A unconvincing and unsatisfying mix of slasher, folk horror and torture porn that for the most part lumbers along telling two barely related and desperately dull stories that eventually cross over to no discernible effect. Story one concerns the abduction of two young women, Rachel Adams (Anessa Ramsey) and Alyssa Miller (Hannah Bryan) when they leave a bar one night. Rachel has been drowning her sorrows after losing an important client for her boss Ryan Hayden (James Bartz) and throwing fellow employee Ben Geringer (A.J. Bowen) under the bus. They’ve now fallen into the clutches of the Stranger (Marco St John) who ties them up in his barn and seems to be trying to prevent something from emerging from a hole in the ground. Elsewhere, Geringer, his wife Amy (Katherine Randolph), his brother Tommy (Andrew Breland) and friend Paul Nolan (Sonny Marinelli) kidnap Hayden’s daughter, murder Hayden’s wife (Shanna Forrestall) and take nanny Jessica (Sarah Pachelli) hostage. Eventually the two storylines intersect when the creature from the pit is freed.

Amid all the screaming, sobbing and the usual cries of “why are you doing this to us?”, there’s talk of a series of disappearances of young woman dating back twenty-four years – every year women vanish on the first day of spring yet no-one in this small town thinks to get the womenfolk out of the area for a few days to prevent it from happening again. In fact after it’s been established that this annual slaughter takes place, barely anyone mentions it again, as though the town either suffers a massive collective bout of amnesia each year or is populated by morons who can’t quite work it out for themselves. Why have the authorities apparently never been alerted? Has no-one even noticed that these poor women have disappeared at all? And why didn’t photographer Carl Herse bother to bring any lights with him to cut through the relentless murk?

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Unfortunately this is just one of the many unanswered questions that will keep you occupied during Rites of Spring’s *many* longueurs. It flirts half-heartedly with the tropes of “folk horror” with its rubbish Pagan deity, which turns out to be Karmanor, a tall man with a bag on his head also known as Wormface, but as with everything else in the film, it fudges the issue to the point that it becomes almost incomprehensible. The Stranger (who he is is one of those questions you’ll end up pondering) seems to be sacrificing victims in some sort of ritual to help with the crops but it’s never really clear. And the fact that none of the locals cotton on to what’s been happening for the past quarter of a century hints that they may be in on the secret though as we barely see anyone outside the handful of main protagonists we barely get a chance to find out.

The two disparate storylines – linked only by the local businessman Hayden, don’t manage to mix as well as the gritty crime/folk horror strands in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011). Writer/director Padraig Reynolds never quite seems sure what sort of film he’s trying to make here and he never does anything of interest with any of the different films struggling to find a way out of this mess. The kidnap plot is rather dull and the slasher stuff strictly by the numbers, complete with idiot characters that scream and howl and do all those stupid things that eventually turned us off slasher movies in the mid-1980s. It’s difficult to give a damn about any one of these people, which would have been less of an issue if Karmanor/Wormface had been a more charismatic monster to root for. But this manifestation of Pagan belief is just a cut-price Jason-from-Friday-the-13th-Part-II clone, a hulking brute with a cloth-wrapped face rather than some terrifying ancient deity challenging the beliefs of a modern world in danger of forgetting him.

Reynolds saw Rites of Spring as the start of a new horror franchise, envisioning at least three films about Karmanor. Sadly he used up what few ideas he had on this feeble maiden effort and seems to have abandoned the idea. In fact he’s only had one project off the ground in the seven years since Rites of Spring. Still in post-production at the time of writing, one can only hope that Open 24 Hours is a bit more original and makes a bit more sense.