Rites of Passage (1983) User Reviews

Work of art by a 15-year-old

[justusdallmer · 9/10 · 18 September 2006]

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.

An interesting and visually stunning early short by Richard Stanley

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 16 December 2009]

A disillusioned modern man is haunted by memories of a previous life as a primitive caveman (played by writer/director Richard Stanley) who existed in a past hostile world. The caveman walks across a harsh landscape, hunts animals for food, battles savage apes, scales a deep cliff, and gets mauled by a vicious fanged hairy humanoid beast. This early Super 8 short by Stanley shows both his characteristic bleak worldview and remarkable talent for striking visuals. Shots of the verdant, yet desolate jungle landscape, a fog-shrouded forest, the bright skyline, and especially an amazing image of the caveman climbing a steep and dangerous precipice silhouetted by the piercing sunlight are all uniformly breathtaking. Greg Copeland's rather rough and grainy, but still fairly polished cinematography boasts a few nice gliding tracking shots and a wealth of exquisitely composed visuals. The moody, rhythmic, syncopated score likewise does the trick. Worth a look for fans of Stanley's always stylish and impressive work.

Where are all the zombies?

[BA_Harrison · 14 September 2011]

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.