Funny games in the woods

"How many chainsaw massacres can one state possibly contain? One more, at least, from the look of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,' a prequel to a remake of a 1974 film that spawned numerous sequels and numberless copycats. There’s more to come, no doubt, given the bloodlust for torture and indifference to depravity characteristic of contemporary horror films. Every era gets the scare pictures it deserves, and there is nothing more unsettling in this orgy of hate than its overwhelming stench of corporate nihilism."
–Nathan Lee in The New York Times, Oct. 6, 2006

This has been quite a year for Joss Whedon. Not only did he write and direct Marvel's The Avengers (#3 movie of all time as of this writing), he also wrote and produced The Cabin in the Woods. (Whedon shares screenwriting credit with Drew Goddard, who also directed.) In an age when we're lucky to get a pretty good reboot like Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, Cabin manages to work on multiple levels. It's the cleverest horror-comedy since Scream, as well as a lacerating critique of the genre a la Michael Haneke's Funny Games.

Haneke's controversial shock show depicted home intruders terrorizing a family. The director terrorized the audience with equal if not greater savagery. His punitive approach was spelled out in the film's tagline: "You must admit, you brought this on yourself." He wanted to punish viewers for expecting him to turn other people's suffering into an evening of entertainment. In contrast, Whedon wants us to have a good time, but that doesn't mean he lets us off the hook.

Conceived as a direct response to the "torture porn" subgenre popularized in the '00s, Cabin is the latest horror-comedy to offer a welcome respite from the depravity. The hilarious Tucker & Dale vs Evil took a familiar setup – college kids are picked off one by one on hillbillies' home turf – and delighted horror fans by having the rival clans switch roles. Cabin is an even savvier send-up. It supersedes Tucker & Dale by gleefully playing with genre conventions, and it arguably beats Haneke at his game, too.

This review is spoilers from here on out, though if you haven't seen the movie yet you might be surprised by how soon the filmmakers put their cards on the table. We meet five backwoods-bound college kids who could have stepped out of a thousand different horror movies. The masterstroke here is the totally original opening scene, which introduces us to a pair of corporate drones, Sitterson and Hadley (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, giving highly amusing performances), who look like they belong in a deadpan comedy like TV's The Office. Unlucky for the kids, Sitterson and Hadley have been assigned to carry out a ritualized slaughter, in order to appease gods that demand blood for peace.

Some of this plays as silly as it sounds, but it pays off big time. Cabin was a modest success when it came out last April, but it might have been even bigger had audiences known what was in store for them in the third act, when the movie becomes a crazy funhouse ride. All this nonsense about "the ancient ones" gives the film surprising scale, as we learn that similar sacrifices are taking place all over the world. J-horror fans will be tickled by a video feed from Kyoto that shows Japanese schoolchildren defeating an evil ghost whose face is hidden by a curtain of disheveled hair. ("Now Kiko's spirit will live in the happy frog.")

As we soon find out, this is no ordinary cabin in no ordinary woods. The place is booby-trapped, and a force field zaps anyone that dares escape. Sitterson and Hadley (referred to by the college kids as "puppeteers") release toxins in the air, causing the kids to behave like characters in some cliched horror movie. Curt (played by Chris Hemsworth, who has also had quite a year) is a sociology major on academic scholarship, but after a few hours in the woods he's acting like a bonehead. Jules (Anna Hutchison) becomes suddenly slutty. With some romantic lighting courtesy of the puppeteers, she takes off her top and goes all the way with Curt, thus sealing her fate. Hapless stoner Marty (Fran Kranz) is immune to the toxins because he's already on so much pot. His exasperation with his friends gives the movie some of its biggest laughs. Curt: "No, this is wrong. We should split up." Marty: "Really?"

