The Cabin in the Woods

Rated R

Before vampires sparkled, they were crawling out of a Hell Mouth and getting their asses slain by a buxom high school cheerleader with mystical powers. Those were simpler times. While Buffy the Vampire Slayer may not have been highbrow, it hinted at the promise of a young writer still cutting his teeth (pun intended) in the realms of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. Today, Joss Whedon is one of the most interesting creators those genres have to offer, and with his latest film (directed and co-written by Buffy/Lost alum Drew Goddard) Whedon’s place in the horror pantheon seems pretty well assured.

In the months leading up to The Cabin in the Woods, I was advised to go into the movie knowing as little about it as possible. Interesting, considering another film Goddard co-wrote–the mind-altering monster-eat-city flick Cloverfield–was as much about the wide-reaching alternate reality game strewn across the Internet as it was about the actual film. As it turned out, going into The Cabin in the Woods without any clear expectations–other that there would be some blood and gore and college-aged kids getting stalked in the woods–certainly enhanced my enjoyment.

The film starts not with the stereotypical group of kids, but with a group of apparent scientists scuttling around what appears to be a mysterious research facility. Our group of cookie cutter slasher flick protagonists do show up shortly thereafter, bearing all the established guises: There’s the squeaky clean heroine (Kristen Connolly), her promiscuous blonde best friend (Anna Hutchison), the brawny man’s man (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth), the somewhat nerdy nice guy (Jesse Williams) and the Shaggy-like stoner dude (Fran Kranz). They all pile in an MV and head to a cabin in the woods for what would seem to be a weekend of lakeside fun in the sun, but turns out to be a frightful bloodbath.

It’s basically every story of its ilk that you’ve seen since the first Friday the 13th movie, yet completely fresh and original. I’d tell you more, but it would kind of ruin the fun.

It’s actually difficult to write this review without giving too much away. Luckily, what makes The Cabin in the Woods so much fun is that it’s so keenly self-aware. The multitude of twists and turns in the plot certainly enhance the experience, but knowing them wouldn’t necessarily destroy your enjoyment of the film (a la anything M. Knight Shyamalan has ever done). The writing is clever, serving up just about every horror cliché you can think of and turning them into a good-humored slurry of blood and guts.

Unfortunately, its own cleverness is also its undoing. As the story of the five youths becomes a sort of play within the play, some of the horror of their situation is dampened as the plot’s slier elements begin to take precedent. The stakes of our heroes’ plight seem diminished. Also, The Cabin in the Woods seems to be making a valiant effort to make a point. Is it shining a light on the blood lust of moviegoers who have made the woeful schlock like the torture porn series Saw into a six-film franchise? Does it indict the audience for delighting in seeing young people shredded into lumps of goo by supernatural killers? I suppose it could, and perhaps it should, but if that’s what the film was striving for, it seems to back off and instead opts for a heavy-handed (literally) conclusion.

There’s plenty here to like, though. It’s smart, silly, sometimes scary (though not as much as I’d hoped), sexy and bloody. Film nerds will clamor to out-geek one another in picking out The Cabin in the Woods’ many well-placed horror pop culture references. Veteran actors Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford turn in memorable performances as key figures in the mysterious conspiracy that is at the heart of the film, combining sinister disregard with wonderfully dry humor. It may not be Whedon at his best, but it proves that he’s one of the most progressive voices in what is usually a very conservative genre.

A cursory look at the temperatures will tell you that we’re a long way from winter. But make no mistake about it: Winter IS coming. If you don’t know what I’m referencing, I’m sorry. You really should live life less and watch TV more. That’s what I do. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but the TV I do watch occupies much of my life. LOST was a prime example. I like to snicker at all the vampire drama blah blah blah on True Blood, but right now, I’m completely preoccupied with HBO’s latest time sucker, Game of Thrones, which is based on a series of novels I haven’t read. But after seeing the TV adaptation, I may not have the stomach to.

More accurately, I was hooked on Game of Thrones. It just had its first season finale, and it was quite a cliffhanger. I was going to try to break down the show in simple terms for our readers who haven’t seen it, but that’s a fool’s errand. There are so many names, nicknames and family/realm history thrown at you in each episode that it’s pointless to try to keep up with it all. For those of you out there who have heard about the show and are going to try to watch it en masse on demand or on your fancy portable device at a later date, my best advice to you is just squint really hard, concentrate all you can, then find some nerd on Twitter who can answer all your questions–just don’t get them too worked up because then they’ll never leave you alone.

