Some movies, I can very easily ramble on and on about. Others don’t capture my attention/imagination quite as strongly, and I find it difficult to write about them. The following three films are of the latter variety.
~ Arcadian ~
It kind of seems like this one was marketed as whatever the movie equivalent of a “killer app” is for Shudder. I got a lot of emails promoting it! Although, it is a Shudder original, so maybe they just pushed it harder because it’s theirs. Anyway, it’s somewhat similar to A Quiet Place but with Nic Cage. Also, it’s not stupid due to major plot holes and braindead characters, but rather because stupid is just kind of the vibe it’s going for, which I can appreciate.
Plot is as such: About fifteen years after humanity falls to… something, Nic Cage lives on a farm with his two teenage sons. Every night, they maintain a stoic vigil to protect their home from attempted invasions. Obviously, the sons are polar opposites: one a hot-blooded tough guy, the other a quiet inventor. Their inability to reconcile their desires (girls vs learning) ends up ruining the balance that they’ve maintained for years and puts everyone’s life in danger. Because of course it does. Teenagers, am I right?
What I liked most about Arcadian is its monster design. The creatures are wildly original, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them and all the batshit insane things that they do in the movie. I honestly wish we could have gotten some more background on what they are/where they come from, but that likely have ruined the mystique. I’ll have to make do with watching the Roanoke Gaming analysis over and over. Creature designs and how said creatures are used are paramount to a good monster movie, and I honestly think that Arcadian knocked it out of the park in that regard.
What I dislike most about the movie is how much it focuses on the teens. Much like Netflix’s disastrous Resident Evil series, Arcadian spends way too much time on teen drama, and not enough time on Cage brutalizing monsters. I kind of feel like this was sold to me as another “Watch Nic Cage be a badass” flick and then pulled the ol’ bait-and-switch. The teen characters are… I just couldn’t bring myself to care about their petty squabbles, especially since said squabbles directly caused many, many people to die. Like, just let the hothead kid go already. He’s clearly more of a liability than an asset, and especially in the post-apocalypse, there’s no reason to keep hauling around dead weight.
Arcadian has other issues, too, like the entire scene where the hothead teen gets kidnapped by some farmhands and comes thiiiiiiis close to being tortured and/or executed. No part of that scene made any sense whatsoever, and it felt like it was shoehorned in. It could have been removed completely and nothing would have changed. Some other scenes are weirdly edited in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about them for more than a second, but that’s less of a problem. Arcadian is a silly movie, and clearly not concerned with trivial things like spatial relations and consistency.
Would I recommend it? Hell yeah!! Despite its obvious flaws, it was a very fun movie to watch, and it’ll definitely be one that I come back to from time to time. I’d give it a strong 7/10. It would likely be an 8 if they hadn’t put Cage in the backseat for half the run time.
~ The Ritual ~
Much like Arcadian, I had high hopes for The Ritual. However, this one was not on my radar because it features one of my favourite actors, but rather because I’ve been hearing nothing but praise for it for what seems like a few years now. Somehow, even through all that, I was able to remain completely blind to any actual information about the movie.
The plot follows four pals who are off on a hiking adventure in Sweden. They had been trying to plan a boys’ getaway with a fifth friend a year prior, but he was murdered by a couple of hoodlums, so the remaining fellows go on the trip that he had wanted. At one point, the whiny one of the group twists his ankle, so they plot a shortcut through some spooky woods in an effort to get him back to civilization quicker. As you may expect, things do not go well.
The first half of The Ritual follows all the usual tropes, and I quite liked it. It peaked for me when the boys find an abandoned cabin in the woods, which contains a massive, disturbing effigy of some description. Despite it obviously being a terrible idea, the four are behind schedule and decide to stay for the night. The following scene is rare these days – I was genuinely terrified by that stupid cabin and had to get up and turn the lights on to avoid imploding with fear. In retrospect, it’s obviously not that scary, but in the moment? Pure terror.
