Review: Yellowbrickroad (2011)

Click your heels together three times and wish for another movie."

I must be missing something here, because everybody who has written a review about this movie so far seems to think this movie was pretty damned good.

I remember seeing the trailer and reading various things about the plot of Yellowbrickroad last year, and being extremely geeked to get a chance, any chance, to see it. The idea of a group of filmmakers willing to go down the "Yellow Brick Road" to find out what happened to an entire town that disappeared (ala the colony at Roanoke), sounded fantastic. The movie, as it turns out, was not as fantastic as its premise.

This is an actual picture of one of us watching this movie.

Many reviewers have called this movie "a slow burn" which I don't agree with, mainly because there is no burn. It's slow, yes. No burn though. It felt uneven and directionless, like they had no idea where to go with their own awesome premise and set-up. From the advance buzz I read about YBR, I was expecting a tense, atmospheric creeper, and to be totally honest, aside from one or two scenes, there wasn't much creepiness in this movie at all.

There was a lot of this, though.

The acting was decent, though some of the characters were a bit annoying at times, but if felt as if I was watching a bunch of actors pretending to go insane rather than characters losing their grips on reality. Some of it was even goofy. The part in which a girl just walks of a cliff made me giggle; they must have sped up the film during her fall, because it was so fast that I couldn't help but laugh and say "what?!?" Then again the fact that the characters just kinda stood around and watch a guy bash a chicks leg off with a rock -and did nothing- was nearly laughable as well. Like how long does it take to bash through someone's leg with a rock? A while, right? And no one ran over to stop him until he had removed the leg?

There's also a rather jarring sequence about midway through the movie that grated on my nerves. Music loudly flared on and off while they cast stumbled around like the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise during a Klingon attack, and I'm talking 70's William Shatner-style here... it would have been funny, if it hadn't been so horribly annoying. It felt like the scene went on and on too, so much so that it elicited a cheer from us when it finally ended.

Yeah, that was pretty much our reaction.

I'll give the movie credit for a few things, such as the sound mix/editing. The filmmakers made some bold moves involving sound in this one, to the point where it almost became its own character in a way. Aside from the majorly annoying "on/off scene," the sound throughout the movie was used to great effect. There's also a scene where a guy is hiding in a little cave which was pretty good too.

There are some good things at work here, mainly sound, location and premise, but they're just never really used to any good effect, and that's the real problem. The director and writer never really make us feel dread or any sort of impending doom for the characters as they make their way further and further down the road, towards whatever waits at its end. I really just don't get it.

She's so good on Longmire that we're just going to forget she was ever in this movie.

The movie was slow, uneventful, and tediously frustrating. Walk, talk, sleep, act odd, repeat. And there was nothing even close to a payoff at the end. Oh yeah, we didn't mention the ending, did we? I won't spoil anything by going into any sort of detail, but I will say that Horror filmmakers need to stop being afraid to conceive and deliver actual endings for their films. Enough with the twist and/or complete ambiguity bullshit, let's have a little bit of resolution, or at the very least, some sort of explanation at the end of these 90 minute journeys that we're asked to go on.

Even if there's no "payoff" to be had at their end, how about at least make the rest of the movie gripping and absorbing? I kept waiting to tense up, and feel some sort of permeating doom creep into my bones, but that moment never came. 1940's music and melodramatic over-acing are bad enough, but when they're the centerpiece of a movie and are counted on to raise its level of tension/atmosphere with absolutely nothing else to help them, it's a tough sell. At least for us it is.

At least this yellow brick road led somewhere...

Yellowbrickroad is not an awful movie, it just really drops the ball in the most important areas, which makes it awful enough to us.

Like I said earlier, it seems as if a lot of Horror sites out there think that this movie is some sort of uber-effective triumph of Independent Horror Cinema. Aside from the ones that usually seem to be shills for certain movies/filmmakers, maybe they saw a completely different cut than we did? We really wanted to love this movie, but if we sat here and said it was lovable, we'd be lying.

*And before some jerk-off leaves us a clever comment like "You just don't appreciate the slow burn" or "You need everything spoon-fed to you!," please know that I loved the TV show Rubicon. If there's anything that spoon feeds less, or that burns slower than that, I have yet to see it. That show got cancelled because "nothing really ever happened" on it, and I still thought it was brilliant. So no, we in no way prefer style over substance, and in fact we will take substance every time. This movie just fell short. 

D+

Anessa Ramsey and Cassidy Freeman are in this.