Here’s the best I can do to summarize and still leave enough word count for my pithy commentary: There are these families who rule a fictional land called Westeros, which is broken up into seven kingdoms (I think), and there was this old king called “The Mad King,” but he also has another name. He was MAD, so this one dude, Jaime Lannister, who fucks his sister, killed him, which got this other guy Robert installed as king. Oh yeah, Robert is also married to Jaime’s Sister (the one he’s fucking). Robert has a buddy Ned who lives in the north. Ned’s cool as shit and ends up working for the king, but there are a whole lot of growing threats amassing outside the realm, like the Dothraki, a race of people who are really into horses (but not in that way). The Son of the Mad King sold his sister to the Dothraki Leader in exchange for an army of savage killers who could march into Westeros and reclaim the Iron Throne, which is where the king sits. The sister, Daenerys, is a total babe and doesn’t like being bossed around by her brother. She becomes queen of the Dothraki and doesn’t take his bullshit any more. But she’s such a babe that the Dothraki Leader decides he’ll charge into Westeros and rape and kill everyone in her name so she can have her Iron Throne back anyway.

Even worse than the horse dudes is that there’s this wall in the far north, and on the other side of the wall is all this crazy shit, like people who don’t bathe ever and White Walkers, who are on some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons type shit. People guard the wall and can never leave, including Jon Snow, Ned’s bastard son (we don’t know Jon’s momma because Maury hasn’t been born yet). There is also a lot of dragon talk–which gets me fucking stoked–and instead of using e-mail, people communicate via ravens. And there are wolves too, but not like the ones on True Blood.

It’s a really intricate story chock full of twists and turns, backstabbing and betrayal, beheadings and nudity and sex and incest and rape and pre-teens talking about getting each other pregnant.

But really it’s a quality program. I’m amped up for season two, which will air spring 2012 (luckily before the Mayan long count calendar ends). The thing that bothers me about the show, and this is the case with a lot of the shows I’ve seen on the premium cable networks I’ve been watching lately (True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Spartacus, etc.), is that the sex and violence are so extreme. I’m not sure if that makes me a prude or not, but if I want to watch porn (and I’m not a stranger to it), then I will, but if I want to sit down and watch a show because I like a story’s rich intrigue, I don’t really need to watch two prostitutes finger pop one another while a creepy dude rattles off a few paragraphs of expository monologue.

I get that these shows are “adult,” and that’s why I like them. At times, these shows have clever, nuanced plots and wonderful scripts. But it seems like they can’t go four minutes without someone getting their soft-core on or someone graphically getting their head lopped off (or in Game of Thrones’ case, both simultaneously). I’m just wondering if “mature content” necessarily means careless gratuity. Or maybe I should just shut the fuck up and go see Cars 2.

Not too long ago, I was sitting in a car, talking with a friend of mine. We were outside his house and I was double parked; however, I was pulled over enough so that people could get by me. The few people who drove up the street did just that without so much as a beep of their horns or a flash of their high beams–all except one.

It was a gray SUV/minivan/station wagon thing. The sort of vehicle you see in every garage and/or driveway in suburban track homes. It pulled up behind me and didn’t budge. After a few seconds, I shifted my car into park and pulled ahead to an empty spot on the right. The gray SUV pulled up behind me, stopped, and then pulled back onto the road and parked at the curb on the opposite side of the street. Its engine went quiet. I smirked and said to my friend, “I get the feeling we’re about to get into a fight,” but no one stirred from the vehicle.

Some time later, a police car headed down the street. The police car slowed as it passed my friend and I, but other than that, the officers inside paid us no mind and continued on their way, heading the wrong way down the one-way, residential street. The squad car made it down to just about the end of the block when the gray SUV awakened from its slumber. It started up, and without turning on its lights, pulled away from the curb, making a right turn through the red traffic light at the top of the block. My friend and I both sensed something foul afoot.

Another car headed up the street. I realized it was the same squad car that just drove by, so I rolled down my window and flagged down the cops.

“What’s going on, buddy?” the officer in the passenger seat asked. I’ve thankfully had very few encounters with law enforcement, but in each instance the officer in question has referred to me as “buddy.” Do I look like a “buddy?”

I told the police officer what had happened. He asked me if there was a man and a woman inside the vehicle. I answered that I didn’t know, because it was dark and I wasn’t able to see anyone.

The squad car drove off in the same direction as the dubious SUV.

That’s where the story ends.

I like to come up with different scenarios about just what was going on in that SUV. Could it have been drug dealings, prostitution, kidnappings, murder? These are all plausible theories. Or, what if it was something more far-fetched than that, like a terrorist plot or the sort of thing that would get Agent Mulder in a tizzy? A secret rendezvous between two agents of some clandestine organization. Who knows, right? I’ll probably never know. It’s one of life’s many mysteries that go unsolved, a trivial thing that at most allowed me to fill up some word count in this space. It was suspenseful at the time, but after its passing, really didn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things.

