THE RANGER (2018)

Studio:       Glass Eye Pix
Director:    Jenn Wexler
Writer:       Jenn Wexler, Giaco Furino
Producer:  Andrew van den Houten, Larry Fessenden, Ashleigh Snead, Heather Buckley, Jenn Wexler
Stars:     Chloe Levine, Granit Lahu, Jeremy Pope, Bubba Weiler, Amanda Grace Benitez, Jeremy Holm

Review Score:

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Summary:

A teenage girl hiding a dark family secret partners with her punk friends to combat a deranged park ranger from her past.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

As a little girl, Chelsea’s uncle Pete Benson teaches Chelsea how to shoot near his remote cabin in the mountains. Overeager to fire at the targets Pete sets up, Chelsea accidentally shoots her uncle, who falls off a cliff to his death.

A strange park ranger finds Chelsea in shock. The ranger tells Chelsea a story about a timber wolf while vowing to keep her secret. As authorities come to Pete’s cabin to question them, the ranger disturbingly asks Chelsea to never forget him.

While at a punk club as a teenager, Chelsea learns that her boyfriend Garth, their friends Amber and Abe, and Abe’s boyfriend Jerk are planning to deal a drug that looks like pink cocaine. Police suddenly raid the club. Garth has Chelsea flee with the drugs, but she ends up cornered in an alley by a cop.

Garth stabs the cop to save Chelsea. Chelsea recovers the officer’s weapon and considers shooting him, but doesn’t pull the trigger. Chelsea, Garth, Abe, Jerk, and Amber decide to hide out in Chelsea’s uncle’s unused woodland cabin until the manhunt for them dies down.

In the parking lot outside a convenience store with a board of missing person posters, Chelsea and her friends encounter the park ranger from Chelsea’s youth when he admonishes Garth for littering. Garth and the others disrespect the ranger, who claims the mountain where they are going belongs to him. Although she tries avoiding eye contact, the ranger recognizes Chelsea. The ranger warns of poachers during hunting season before leaving as the punks continue taunting him.

Chelsea, Garth, Amber, Abe, and Jerk make it to the cabin. Chelsea tells her friends that her uncle was mauled by a wolf. Frustrated with her disrespectful friends after Garth breaks her no smoking indoors rule, Chelsea goes for a walk alone.

Garth and Amber flirt with each other outside while someone spies on them from a distance. Garth and Amber find a strange grouping of rocks arranged in a triangle. Meanwhile, Jerk and Abe find a Benson family photo album with all pictures of Chelsea mysteriously removed.

Chelsea reflects on her uncle’s death while alone in the woods. The sound of a gunshot shakes Chelsea from her memories.

The ranger confronts Chelsea to ask if she remembers him. During their awkward conversation, the ranger points out his cabin next to a fire tower. The ranger tells Chelsea he would be interested in speaking with her further.

Chelsea returns to her cabin to find her four friends spray painting trees and starting a bonfire with furniture. Chelsea’s anger with her inconsiderate friends grows when she discovers the handgun she took from the cop is missing.

Chelsea suggests to Garth that they should keep moving to avoid authorities. Garth insists that the friends should stay put.

An unseen sniper suddenly shoots the group’s boom box from a distance. The sniper then wounds Amber with another shot.

Chelsea, Garth, Abe, and Jerk rush Amber to their van only to find it missing. The ranger’s radio picks up Chelsea’s plea for help over a walkie-talkie. Abe and Jerk stay with Amber while Chelsea and Garth hike to the ranger’s cabin to find a phone.

Amber begins foaming at the mouth after Jerk injects her with too much of the pink drug. Jerk leaves Abe with Amber while he goes down the road on foot to find help back at the rest stop.

Chelsea and Garth argue about authority figures as well as their respective behavior. Garth stumbles over a mauled torso presumed to be a dead poacher.

Abe flags down the ranger for help. The ranger executes Amber with his rifle, prompting Abe to flee. Abe catches his foot in an animal trap as he rushes toward the van’s new location. The ranger confronts Abe at gunpoint. The ranger threatens to shoot Abe if he doesn’t get himself free from the trap, forcing Abe to tear off his own injured foot at the ankle. After the ranger leaves, Abe tries escaping in the van.

Jerk calls 911 when he reaches the convenience store. The ranger attacks Jerk with an ax.

Chelsea and Garth reach the ranger’s cabin. Chelsea finds the stolen handgun as well as the photographs of her that were missing from the family album.

Abe finds Jerk’s mutilated body planted in the forest. A wolf mauls Abe.

Chelsea and Garth try hiding in the basement when the ranger returns to his cabin. The ranger confronts them. Chelsea tries shooting the ranger, but her gun has no bullets. The ranger shoots Garth in the chest before knocking Chelsea unconscious.

Chelsea wakes in a cage. She sees other cages containing body parts belonging to her friends as well as other victims. Naked except for a wolf skin, the ranger crawls on the floor and howls. A triangle is seen carved into the ranger’s chest. Chelsea passes out again.

Chelsea recovers to discover that the ranger injected her with the pink drug. The ranger gives Chelsea a speech about the two of them being together again. He then reveals that he plans on giving Chelsea a lethal dose of the drug to kill her.

Chelsea convinces the ranger to let her inject herself. Although groggy, Chelsea stabs him with the syringe and flees.

The ranger pursues Chelsea to the fire tower. The ranger ends up choking Chelsea atop the tower, although she manages to reverse their positions and begins smashing the ranger’s face repeatedly with binoculars.

The ranger compels Chelsea to admit they are the same, which she does. The ranger stands up. Chelsea recovers his rifle and shoots the ranger off the tower to his death. While striding away in the woods after, Chelsea comes face to face with a wolf.