Much like the scene where Jules makes the fatal mistake of taking off her top, other genre tropes come into play, as if they're being crossed off from a horror movie checklist. The gas station attendant the kids meet on their way to the cabin is a super-scary harbinger of doom, right up until the moment he's embarrassed by the puppeteers in a hilarious scene involving a speaker phone. The redneck family of pain fetishists that quote-unquote "virgin" Dana (Kristen Connolly) unwittingly brings back from the dead are straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Most of these tropes are shown from a slightly bent comedic perspective, but that's not the case with the zombie rednecks. They represent a genuine threat, and play a key part in the film's most astonishing set piece, the wildest and most unforgettable scene I've watched at the movies all year.

Just when we think all the kids are goners, we cut to the puppeteers celebrating with their associates at an office party. We're shown what we'd expect to see at such a gathering, like people complaining about their overtime bonuses and a pretty lady rejecting the advances of a nerdy coworker. Only one thing seems out of place. In the background, on big TV screens, we can see Dana being brutally murdered by one of the zombies. No one at the party is paying attention to this, but we're forced to look as the girl pukes up blood and fights for her life. It's here that Whedon tops Haneke. As effective as much of Funny Games is, its arguments ultimately fall flat. Haneke hectors the audience to the point of backlash, and his sledgehammer methods, like having one of the killers deliver mocking asides to the camera, are self-defeating. He never achieves what the office party scene in Cabin does. Through Connolly's performance and Goddard's direction, we're made to identify with Dana's suffering, while at the same time we're shown how shocking it is for the partygoers to be ignoring her pain. The scene exposes the "indifference to depravity characteristic of contemporary horror films" that Nathan Lee wrote about in his review of a Texas Chainsaw prequel released in 2006. It also reestablishes the genre's moral footing.

At once cheerfully irreverent and deadly serious, Cabin is often just plain fun, recalling an earlier, more inventive time for horror movies. In his review for Indiewire, Ian Grey argued the film is a celebration of '80s horror and the dark icons that decade unleashed. I agree with his assessment. Whedon lets us know early on he's feeling that old '80s spirit, when Jules references a famous anti-drug PSA from 1987 ("I learned it by watching you!"). Later, at the office party, the puppeteers rock out to "Roll with the Changes" by REO Speedwagon. Cabin could be the start of an '80s horror revival; I just hope it doesn't take the form of another slate of mindless remakes.

"Red State"

The best thing that can be said about Kevin Smith’s Red State is that it’s better than Blue State, a lame romantic comedy with Breckin Meyer and Anna Paquin that came out after the 2004 election. Blue State was about a young Democrat who moved to Canada after George W. Bush won reelection. Smith’s audacious, ultra-violent new movie has a similarly political bent, but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods on the level of horror. Plus, he’s arguably covered the same material before with more rewarding results. I think his fans should see it but this is ultimately an admirable failure on Smith’s part.

I knew surprisingly little going in, only that this was being billed as Smith’s first no-bones-about-it horror movie, and that it was at least partially inspired by Fred Phelps and his vilely homophobic Westboro Baptist Church. I was eager to see the director branch out and to get his take on Phelps. As a grad student at KU, I would sometimes see members of Phelps’ church protesting outside the student union, and to me they almost seemed to fit the trashy, willfully ignorant caricature of red-state America. If anybody deserved to be cast as the villains in a horror movie, it was these people.

The opening scenes certainly feel like a horror film. Smith has reimagined The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Craigslist era, as three high school boys (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) follow an online invitation for group sex, only to fall into the clutches of the murderous Five Points Church. The boys’ efforts to escape and the ensuing showdown between members of the church and ATF agents take up a full hour of the picture.

When I realized the second half of the movie would be a long shoot-out, I was titillated but also a little apprehensive. Smith is famous for his sloppy approach to editing and coverage, and sure enough Red State is often visually incoherent; there are some shots where members of the Five Points Church appear to be inadvertently shooting at each other. This is the same lazy approach to stunts and action that Smith brought to his sell-out Hollywood picture, the aptly titled Cop Out. What the violence in Red State has going for it is an unusually high celebrity body count, which brought to mind the shocking cameos in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning Hurt Locker – though comparisons to Bigelow’s genius filmmaking end there. Smith showed far more flair and imagination with the carnage perpetrated by Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon) in Dogma.