That’s more or less how I feel about the Lost finale, except Lost was one of the most important things to happen to me over the past six years. As much as I wanted the final season to bring me closure, I worried that the writers would attempt to answer everything in the show’s final throes–perhaps even having Jacob field questions from the remaining survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, calling upon them one by one with hands raised.

Those who were expecting every tiny loose end to be tied up in a neat bow probably hadn’t been watching the show too closely over the past six years. An article on TVSquad.com said, “Ultimately, Lost was a show for the anxious, uncertain, post-Sept. 11 nation we have become. We’ve had to accept ambiguity as a fact of life, and we seek answers and closure, though none may be forthcoming. We’re leery and skeptical about science but riddled with doubt about faith. To the extent that Lost was about the journey and not the destination, about the drive to solve riddles rather than the solutions themselves, it was the show that best explained us to ourselves.”

This may be a pretty pretentious analysis of a show that featured time travel, a space-bending donkey wheel and a smoke monster, but it does make some valid points, not only about the show, but the time in which it aired. Most people I know are filled with so much doubt about the economy, environment, government, world peace, hot topic du jour, what have you. I suppose I struggle with the same doubts every day, the most difficult of these is why I bother getting out of bed most mornings. I mean, really, why do any of us? I like the mystery, though, because once you’ve got everything figured out, all life’s little happenstances like suspicious vehicles and hokey television shows must seem pretty boring.

Congratulations, North Korea! On Saturday, Oct. 11, the Bush administration announced that Asia’s most mysterious communist nation is no longer on the list of states that sponsor terrorism. I, for one, am glad.

I don’t know much about Korea, or Korean culture, other than Jin and Sun from Lost are pretty sweet. I’ve also eaten at a Korean barbecue joint once and was really impressed. The table was just full of raw meats and spicy pickled things; and in the center of the table was a grill and fire pit so you could grill your meat to your liking. I got drunk on soju and didn’t even have a hangover the next day. Overall, I was pleased. However, I’m sure North Korea isn’t as bad as they’ve been made out to be—just a bit misunderstood.

Relations between the U.S. and North Korea have never been all that good. There was that war in the ’50s that never really got resolved. Back in 1994, things seemed to be lightening up in the two countries’ tumultuous relationship, as President Clinton signed a similar agreement with the North Koreans. That all went to hell in 2002, though, when the Bush administration pegged the mysterious communist Asian nation as part of the “Axis of Evil,” an announcement that ruffled the well-coiffed feathers of North Korea’s enigmatic and creepy leader Kim Jong-Il. The situation really got interesting in 2006 when North Korea detonated a nuclear device, changing the Bush administration’s “Fuck you!” attitude toward Pyongyang to “Hey, guy. How’s it going?”

An uneasy accord was met. In 2007, “six-party” talks (including Russia, Japan and South Korea) were held. Thanks to those meetings, North Korea kind of sort of agreed to halt their nuclear activities”¦probably. But in 2008, those shaky ties looked about ready to break. According to an article in the New York Times, just days before the Oct. 11 announcement, North Korea had barred international inspectors from a plutonium plant in Yongbyon. In a last ditch attempt to make it look like they have done something positive in its eight years in office, the historically stubborn Bush administration made a compromise. Imagine that.

The deal doesn’t really change the situation all that much. U.S. inspectors will now have access to the Yongbyon plant; however, whether or not inspectors will have access to sites international experts suspect may be used to make weapons grade nuclear material remains to be seen. Inspectors will now be able to gain access to such sites “based on mutual consent”—good luck with that. For its part, North Korea gains a modicum of international acceptance. They’re no longer that disturbed little child picking the wings off flies at the kiddie table; now they’re breaking bread with the big boys”¦just as long as they mind their manners and don’t ask for seconds.

The Oct. 11 announcement raised the ire of Republicans. Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain complained “that North Korea had yet to demonstrate that it was serious about adhering to its commitment to denuclearize.” Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Barack Obama was like, “Whatever, I’m going to be president soon anyway.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

Maybe we’re just making a big deal over nothing. For all his eccentricities, maybe Kim Jong-Il isn’t as insane as people think. Maybe the only way to get noticed as a player in international politics is to wave a loaded gun around. If it’s truly going to be a global community, doesn’t that mean everyone should have a voice? Perhaps it’s the only way he could ensure the safety of his government and his people—to create a sort of stalemate. Maybe if everyone had The Bomb, everyone would go forth in peace. I’d like to give the world a nuke? I suppose it has a ring to it.