Ninth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #19 The Ritual

For the record, Netflix has a crap selection of horror movies available for streaming.  Their DVD offerings are somewhat better but I have had a hell of a time coming up with decent movies in between DVD deliveries.  Which is how I ended up with The Ritual, available as a Netflix original.

After the death of one of their friends in a liquor store hold-up gone wrong, four British dudes embark on a hiking trip in northern Sweden.  This is something their dead friend wanted to do and they do it to honor him, holding a little ceremony at a mountaintop to remember him.  [Note: this is not the titular ritual, IMHO.]  Shortly thereafter, one of the dudes hurts his knee and then a storm moves in.  To try to limit the misery (the hurt dude is a wicked complainer), they decide to leave the established trail and take a "shortcut" through a forest.  [Note: don't do this if you are in a horror movie.]  With the weather deteriorating, they take refuge in an abandoned cabin which has a fucking freaky headless effigy with antlers for hands up in the attic.  They stay anyway and are all awoken in the middle of the night by bad dreams; in addition, one dude has claw marks on his chest and one is found naked in the attic, kneeling before that effigy. 

Things actually get worse: they start arguing and shouting amongst themselves, the complainer insists that they follow a path they find instead of keeping to the compass bearings and they are being stalked by a creature that is apparently fond of hanging disembowled elk in the trees.  Fun!  Things get even worse as people start getting picked off and/or kidnapped by Swedish hillbillies as sacrifices for their "old god," a Jotunn.

I won't go into any more details than that because The Ritual ... isn't terrible.  But it is much slighter than it should be.  Like The Descent, it has a bunch of friends out in the wilderness, dealing with supernatural forces the likes of which they could not conceive.  Unlike The Descent (a vastly superior movie in all ways), the four protagonists are unlikable and largely indistinguishable.  All they do is shout and swear at one another, make bad decisions and never actually talk about anything - and as a result, I really didn't care at all when the blood started flowing.

The monster is the best part: never seen completely clearly, it is a great design - like a giant gnu with an anthropomorphized spider crab where its head should be - and quite scary.  It had enough weight that I think it was mostly a practical effect too, which I love.