Rites of Passage

Great cinematography and styling. He stole the good parts from CAT PEOPLE (Bowie's music) and also used Kubrick (Shining, 2001). Well, that is what we all did in our first films... but this one is much more mature! The director also played the main part, so praise his DP even more! Weird message (which me, as a German, could not understand. Something like Beckett's LAST TAPE? But it lead to Kubrick's end of 2001.) And I wonder if he really climbed this rock?!? It looks terrific! Carefully thought, written, shot and cut, I hardly know films from film schools that are so overwhelming, both on an emotional and serious level. It is available on the "99-EURO-Films of European Directors", at least on the German DVD. Really a hidden Super 8 treasure, complete with original Super 8 - dropouts at some cuts.

Richard Stanley's pretentiousness sure started early: this 8mm feature, made when Stanley was still a teenager, is full of the ponderous philosophising and overly-artistic visuals so evident in his later full-length features. Whereas most lads in the 80s lucky enough to find themselves armed with a cine camera would have filmed their pals goofing around in badly applied zombie make-up, or attempted to catch their sister's friends in their underwear, Stanley opted to make a stupefyingly dull drama about a man recalling a past life as a primitive who is killed by a wild animal.

Some of the camera-work is fairly impressive given Stanley's relatively tender years, as is his willingness to scale a scary looking cliff-face in the name of art, but My God this is boring.