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Review:

When her actors asked for clarification about when “The Ranger” takes place, writer/director Jenn Wexler told them, “it’s not about the year it takes place in, it’s about the dimension it takes place in.”  Speaking to the audience before a SXSW screening of her film, Wexler added, “the dimension is ‘80s dreamland.”

Wexler is of course on the money in her accurate approximation of what the slightly sideways world of “The Ranger” feels like.  Events occur in grounded reality, with nothing outwardly otherworldly.  Yet there is a subtly inebriated haze flavoring the film with an intentionally weird wooziness, like the birth of a buzz following the first two beers.

Chelsea wasn’t always a teenage punk cut from Sid and Nancy’s cloth.  She was a wide smiling little girl until tragedy took her outdoorsman uncle and replaced him with a mysterious park ranger. Whatever secret connects Chelsea to this unsettling man and her uncle’s death, neither she nor the movie are in a hurry to reveal it.

Chelsea’s dark past might have stayed hidden if not for a haphazard drug running initiative fronted by her bad influence boyfriend Garth.  Chelsea may be a misguided misfit, but Garth is a miserable miscreant pulling her down a route she shouldn’t be on in the first place.

That path hits a point of no return when police raid a rock club and Chelsea is left literally holding Garth’s bag.  Garth gets her out of the jam by stabbing a cop, and Chelsea considers shooting the officer for good measure.  Instead, this aspiring Bonnie and Clyde take the drugs and three friends and opt to lay low from the law at Uncle Pete’s old cabin in the woods.

When the ranger from her childhood discovers who has returned to “his” mountain, Chelsea and her friends find they have far more to fear than they thought.  The deranged ranger’s madness has minted him as a mask-less Michael Myers, citing broken regulations the way Spider-Man spouts quips as he cleans up his forest with a rifle and ax.  Garth and the gang’s middle finger insults aren’t going to be sufficient to save Chelsea or themselves once the ranger sets his sadistic sights on annihilating their anarchic acts.

It’s easy to see what makes “The Ranger” attractive to indie producers and a first time feature director.  The simple setup puts the project in a proven commercial market, which appeals to optimistic investors.  A straightforward story, limited locations, and small slate of actors make it an economically achievable endeavor, lowering risks for a fledgling filmmaker.

From a horror fan’s perspective, it’s harder to find the appeal.  Genre filmdom regularly cannibalizes itself when it comes to stalker in the woods scenarios, of which there are far too many to count. With only minor tweaks to a familiar formula, in this case making punk teens the protagonists, the arrival of another forest-set slasher doesn’t open itself up for enthusiasm on the consumer end of this transaction.  “The Ranger” definitely puts its best foot forward, but that foot falls in a deep rut made by the many boots that have stomped these grounds before.

As much as I want to applaud Jenn Wexler and her collaborators for injecting more thematic meat into their movie than most body dropping horror has, there’s a conflict regarding how successful they truly are in ensuring their anti-establishment message is heard.  Elaborating on the summary above, “The Ranger” opens with police attempting to arrest teens dealing an illegal drug.  To avoid capture, one kid viciously knifes a cop while another steals the officer’s weapon with the initial intent of shooting him.  Am I expected to pump my fist and proclaim, “f*ck the police!” in solidarity?  Because in this circumstance, I’m siding with the boy in blue who doesn’t deserve death for doing his job, not the murderous drug thugs who definitely deserve jail.

I can’t say for certain if the movie means for its audience to sympathize with the core cast of crass assh*les who are all kinds of obnoxious.  If we’re not, then who are the rebels we are supposed to root for?

Like the time/dimension conundrum, maybe it’s not whom we root for, but whom we root against. In that case, the ranger should earn our ire, although his colorful characterization makes him the film’s finest feature.  Jeremy Holm blends a chef’s kiss mix of Michael Shannon and Patrick Warburton for the salient role, not just in physical amalgamation but also in echoing those actors’ respective intensity and dim comic absurdity.

As mentioned earlier, the ranger’s shtick involves adhering to a killer’s code where he punishes victims according to broken park rules.  “The Ranger’s” moderately dark humor doesn’t quite qualify it as comedic, although there is some self-awareness to the silliness of this conceit.

Regrettably, “The Ranger” can’t keep its juggled balls of satire, slaughter, and introspective drama circling smoothly in the air.  Kills lazily lapse in logic when a series of serendipitous teleportations makes “Friday the 13thPart VIII” look reasonably sequenced by comparison.  There aren’t enough motivated jabs for social commentary to resonate.  And Chelsea’s self-inflicted internal damage diminishes empathy earned as our heroine.  In short, “The Ranger” doesn’t connect its disparate pieces cohesively.

I’m still awarding “The Ranger” a midrange review score instead of an outright unfavorable ranking because it is an acceptably average movie, not a poorly produced one. I’m also accounting for the fact that “The Ranger” was the second woodland survival thriller I screened in as many days.  It’s not the film’s fault my tolerance wick was already burned to the bone, particularly when both movies additionally recycled similar beats, e.g. turning the tables on an attacker, sticking someone with a syringe by surprise, getting captured while unconscious, etc.  I’ve seen so many kids, cabins, and machetes over the course of my entertainment consumption that unless Jason Voorhees is involved at this point, I’m frankly disinterested.

Hopefully you aren’t, and can glean more enjoyment from “The Ranger” for its punk rock attitude and indictment of authority.  There is a personal story paralleling the punks versus park ranger premise, although the film doesn’t draw the clearest map for finding it.

Review Score:  55

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