I’d hoped Red State would be more like Dogma, which is by far Smith’s most ambitious screenplay to date. With that movie, he showed a strong point of view towards religion and brought an incisive moral order to the material. For all the promise and provocative nature of Red State, which depicts a fundamentalist church that executes gays, the movie is surprisingly random and meaningless. Smith seems to have nothing more on his mind than shock value, and the fact that he teases us with an apocalyptic climax only to quickly backpedal away from it is an unforgivable sin.

Fortunately, the director has a trump card. Viewers are probably most familiar with Michael Parks for his performance as Texas Ranger Earl McGraw in From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill and Grindhouse. Smith has given Parks one of the best roles of his life as Abin Cooper, the deranged leader of the Five Points Church. Terrifying, theatrical and often hilarious despite the bile that spews from his mouth, Cooper puts on quite a show, and so does Parks. Red State is at its strongest when Parks is at his funniest, which may be as good a sign as any that Smith should get back to what he does best now that he’s tried his hand at horror.

Undead and Not Loving It

In the recent DOA comic-book movie, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, Sam Huntington plays Marcus, a motor-mouthed paranormal investigator who gets killed off early on in the film and comes back as a zombie. Marcus' postmortem plight – his diet consists of worms and maggots – got me thinking about some of the unhappier undead movie characters. Here are some of my all-time favorites:

Louis de Pointe du Lac, Interview with the Vampire

On my ancient DVD copy, director Neil Jordan introduces Interview with the Vampire as "a movie about the saddest vampires you've ever seen." The saddest of the sadsacks is Louis (Brad Pitt), a bloodsucker with a conscience who feeds on rats, chickens and poodles because he refuses to kill another human being. A close second is Claudia, a prepubescent immortal played by Kirsten Dunst, who laments that she will "never ever grow up." These milquetoast vampires are almost TOO melancholy; when Louis and Claudia's gleeful maker, Lestat (Tom Cruise, in a flamboyant, expansively entertaining performance) exits the picture, the movie pretty much falls apart.

Jerry, The Prophecy

I remember being really excited to see this when it came out my sophomore year of high school. I'd seen Pulp Fiction about 20 times by then, and The Prophecy features three Tarantino alums (Eric Stoltz, Christopher Walken and Amanda Plummer). In addition to Walken's homicidal archangel Gabriel, the character I was most struck by was Jerry (Adam Goldberg), a sardonically depressed young man who's kept in limbo by Gabriel after committing suicide. Ol' Gabe has nothing but disdain for the human race, but he keeps Jerry not-quite-alive because "it's a big universe and some things in it are talking monkey work." Walken and Goldberg have a very funny onscreen rapport; they provide the only comic relief in this otherwise grim horror picture, one of the ickiest cinematic Bible stories to come along before The Passion of the Christ.

Ray Lynskey, The Frighteners

The main thing you need to know about Ray Lynskey (Peter Dobson) is that he's the only person who cries at his own funeral. "It's a goddamn tragedy!" he sobs, even while he's remembered as "less than generous" by those he left behind. A skeptic who has to become a ghost to believe in ghosts, Ray refuses to take the Corridor of Life to heaven because, as he explains, he's "only 29!" As an earthbound emanation, he ultimately gets to redeem himself; he clearly loves his wife, Lucy (Trini Alvarado) and tries to save her. Unfortunately for him, no good deed goes unpunished in this wicked Peter Jackson-directed horror-comedy, the second-best genre mashup of 1996 (after From Dusk Till Dawn, of course).

