Anyone who is anyone knows that if there is a legend that is set in the woods you never go looking for it to find out of it holds any logical weight in this reality. We’ve seen this movie a thousand times already, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of a watch as directors Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton put together a classic horror yarn that mixes documentary footage with live action footage.
From the minute we begin to hear rag time tunes coasting over the midnight air without a source, we begin to see the minds of our cast unraveling inch by inch with every sound emanating from the forest that signals they’re not only no way closer to finding the wizard, but the wizard may just be their worst nightmares. Teddy Barnes is a historical researcher obsessed with the town of Friar, a small town in the 1940’s who went in to the woods and never returned. With this healthy obsession and some know how he teams together a group of his own experts. As the expedition nears, the team find themselves as a crossroads constantly, trying to figure out why they’re so inundated with complications during the trip that seem to mire their progress as they venture deeper in to the woods.
What’s so remarkable about “YellowBrickRoad” is that both directors are capable of turning the wooden landscape in to something of a foreign land, one filled with surprises and always enshrouded with the forties music playing overhead. It taunts them and induces a violent hysteria that culminates in to some of the most violent and demented scenes depicted in an indie film. Parts “Cube,” and “The Blair Witch Project,” the director’s own efforts have not gone unnoticed as “YellowBrickRoad” is a horror film to look out for, a disturbing and unsettling bit of word to the wise that sometimes the unsolvable should remain unsolved. Or else.
Until the very end, it was possible that the whole thing might have been caused by psychotropic spores of some undiscovered species of toadstool that drive inhalers mad. That hypotheses has to be thrown out the window in favor of two possibilities: a conspiracy of psychotic sadists who live in hidden places throughout the woods, preying on passersby for sport, keeping their game going for generations, or we are dealing with a gateway to Hell scenario. It most likely the latter, and it makes me wonder why a Native American perspective was not added to the beginning. In this type of story it is tradition to have had Natives warn the early settlers of the town of Friar to stay far away from the cursed land, the Evil of Unending Tears, or some such. Without it headscraching distracts a lot from the heart renching tragidy.
I loved it. This is a disturbing and unsettling film in which our travelers enter into a mysterious woods but really a labyrinth that seems to close off all exits. Overriding the entire film is the most
disturbing soundtrack I’ve experienced in any movie – an endless cacophony of sounds, sometimes ragtime segments and other times, piercing screeches. Nothing pleasant here – rather, the volume increases and decreases, starts and stops, all without pattern, almost as if a drugged madman who lived next door was playing a random collection of sounds, dropping the arm onto haphazard locations of this and that record. The never-ending sounds come from
everywhere, eventually driving our hikers, as well as anyone who watches this film, into madness. They’ve walked into a kind of hell, the kind of woods people should leave alone.