Rites of Passage

What do you get when you add one stupid plot, a huge serving of terrible acting, a bit of sex, drugs, and violence, and a heaping dose of cultural insensitivity?

You get a terrible 2012 movie called 'The Rites of Passage'.

The story may seem like it's trying to be a scary movie, but there isn't really anything scary about it. You don't feel enough for the characters to really care about what happens to them.

You'd think a story about a bunch of horny kids and a couple of psychos out to kill them would make for a very entertaining slasher movie, but no. The execution was terrible. In fact, saying it was unimaginative and predictable is an understatement.

The acting in this movie range from decent to something awful, with the decent part coming from the veteran actors.

This movie makes women look bad and it glorifies sex and drug use at the expense of a certain Native American tribe. You can see it was a cheap attempt to lure people in, simple-minded people to be exact.

This really is painful to watch. The only reasons I could think of to watch this movie is:

1. To rip on it and 2. To learn how NOT to make a movie.

Aside from that: Turn around and walk away.

"Grandmother Malloy I've come to beg for your roots. I promise to do you no harm. I need to borrow your magic for tonight." After an anthropology student decides to take a few of his classmates to a family ranch in order to do a mock ritual for extra credit they get more then they expect. His brother seeing this as a chance to get revenge for his family decides to make the ritual a real thing. So going in I was thinking this was going to be decent. While I was not totally wrong it could have been way better. The beginning was actually pretty entertaining and a little funny. The longer it went on though the more it started to drag and I was just interested enough to want to find out what happened. What started off as an interesting idea devolved into the kids in an abandoned area start getting killed off one by one type movie. While this is not a terrible movie this is still just OK. Overall, a fun and entertaining beginning gives way to a formulaic ending that isn't as fun. I give it a C+.

THE FINAL RITES (aka RITES OF PASSAGE) is a very strange little movie. It involves a group of high school students who are being taught about esoteric Native American drugs by their slick teacher. One of the students has an elder brother who experiments with these narcotics, which turns him into a psychopath. Inevitably a group of the students go away for the weekend for a beach holiday and find themselves being menaced by all and sundry.

There's a definite sense here that the story was being made up as they went along. Certainly it seems to make little sense and by the end it's fallen apart entirely, so the "narrative" consists of characters killing each other off until only the final survivors are left. The first half of the film, which is the build up, is actually mildly enjoyable, so it's a pity that the it goes absolutely nowhere come the end.

Three famous faces are mixed up in this mess. Wes Bentley plays virtually the same likable loner/weirdo character as he did in American BEAUTY. Stephen Dorff shows up as a cool teacher who's down with the kids, and strips off to show his buff body when required. Then there's an almost unrecognisable Christian Slater, hilariously playing a demented psychopath who just wants to kill everybody. His interactions with a sock puppet bring to mind the PG Tips adverts in the UK starring Johnny Vegas and Monkey. It's all very silly and relatively bloodless, meaning there's not much here for the viewers.

First - it takes WAY too long for this movie to get going.

Second - I believe in respecting all cultures, but this movie was so ridiculous (talking sock puppet), that I don't know how any Native American could be offended by any representations in the film.

Now, college professors and students look pretty stupid.

There ARE some pretty amusing moments.

Most from Christian Slater.

Although I felt all the actors did a great job, the material?

I wouldn't waste my time.

The "4" is because I actually made it through.

Attempting to visit an authentic Indian burial ground for research, a group of students partying away at the site run afoul of a demented killer looking to punish them for a past indiscretion and forcing them to fight him off to get out alive.

This here turned out to be quite a misguided effort, mainly because so much of it really doesn't gel together the way it is. The premise of turning a haunted burial ground into a slasher is quite novel and generates much of the positives toward this, but the fact that the killer is absolutely pathetic, generates no fear or suspense from his physical appearance since he's essentially a homeless person for all intents and purposes and runs around with a shotgun, not a true slasher weapon which relegates all the kills to gunshot wounds or merciless pounding with a foreign object, greatly reducing the gore quotient here that could've saved this. The constant drug use allows for a few freaky hallucinations from time-to-time but the vast majority of the time nothing substantial happens during the trip, rendering it quite curious as to why it was featured as it was and why there was a huge furor from the characters to include it, so overall this has way too many problems. Even more ridiculous is the animated talking sock puppet giving the lead advice, a tactic that tries to make this a comedy but fails miserably as it comes off as incredibly lame more than anything, and it really only has a few isolated individual moments where it approaches watchability to make this enticing.

Rated R: Continuous pervasive drug use, Graphic Language, Graphic Violence and Brief Nudity.