Moaning Myrtle, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Poor, poor Moaning Myrtle. She's destined to haunt the girls' bathroom at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (As haunting places go, bathrooms must be among the most unpleasant.) A bullied teen who was murdered by Tom Riddle himself, Myrtle is a genuinely tragic figure, but as played by the pixieish actress Shirley Henderson in the movies, she's mostly a source of annoyance and bemusement for Harry and his friends. Technically speaking, Myrtle plays a bigger part in Chamber of Secrets, but the Chris Columbus-directed Harry Potter movies are dead to me. Besides, she's a much more well rounded character in Goblet, as she helps Harry decipher a riddle that will lead him to winning the Triwizard Tournament.

Zia, Wristcutters: A Love Story

"Soon after I killed myself I got a job here at Kamikaze Pizza." Thus begins one of my favorite black-comic visions of the afterlife, right up there with Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. Zia (Patrick Fugit) slits his wrists after his girlfriend dumps him and ends up in a dreary place populated by people who have committed suicide, where there are no stars in the sky and nobody ever smiles. (Sounds like South Florida - zing!) Like Moaning Myrtle, Zia was unhappy in real life and he's unhappy in the afterlife, suggesting that people are not only the same backwards and forwards but also alive and undead. But, as the title suggests, Wristcutters is a love story, and with Cupid's Arrow comes an opportunity for rebirth.

"Insidious"

James Wan is one of the most talented grindhouse directors working today, but he’d be a lot better off if he’d quit ripping off the classics. The climax of his last film, the neo-Charlie Bronson revenge flick Death Sentence, was a shameless plundering of Taxi Driver; at one point, the hero actually shoots the fingers off the bad guy, just before taking a bullet to the neck and falling on a couch. Similarly, his new haunted-house horror movie, Insidious, plays splendidly for the first hour or so, before it becomes a virtual remake of Poltergeist. If he cuts the cutesy film-student referencing, Wan just might make a genre masterpiece of his own.

Until that happens, Insidious will suffice. I’d been dying to see this since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, when fanboys were buzzing about how the creators of Saw – Wan and his frequent collaborator, actor/writer Leigh Whannell – had made another horror classic. The first half of Insidious certainly delivers on that promise. It’s about a yuppie couple (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) whose young son goes into an inexplicable coma; right around the same time, things start to go bump in the night.

Like Dead Silence, Wan’s other post-Saw horror film, Insidious is skimpy on the gory effects. (It’s rated PG-13.) Instead, we get the old scary-looking-day-players-popping-out-of-the-dark routine, as the soundtrack practically screams at us to jump out of our seats. Wan is a master of this sort of thing; even Dead Silence, generally regarded as a misfire by fans and critics (and dismissed by its makers as the product of studio interference), had me cowering in my seat in fright.

The movie pretty much falls apart when a team of parapsychologists shows up to investigate the disturbances. As Carol J. Clover notes in her essential book on the genre, Men, Women and Chainsaws, task-force teams of psychics have been a horror-movie staple since 1963’s The Haunting. It doesn’t help that the team in Insidious precisely mirrors the one in Poltergeist: two male techies, who defer to an all-seeing female psychic (gamely played here by Lin Shaye). The scene where the psychics communicate with the spirits is dynamically staged and might seem original… if you haven’t seen J.A. Bayona’s vastly superior The Orphanage.

Insidious has a bad habit of getting our hopes up and then crushing them. A drawing of a red-faced demon in the comatose boy’s bedroom is wicked scary, but when we actually meet the devil he looks a lot like Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace. (The demon in Drag Me to Hell – Lamia – is infinitely more terrifying; there's a good example of a director showing just enough and then wisely leaving the rest up to the viewer’s imagination.) Like Event Horizon and The Ninth Gate, Insidious promises a glimpse at a hellish parallel world and then never quite delivers on that promise. We end up feeling cheated out of a more complete movie, even though it must be said the filmmakers have accomplished a great deal on a paltry $1.5 million budget.

When I could tell what was going on (I have a tendency to whip off my glasses during the scarier parts of horror movies, rendering the screen a complete blur), I thoroughly enjoyed the opening stretch of Insidious. It’s perhaps notable that the film’s best-directed scene is also its most original: a frightening scene with a playful child, which reveals that it isn’t the house that’s haunted but its occupants. Wan should stick to original material next time; a filmmaker this bloody talented deserves nothing less.

