In the realm of low budget indie horror films the ability to manage a story, get some decent cinematography and directing in, and maybe even some good acting and special effects is a smoking gun for future success stories. Sometimes no one succeeds...but also, maybe, they don't totally fail, either? Yellow Brick Road feels like a film that didn't quite succeed, but also managed to pull together just enough decent cinematography, and not bad acting, then wrapped it in an enigmatic and largely inexplicable, threadbare storyline to motivate the plot, and made something watchable (at least once) for those who enjoy watching amateur efforts at serious film making. For people just looking for a solid film I might point to a few hundred other options, though.
Yellow Brick Road is about a man who pulls together a team of like-minded friends to investigate a mysterious event in a town where a bunch of people back in 1940 set off on a wilderness trail and disappeared, never to be seen alive again (dead, sure, just not alive). A modest effort is made at introducing our disparate array of investigators as the film slowly moves into the realm of insanely low budget horror, in which (to reference a common refrain of the Red Letter Media gang), most of the film is shot in the best free place you can find: the woods.
The story of the film is very basic: they go into the woods to follow this trail from decades before. Eventually they wander into a Liminal Horror event as they realize they are losing track of their sense of direction and maybe even time, as strange vintage music plays everywhere and nowhere at once, haunting and driving them on to find its source. Gradually, one by one they go mad, and eventually the last man standing, our protagonist, finds he has come full circle and the story ends because the runtime necessitates and ending.
Thankfully, this process is made bearable by some decent young actors making a good effort, some fun but cheap special effects (my son was sufficiently grossed out at one dismemberment scene he lost his appetite) and the strange and vague references to The Wizard of Oz keep you wanting to know why this old movie hangs over the film like some sort of allegory. The answers at the end, which are no answers at all, do nothing to clarify, leaving you either annoyed at the fact that the film seemed to barely do anything with its theme, or perhaps satisfied, if you are a bit masochistic, at its lack of desire to provide any sort of closure beyond the barest suggestion of some sort of loop.
The film makes clever use of New Hampshire's woodlands mixed with eerie forties music to provide a creepy liminal horror/backrooms vibe. This is, in fact, the main menace in the film, the endless woods and the ever present diegetic music causing people to slowly go insane.
The most exciting moment in this movie for me was watching the extras on the making of the movie and discovering that a younger Robert Eggers was the costume designer for this film. It has me wondering now if anyone else in this movie has went on to better things....scanning IMDB I am going to say "sort of...?" There do appear to be a few other horror movies under the writer/directors' belts, with slightly better ratings, so I may have to check them out. That Eggers was a costume designer who subsequently went on to a serious film career (Nosferatu, The Witch, The Lighthouse, Northman) proves that real talent must start somewhere!
The old notion that B movies can get a lot out of filming in the wilderness is thoroughly played out here. The scenery is in general put to good use, but the film thankfully ends right around the time you are kind of hoping it will; it just barely overstays its welcome.
The box art of the copy I got (with a Scarecrow on it) references a single scene in the movie that left me wondering for some time (right to the very end) just how the scarecrow got there; I won't spoil the details, but someone had to have done it....and we don't learn who that is until the very end; and even then, nothing is explained at all.
A lot of horror is easily explained if you simply assume that everything happening is the survivor's purgatory, behind which some cenobite-like monster is pulling the strings. But hey, a film's plot shouldn't rely on another media resource to explain its own absence of a plot, and honestly? I think the movie's ending is trying for some sort of surreal way to tie it to the beginning, though it does so in the least satisfying way I could imagine, if only because our nemesis (if that is what he is) is otherwise absent from the film except as capstones to the tale.
At the very end, I think even if nothing else were explained, I wouldn't have minded a more substantive explanation for why the Oz themes are even a thing, beyond the hint (I think?) that maybe Wizard of Oz was the movie people watched before disappearing.
Anyway, I would rank this a solid D+, chiefly because it had some nice scenery, not bad acting, some good but exceedingly low budget gore, clever use of liminal horror's obsession with muzak and interstitial spaces, and even if I was unsatisfied with the ending it did show promise. Worth a watch if its streaming free somewhere and you have a high tolerance for amateur low budget film-making.
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