Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get into a film. You can acknowledge its merits, appreciate the technical quality of the film, and just get nothing from the overall story. It makes reviewing a film like The Ritual a challenge.
All in Event
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get into a film. You can acknowledge its merits, appreciate the technical quality of the film, and just get nothing from the overall story. It makes reviewing a film like The Ritual a challenge.
This will shock any long time reader of this site. I once had an obsession over a board game. Yes, shocking news from your friendly OCD critic here. It was called The Harbingers and was part of a VHS board game series called Atmosfear. I was obsessed with this game. My parents knew that I would just focus in on every detail of the story and character design to the point of losing sleep, so they held off on getting it for me until a year after its release. It became a Christmas gift that gave me many sleepless nights of crafting backstory and essentially fan fiction before even pressing play on the tape once.
It’s not very often that I find TV shows that really feel like I’m the target audience. My interests are wide and varied. I like crafting. I love horror. I’m a lifelong home haunter. I bake. I sew. I work in theater (educational theater mostly, but theater nonetheless) and love set design, lighting, props, and puppetry.
Content warning: A Dark Song features scenes of violence against women and sexual assault.
A Dark Song is a film about truth and perception. A woman, grieving the loss of her son, is willing to do anything to feel a sense of relief from the pain of her loss. She hires an occultist to take her through a dangerous ritual that will allow whoever participates to be granted one wish from their guardian angel. You just need to survive the ritual and not quit. Quitting is bad. Very bad.
American Poltergeist is a horror film inspired by the Lizzie Borden story. A group of five college students move into a too good to be true mansion so they can live off campus while attending Brown University. They are renting rooms from a woman who does not tell them anything about the history of the house. This palatial mansion is apparently the former home of Lizzie Borden, the alleged ax murderer who killed her parents and got away with it in the 1800s. In this story, the house and the family have been cursed ever since.