Rites of Passage

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.