Yellowbrickroad

Normally, I listen to music while writing reviews but I think I'm gonna pass this time. "Yellowbrickroad" is pure definition of a B-Movie. I don't know what their budget was (Me? Research? Surely you jest!) but it couldn't have been more than 50 dollars. And that's not even in insult to the film. 90% of the movie was in the forest, hardly any CGI was used, and it's only soundtrack was public domain music.

Sometime in the 1940's, a bunch of people in the town of Prior got up and started walking North for reasons nobody knows and in present day (2010) a husband and wife team named Teddy and Melissa want to know what was up. So they set forth to begin their own expedition, but since it's the 21st century, they bring along a shitload of people and devices to help track the way, like GPS and...maps?

We're introduced to a brother and sister team of "map experts", a guy who's a wildlife expert, a doctor of medicine and psychology, and some other chick because she's hot I guess. Well, she is hot but I really don't know why she came along besides to annoy the characters later.

They arrive at Prior and instead of finding the start of the trail the old townspeople took, they find a movie theater. Inside the theater is Liv, a local girl who thinks what Teddy is doing is exciting and begs to come with, saying her Grandfather knew some of the people who disappeared. She shows them the real start of the trail and so begins their quest.

It starts out normal enough then one night, they start hearing music in the forest. Sadly, it isn't this:



Or this:



Or even this:



Instead it's, well, 1940's music. And everybody is weirded out and fascinated by this. But around day 2 of hearing it non-stop, it starts driving people a bit crazy. And then things start breaking down when the brother kills his sister over something stupid and it's not just a simple kill, he goes NUTS, even ripping her leg off. Soon it's revealed that the brother was slowly going crazy and wrote down a bunch of gibberish in his logs that were suppose to be used to get back home.

Then things get creepier when the music suddenly gets louder, then softer, then it sounds like someone suddenly removed the needle, and then the sound gets crazy for a good solid five minutes where there's nothing but a piercing screeching noise. It comes to an end when they find the sister's body all mangled and posted like a scarecrow. The brother manages to escape.

Realizing things are getting fucked, some people want to go a different direction than North. This includes the wildlife guy and Liv, who reveals she lied about her Grandfather and just wanted to come along for fun. So they split up, then Teddy and Melissa fuck and then THEY split up and soon the pointless girls eats all the candy and kills herself, leaving Melissa and the doctor alone.

Phew. I know I just dropped a lot on you, but I'm doing it at a much quicker pace than the movie. Eventually, wildlife guy and Liv eat some wild berries, get high, and soon wildlife guy wants Liv to kill him, which she does. The brother kills Melissa, while the doctor kills himself, and Liv kills the brother and-

Fuck, we need a flowchart for this movie.

Make sense now?

Ok, so now it's just Teddy and he's crawling along until...he gets to the movie theater. A creepy guy comes out, tells him he's made it to the end and to go take a seat, his "picture" is about to begin. Then we get some ghosts sitting in the theater while Melissa's dead body flashes on the screen and Teddy freaks out and that's pretty much it.

I know I go on and on about slow paced movies where NOTHING happens for a stretch, but here it actually kinda worked. I will admit my biggest fear is getting lost in the woods and not only were they lost but fucking creepy old timey music started playing and the fact it wasn't explained why the town went down the path to begin with, if maybe this is exactly what happened to begin with, and just the fact people were calmly going crazy. This movie really isn't for everybody and I probably won't watch it again but I think considering the small amount of money they had, they came up with a good spooky story and made an interesting looking film.



-Jason