Then we get to the second half of the movie, and things just… get boring. There’s a monster in this one, too, and it is quite visually striking, but it’s way less interesting. The monster in The Ritual is apparently a god, and even has its own little cult that worship it and feed it regular (human) sacrifices. After two of our “heroes” are picked off and strung up in the trees by the monster, the cult kidnaps the other two and, predictably, confines and tortures them before offering them as a snackrifice.
I’m not sure why The Ritual didn’t really resonate with me. It’s probably because the main characters are all total dickbags and despite calling each other friends, seem to genuinely hate each other (but maybe that’s just normal for British guys?). Also, the whole cult angle was just not what I was expecting, and while that’s fine in general, I don’t think it stuck the landing. The cult worships the monster because it gives them eternal life, but their bodies still age, so they get to live forever as immobile, desiccated husks? What’s even the point of that? And the monster can’t leave the woods because reasons, so… it’s actually very well-contained and harmless as long as you stay the heck out of said woods.
I can’t in good faith recommend The Ritual, and that hurts me a little, because I wanted to like it. I really did. But as I stated before, I’ve heard nothing but praise for it online, so I must be the one who’s crazy. Crazy enough to give it a 4/10. I wouldn’t say there’s anything technically bad about it, but outside of that first cabin scene, I was just kind of bored and waiting for it to be over.
~ Antlers ~
Here I sit, trying helplessly to figure out why I feel the way I do about The Ritual, and then I remember that I still have to write something about Antlers. How about we cut to the chase on this one: Antlers was boring as all heck. Unlike The Ritual, I read very mixed opinions on Antlers before I watched it. But I held out hope, because the themes and the monster (surprise, it’s another monster movie!) seemed to be right on-brand for me.
This film opens with a little boy waiting in a truck for his father to finish up with some kind of job in a sketchy old building. Said job turns out to be cooking meth (I think?), but the secret meth lab also happens to be the hideout of… something. That something gets both father and son, and we’re skipped forward in time to meet our actual main characters: a teacher played by Kerri Russel (<3) and the meth-man’s older son, Lucas.
You know, it’s probably actually a good sign that I remembered at least one of the characters’ names from this movie. I can’t say the same thing about either Arcadian or The Ritual.
Antlers is all about Lucas dealing with the fallout of the attack on his father and younger brother. As it turns out, the something didn’t finish them off, it only infected them with something that made them turn a little loopy. Lucas now has them locked in the attic, where they subsist on a diet of small animals. The teacher starts to notice that Lucas isn’t behaving quite normally, and she starts looking into why he’s so withdrawn and why he’s got a sketchpad full of horrific doodles. Obviously, things don’t go to well once she starts prying. Lesson: keep your nose out of other peoples’ business unless you want to risk being shredded by a wendigo.
Oh, and that’s the monster, by the way. A wendigo. Ever since I first played Until Dawn, I’ve been fascinated by the legend of the wendigo. To the point where that’s the main reason I watched this movie in the first place – I’m always interested in new takes on the lore. If you’re unfamiliar, the short version is that it’s an evil spirit that possesses people who are exceptionally greedy, or who give in to cannibalism. And in all fairness, the creature in Antlers is very cool! It looks awesome and is the best part of the film by far.
So then what did I dislike about Antlers? Honestly, nothing specific. All the elements were there to craft something that I should have truly enjoyed, but… I found myself looking at my phone multiple times, and I just wasn’t really feeling it. Maybe it was just an off day? I can’t in good faith say that Antlers is an outright bad movie, though I don’t think it’s unique enough in any way to justify calling it a good movie, either. I guess I’d recommend it if you like horror but aren’t super familiar with the genre like I am. Otherwise, you probably won’t get much out of it. I’d say that I liked it more than The Ritual, but I think that’s mostly because I went into Antlers with zero expectations. 6/10, which would have been a 5 or maybe a 5.5, but the wendigo design is great, and in my opinion, that’s worth at least half a point.