Rituals

Five doctors fly into the northern Ontario bush for a fishing trip, wake on the first morning to find their boots stolen, and spend the rest of the film being picked off by something in the trees that plainly planned all this. Hal Holbrook anchors it as the one man keeping his head while his smug colleagues come apart, and the wilderness does most of the work, with a stalker who reads the terrain far better than the men crossing it. It reached screens the year before Halloween and gets to the stalk-and-kill early, which is why people keep calling it a proto-slasher. For years it only circulated in a battered, murky transfer that made it look even nastier than it is. Bleak, cold, and better than its obscurity suggests.