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The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Note: The Cabin in the Woods is an exceedingly hard movie to review without giving away everything that makes it worth watching. If you haven't seen it, it's best if you know nothing about it. Spoilers follow this section.

What It's About: The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie. A group of college kids decide to spend the weekend at a cousin's remote mountain cabin. Drinking, sex, all that stuff that gets you killed in horror movies. You pretty much know the characters by now. The asshole jock, the stoner, the hot nerd, the dumb blonde, the one girl who's generally wholesome and, of course, happens to be a virgin. Ignoring the ominous warnings of a creepy old gas station attendant, the five proceed as planned and, by coincidence, discover an old diary in the cabin's junk-filled basement, detailing the exploits of the depraved Buckner family -- residents of the cabin in the late 1800s. After reading some mysterious Latin phrases scrawled in the back of the diary, the friends unknowingly resurrect the Buckners, who attack the cabin and start picking off our heroes one by one.

There are no surprises here.

But.

Beware spoilers below.

What It's Really About: The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie. A group of college kids decide to spend the weekend at a cousin's remote mountain cabin. Drinking, sex, all that stuff that gets you killed in horror movies. You think you pretty much know the characters by now, but you don't. The jock is a friendly, funny sociology major. The nerd is also a star college football player. The dumb blonde is neither dumb nor naturally blonde. In other words, they're ordinary people with their own quirks, flaws and interests. And they are all, unknowingly, part of a larger operation run from behind the scenes by a mysterious organization whose purpose remains unknown until the end -- whose members are also quite likable, ordinary and, especially in the case of Hadley and Sitterson, the two we see the most of, funny. They're workaday office stiffs and technicians (you know, like the people who make horror movies).

Every cliche, every poor decision is enforced through lockdown procedures, subliminal hints, careful monitoring and mind-altering chemical mists. Even the undead Buckners are resurrected purely by chance. It could just as easily have been demons. Or a killer robot. Or a ghost, or mutants, or an alien creature. Everything is accounted for, catalogued, contained and followed to the letter, but even then, one can't always account for every variable, and the kids have reason enough early on to suspect that something's up when they discover a one-way mirror in one of the bedrooms. They're part of what amounts to an annual human sacrifice, reduced to meetings, paperwork and standard operating procedure. The organization exists, as it turns out, to appease the Ancient Ones, Lovecraftian elder gods who demand a yearly sacrifice of standardized archetypes, according to a specific and unchanging formula (you know, like...well, like you, us, the people who watch horror movies).

As it turns out, Curt doesn't even have a cousin, let alone one who owns a cabin in the woods. It's the opposite of Scooby-Doo. It is all manufactured -- everything except the monsters.

Why You Should Watch It: The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie -- sort of. It might be better classified as a very gory, superficially scary comedy about horror movies, and it was probably the best film of 2012. It was co-written by Joss Whedon and frequent collaborator Drew Goddard following a discussion in which the two of them lamented the current state of horror in film -- namely the proliferation of torture porn following the success of the first Saw movie (which is a weird cultural phenomenon, because Saw was neither gory nor, strictly speaking, torture porn at all, as the series started as a sort of gimmick-based serial-killer movie along the lines of Seven; The Passion of the Christ is more torture porn than the first two Saw movies). The Cabin in the Woods is described by Whedon as a loving hate-letter to the older horror movies he and Goddard grew up watching. An examination, dissection and critique of all the well-worn elements of the genre that have been pushed aside now that people would rather see someone tortured to death for an hour and a half.

It's a little like Alan Moore's Supreme, in that regard. Supreme was a comic about the history of comics, and it really didn't have much appeal for anyone who hadn't been reading comics for a while. The Cabin in the Woods isn't quite so dependent on prior knowledge of the medium or the genre, but its gags and references run from the obvious (pointing out that is seriously makes no sense at all to think that the wind blew open a trap door in the cabin's living room) to the obscure (the fact that said trap-door scene is a nearly shot-for-shot homage to a scene in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead).

It's kind of post-postmodernist, and in many ways, intentionally or otherwise, seems more an answer to the postmodernism of Wes Craven's Scream, which Craven intended to kill the slasher genre once and for all but succeeded only in a popularizing an overabundance of slightly-more-self-aware-than-usual slasher movies for the next decade or so (which, as killing goes, is kind of like aiming for the other guy's head and shooting yourself in the foot instead), than anything else. If Scream was a horror movie made in response to twenty years of Friday the 13th, The Cabin in the Woods is the answer to fifteen years of Scream. While Scream points out its formula, the formula still stands on its own; it's merely joked about in the process. The Cabin in the Woods' characters are smarter than the average horror protagonist, and while they know something's wrong and try everything they can to remove themselves from the game, the cards are simply stacked against them.

It's also extremely funny. I'm not much of a comedy guy, but it's one of the few movies to make me laugh out loud in a long while. Whedon and Goddard's dialogue is witty, the characters -- even the "evil" ones -- are all likable, and even someone who doesn't enjoy horror movies can appreciate a guy getting killed by a unicorn.

"I just think it would have been cooler with a merman."

Trivia: Madea's Witness Protection has a higher rating than this movie on Amazon Prime Video. Maybe Marty made the right choice in the end after all.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.

Grave Encounters

Grave Encounters (2011)

What It's About: Some years ago, the crew of the ghost-hunting reality series "Ghost Adventures" "Grave Encounters" vanished while investigating the supposedly haunted Waverly Hills Sanitorium Collingwood Psychiatric Institute. The show's producer eventually decides to make public the footage left behind by Zak Bagans Lance Preston and his group of technicians, cameramen and psychics. (Everybody got killed by ghosts in the asylum.)