House of 1000 Remakes: "A Nightmare on Elm Street"

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of reviews focusing on horror remakes. When I first came up with the idea, I decided to look up which B-movie classics, ‘80s exploitation pictures and foreign-language shockers were about to be repackaged and released to a theater near you. The sheer number of titles was staggering: The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Children of the Corn, Faces of Death, Hellraiser, The People Under the Stairs, Poltergeist, Suspiria…

I could go on. So what gives? Why is Hollywood so intent on selling us not-so-new nightmares?

I blame Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 horror blockbuster (along with George Lucas’s Star Wars, released two years later) helped bring exploitation pictures into the mainstream. Movies that had once been shot in a week for $30,000 by the King of the B’s, filmmaker Roger Corman, were now being given extensive production schedules and multi-million dollar budgets. Today, we basically live in the world Spielberg created: a world of mega-budgeted exploitation pictures. Just take a look at next summer’s slate of releases: Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, X-Men: First Class, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Cowboys & Aliens…

Horror remakes are simply a byproduct of that world: gritty, often modestly budgeted exploitation movies are being slickly repackaged. You can argue whether or not Planet Spielberg is a good thing. What's undeniable is that Hollywood's addiction to horror remakes has produced some exceptionally lousy fright flicks. (Not all of them are terrible; I’ll get to the good ones in future posts.) The studios have flooded the market with remakes and sequels to remakes that, in the words of one particularly perceptive blogger, look like “Gossip Girl meets Freddy.”

Which brings us to 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, a big-budget reimagining of Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher hit. The first film spawned half a dozen sequels and gave us one of the genre’s most iconic villains: the undead child killer Freddy Krueger. The new movie lacks the imaginative dream sequences of the original. It’s the worst of the Craven remakes, falling way behind The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes.

Made for $1.8 million, Craven’s original Nightmare showed a surprising amount of ingenuity and still has the power to shock. Music video director Samuel Bayer’s remake has a budget of $35 million. But what, exactly, does Bayer have to show for it? His movie copies the cool effect in the original film where we see Freddy stretching a bedroom wall. Craven used an 8-ft piece of spandex to achieve that effect; Bayer uses computer-graphic effects, and I’ll be damned if I can tell the difference.

The new, unimproved Freddy (played by Jackie Earle Haley) isn't any fun to watch; he’s been robbed of his nightmarish playfulness. Gone are the impossibly elongated arms; the tongue-kiss through the telephone; the frightening scene where Freddy disguises himself as a high school hall monitor. Even the murder scenes aren’t up to snuff – though, to be fair, Craven is peerless in this respect. It’s difficult to compete with that terrifying scene in the original where Amanda Wyss is slashed open, dragged up a wall and across the ceiling by an unseen force, or the classic scene where Johnny Depp gets sucked into his bed and a volcano of blood erupts.

There’s no replacing Robert Englund, but Haley – aided by some very effective burn-victim makeup effects – commands the screen. Too bad the movie he’s in makes no sense. The heroine (played by Rooney Mara) doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that one of her closest friends has just been brutally murdered. Her mom (Connie Britton) suggests the teens are safe because the adults ran Freddy out of town. Uhm…

Then there's the CW aesthetic I mentioned earlier. The opening of the original was like some fucked-up documentary about Freddy Krueger, with the killer putting on his “work gloves” in a grungy-looking boiler room. There’s no scene like that in Bayer’s film, which is afraid to get its feet wet or its hair mussed. Nancy’s believable physical transformation in Craven’s film, as she tries to stay awake and avoid being murdered in her dreams, is similarly MIA. We wouldn’t want Mara looking anything less than movie-star beautiful, now would we? What’s missing from this remake – and many others like it – is the original’s gnarly, grindhouse spirit.