merciless, while Ben clearly doesn’t have the temperament for this sort of thing. However, Hayden succeeds in killing his wife and daughter Kelly (Skylar Page Burke), despite the unexpected arrival of Kelly’s childhood friend, who saw Paul’s face. They take Kelly to the conveniently abandoned factory and begin making their demands for an unsigned $2 million, ten and twenty. Ben’s brother Tommy (Andrew Breland) is sent to collect the money. Little does anyone know that Hayden is not the type of person you want to screw up.
Based on the first part of the film, how connected these two stories are. When everything is flat, we are more mad than satisfied. The point is that, although the stories share certain characteristics, which shame prevents me from revealing, writer/director Padraig Reynolds either didn’t realize or didn’t care to make two completely different movies. Their engagement in the final act is actually one step below the plot; it literally seems as if the plot of a crime thriller and a slasher/creature feature were split up in the editing room just hoping for a coherent storyline somehow to emerge Ed Wood turned in the incompetence of the craftsmen in the camp of the dear. An appearance or two of Glen or Glenda might actually do Reynolds some good.
The Internet Movie Database creates the main antagonist, although the end credits refer to him as Worm Face, and indeed close-up shots reveal a select head with worms crawling on it. We do not know what hell is; He had the proportions of a regular man, although he was tall, although his face was nothing but human, and miraculously, I could say this, despite the fact that his head was wrapped in some kind of cloth. We know that his weapon of choice is an iron sickle attached to a long staff, and there are many scenes near the end of him chasing people, not only through abandoned factories, but also through crops, which is only fitting. The last scene of Rites of Spring is immensely inappropriate, not only because of the sarcastic attitude with which Reynolds regards loose ends, but also because of the runner’s belief in overkill. This is such a poor man’s work. How did it earn a theatrical release?
(www.atatheaternearyou.net)