"Prepare to have...some Grave Encounters!"

Why You Should Watch It: As a rule, I'm not too fond of found-footage horror movies. On one hand, they're cheap to make and provide an opportunity for skilled amateur filmmakers to break into the business. On the other, they're cheap to make and provide an opportunity for talentless amateur filmmakers to produce poorly-acted, badly-written Blair Witch Project ripoffs that would otherwise have gone unmade. Most found-footage horror defies all common sense. Sure, the characters all act like complete morons, but that's more or less to be expected, because most horror movies would be over in about five minutes if they didn't. What bothers me is that the subgenre is limited by its very format, and characters who should be dropping their cameras and running stubbornly hold onto them up until the very moment they're abducted by aliens or hacked up by a murderer.

So I was fairly surprised at how much I liked Grave Encounters. First of all, it has a pretext for its camera format. Sean Rogerson does a pretty much pitch-perfect Zak Bagans impression as the leader of the "Grave Encounters" crew. The ghosts are actually pretty scary, with their gaping, too-wide mouths and dead white eyes, and they're not so overused that they outstay their welcome. There's also an enjoyable Silent Hill-ness to the whole thing with the asylum shifting its layout into an endless labyrinth of decrepit corridors, random bathtubs of blood and a night that extends on well past the planned twelve-hour lock-in. It's a fun, well-made Halloween-season movie, if not much more.

(Don't bother with the second one, by the way. They do that stupid Blair Witch Project 2 thing, where the first movie was a movie and the sequel is about a film crew going to investigate the disappearance of the people who made the first movie. It's a dumb gimmick that's never worked and likely never will, and makes the original movie lesser in context as it's suddenly an in-universe fictional document.)

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.

Ravenous

Ravenous (1999)

What It’s About: 2nd Lieutenant Boyd is a coward. He knows it, everyone else knows it, and he still gets a medal pinned on him for his “heroic” actions during the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848. After his commanding officer is killed right in front of him, Boyd decides to play possum and winds up tossed in a cart with the rest of the dead. Blood drips into his mouth, and a sudden adrenaline rush enables him to sneak into the enemy headquarters and capture it single-handedly. This, of course, does not absolve him of his initial cowardice, and he and his shiny new medal are reassigned to distant Fort Spencer.

Everyone else is there under similar circumstances, and as such, they’re kind of a useless bunch of people. They just sort of sit around, eat, talk and get stoned, because there’s fuck-all else to do in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Before long an unhinged stranger named Colqhoun stumbles into camp, claiming to be the survivor of a lost wagon train whose scout, Colonel Ives, deliberately led the wagons along a winding route and eventually encouraged the party to engage in cannibalism when the food ran out. Organizing a rescue party, Fort Spencer’s commanding officer, Colonel Hart, Boyd and the others follow Colqhoun out to the location of the stranded wagon train, only to find that they’ve walked right into a trap. And that’s only the first act.

Why You Should Watch It: Ravenous is a very weird little horror-comedy about wendigos, cannibalism and Manifest Destiny, directed by the late Antonia Bird (who’s probably much better known for 1994’s Priest) and starring Guy Pearce, the always-entertaining Robert Carlyle (who I really hope people are able to associate with something other than his turn as Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon a Time) and Tim Burton mainstay Jeffrey Jones. It came out in 1999, right in the middle of my college career, and flopped pretty hard; it was not, for its time, an expensive movie to make, but it still only recuperated a quarter of its budget. And I can honestly see why it didn’t do well, which is sad because it really isn’t a bad movie at all, just a strange one that had essentially zero mainstream audience appeal, was shown in a very small number of theaters and was terribly mismarketed by Fox -- though it’s since become well-liked as a minor cult classic. The atmosphere is bleak and oppressive, reflecting what actually was a difficult shoot that only grew more troublesome over time due in part to uncooperative weather.

From the start, it’s clear that Ravenous is not meant to be taken entirely seriously. It’s a cannibal horror movie played mostly straight, but it maintains a distinct thread of very dark comedy throughout. From the opening quotes to the first murder scene -- which plays out more like a chase on Benny Hill than anything else, complete with banjo music, yodeling and a near-slapstick leap off a cliff -- it’s laced with satire and a morbid humor regarding the shrinking American frontier and the kind of people who are pushing it back.

There’s a point where Martha, the fort’s Native American medic and general chore-accomplisher, tells Boyd more about the Wendigo myth -- something he’d heard the basics of from George, the other Native American living at Fort Spencer (a scout who mostly spends his time smoking pot with his buddy, “the over-medicated Private Cleaves,” in a nice aversion of the old “Mystical Indian” stereotype). “The Wendigo only takes, and takes, and takes,” Martha tells him. “Never gives.” And it must keep killing to sustain its life; killing is an addiction in service to the beast’s hunger. It’s a statement that’s also clearly intended to apply to Western expansion as much as to the cannibal threat of Colonel Ives, who discusses Manifest Destiny more directly with Boyd in a later scene. American expansionism as a force both consumptive of everything in its path and, obviously, of itself.

“Now isn’t this civilized?” one character remarks as he sits down to eat some human stew.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.

New Feature Time! (Because I felt like adding a new feature.)

Trivia: The soundtrack was co-composed by Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz.

I’m not posting the trailer for once, because it spoils literally every single twist in the film. You’re better off watching the movie without it.