YellowBrickRoad (2010)

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Most boring and time wasting movie I've seen in a long time. I really like the horror genre and can live with just a bit of getting scared and so but this..... not scary at all, just boring. The story is bad, there isn't even much of a story, the dialogs are even worse. Just don't waste your time and or money. Go watch something else like sesame street, you'll enjoy it more!

SPOILER ALERTThis movie starts out with a great premise. You have a town where everyone except one guy disappeared in 1940. Well decades later a group of historians or whatever they are get information on it and retrace the steps of the townsfolk for the purposes of getting material to write a book. We aren't even told really who these people are. What are their skills or credentials? You are going to be given scenes of pseudo psycho babble "evaluations" one character does on the others which are never actually explained. Why does he do this? Dunno and by the end of the movie you won't care. This is a movie about the descent into madness caused by some external force that from what I can tell is never, ever explained. I mean this is so disappointing and frankly, this is lazy film making and shoddy story telling.Yes some of these artsy oriented film makers think this is solid work. It's not. This is lazy story telling. Why? Because in good story telling you have to come up with something that explains the central mystery. You have to take the reader or viewer from A to B and have it make sense. There are lots of ways to do this. Yellowbrickroad does none of this.Instead we have characters descend into madness. For example the first initial kill scene is stupid. One male character attacks a female character after she takes the vintage hat he found and was wearing. I sat there wondering why that scene didn't end up on the cutting room floor. After that the characters have the full on breakdown of the group and it makes no sense whatsoever.Yes, there's this mysterious music they are hearing and for effect the director cranks the volume from time to time to apparently shock you. Trust me. This fails miserably. In fact, all I did was turn down the volume when the music was cranked up. Now don't get me wrong. Sometimes I'm OK with a good open ended ending. Sometimes mystery is satisfying. In Yellowbrickroad that's not the case. The ending looks tacked on. Here's the spoiler so quit reading. The main character is struggling at the end crawling on the ground and then voila he's back in the town in the movie theater. He sits down to watch the movie of their adventure or whatever it was. We get a flash of the dead all around him and then some pictures on the screen and he, oh my god, yes he screams. Here are somethings any film maker reviewing this needs to keep in mind so as to not repeat the mistakes of this movie.1. crisp clean clear images and film quality 2. proper microphone use 3. don't wash out the color when editing 4. don't use annoying sound effects to try to tell a story 5. explain your mystery with a logical or some kind of understandable conclusionI gave this movie a rating of 1 for awful because it is. This is a bad movie.

A fortnight ago I discussed the independent puzzler, Resolution (2012). It's plodding and pensive, but delivers on its clever high concept with a disturbing climax. Akin to Resolution, the glibly entitled Yellowbrickroad follows a like formula and offers a similar experience. It's enigmatic, and saves all of its open-ended answers for its lurid finale. While Yellowbrickroad has fewer puzzler paradoxes than Resolution, first time feature film writer-directors, Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton do a pretty good job considering their half mil micro-budget, incorporating intriguing and colorful elements of mystery, and a couple of relevantly mesmerizing characters.In Yellowbrickroad, several young academics set out to re-chart a rural New England zone inexplicably reopened and declassified after an unsolved mass exodus emptied a nearby town 70 years in the past. And, you guessed, it, everyone disappeared in them thar hills. Except for their intestines, that is.OK, not just their intestines. Other parts were found too, but not nearly enough to account for everyone. Some of the emigrants, intestines and all, just...well they just vanished, it we get the general idea.Or do we? Because except for several token nods to the 1939 classic, The Wizard Of Oz, Yellowbrickroad's enigma is so perplexing that we mostly forget to question several pretty far-fetched plot holes. Such as why people in the town where everyone disappeared a generation ago are so tight-lipped. If everyone left, presumably today's residents aren't the descendents, and so have no stake in the matter.But that's OK, because something so unspeakable pervades the locale that just maybe it has a hold on everyone who is afraid to talk about it. One thing's for sure: when a group of 20-somethings venture into the spooky, spooky hills in search of a macabre mystery, we can predict that...well, let's just say, "we knew there'd be death!" A lot of it.To its credit however, Yellowbrickroad avoids typical deep woods "Boo!" and splatter clichés, instead building on the wilderness atmosphere inherent in being disoriented in a labyrinthine forest. As the team's equipment fails, so do their minds, and the fact-seeking sleuths succumb to bedlam and violence. Time and space mean something different here, and all the while, period music from the era of the disappearance inexplicably wafts across the landscape. The trekkers can't determine it's source -or the way back. The path, nicknamed the "Yellow Brick Road" since its original followers departed from a local theater playing The Wizard Of Oz, held then, as today, some kind of symbolic "way out." Or not.For the woods have swallowed our crew of intrepid explorers, their navigational aids won't work, and there seems to be no way off the trail. Reminiscent of an old fable about suicide, in which those who killed themselves were presumed to be dissatisfied with reality, and wound up sentenced to increasingly topsy-turvy, contrary worlds each time they attempted escape, the Yellow Brick Road in Yellowbrickroad obviously leads to some much weirder reality with the grim caveat of "be careful what you wish for." Like the aforementioned Resolution, or the engrossing but talky, independent sci-fi thriller, Primer (2004), Yellowbrickroad is a niche film. It takes is dialogue-saturated time delivering us to the sensational payoff. All three vehicles would be more effective as half-hour shorts.Yellowbrickroad offers some gruesome, blackly comedic skullduggery along the way, however and there's one forceful, enigmatic hint for what is to come: an unsettling sound effect that everyone will instantly recognize, but absolutely not be able to place. Until the ending that is, which slaps you with a sickening epitome of recognition, and of course, this adds to the shock value, making the journey worth the time, even if one has to hasten the hiking pace via judicious use of the Fast Forward button.

The only thing disturbing about this movie is that someone actually agreed to make it. I understand that it's an independent film, written, directed, and starring first timers, but anyone who read this script had to have known it just wouldn't work! Don't get me wrong, the story they had was extremely solid, and they could have taken it in a million different directions, any other direction than the one they took. The story starts 70 years ago, when an entire town randomly decides to follow a path into the woods and are never heard from again. The FBI investigated, covered up whatever they found, and kept the whole area off limits, until a random group of people decide to investigate for themselves and write a book about their experiences. First of all, this group of people have no connection to the town, people, or even each other, so why do this? Second, for 70 years the FBI has kept the area off limits to everyone, so what makes this group so special? These idiots march into the woods and the only thing they find is music playing, music that gets progressively louder until it drives them insane. The music is from the Wizard of Oz, but the producers were too cheap to buy the rights to the music from the Wizard of Oz, so it's very similar melodies with different words that nearly drove me to insanity. These idiots romp through the woods makes the Blair Witch Project look like an Oscar worthy film by comparison. It's a lot of talking, and crying, and yelling, that leads to an ending that is by far one of the dumbest things I have ever seen. The ending is the strangest part of all, in that it builds up and plays like it's some huge twist, which maybe it would have been had it made any sense at all. The acting was terrible, the direction was all over the place, and the film destroys the story worst than Paula Deen destroyed her career. This is one film you should absolutely avoid!