BEFORE: Before I kick off the annual horror movie jam for October, and complete a Chris Hemsworth triple-play, let's take a quick look back at my format breakdown for September:
SEPTEMBER -
6 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Wife, Thirteen, Bad Boys for Life, Gemini Man, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Drunk Parents
5 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Spies in Disguise, Stuber, Bad Education, Lucy in the Sky
4 watched on Netflix: Cookie's Fortune, Tallulah, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Extraction
2 watched on iTunes: The New Guy, Liberal Arts
3 watched on Amazon Prime: The Wilde Wedding, The Circle, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
2 watched on Hulu: Please Stand By, Hearts Beat Loud
22 TOTAL
I know, it was a bit of a sleeper month, some back-to-school films and some indie films that barely moved the needle, a couple Will Smith action films, though, but then the sappiness of Mr. Rogers, the silliness of Will Ferrell and the nightmare that was "Drunk Parents" (still haven't recovered). But half of my films are still coming from cable, that's a trend that doesn't seem likely to change.
October's not going to be a full month, either, just 24 films, because I left a week's worth of room here in case New York Comic-Con happened, or we planned some kind of vacation. Well, no Comic-Con, and no getaway is planned, but my wife and I both have birthdays, so I'll work in the necessary skip days somehow. Even if I don't enjoy these horror movies, I love this chain - maybe that's a bit hard to explain, but it's where we find ourselves. Now, technically, two of October's planned films aren't scary horror films, one's a superhero film and one's more like a fantasy comedy, but connections have to be made somehow, films have been rescheduled here and I really want to clear them from the list, and other films that COULD have fit here, like "Hellboy", have been removed due to close proximity to "Black Widow" - but I'm going to forge ahead with it and try to take it all as it comes. When the month is over, I'm going to be very, very close to the end of regulation play for the year and maybe I'll do a quick re-assess then.
Chris Hemsworth carries over from "Extraction".
THE PLOT: Five friends go for a break at a remote cabin, where they get more than they bargained for, discovering the truth behind the cabin in the woods.
AFTER: Speaking of formats, I'm not quite sure where to count this one - because I watched the first 1/3 on cable on demand, the second 1/3 on my DVD, and the final 1/3 on Hulu. Obviously my first choice was cable, because the digital reception's better than a DVD and also I get the captions, but when I went back to look at something again, the DVR would not stop rewinding, then it wouldn't go forward again - I think there was a bad connection, or the cable company was updating the listings, because after finally stopping it, the search function was unavailable, so I couldn't even find the movie in the menu to pick up where I left off. OK, so there's my back-up DVD, only sometimes the DVD player won't recognize the second film on a DVD with two movies on it, and then I have to turn off the DVD player and wait a few minutes before trying again. It's definitely the player and not the disc that's the problem, because that movie will play fine in the back-up DVD player that's part of a DVD/VCR combo, only then the resolution isn't great. And then even when I could get the primary DVD to play the movie, the TV has a problem with signals from that DVD player when movie scenes are too dark, it makes them even DARKER (umm, thanks?) unless I leave the DVD menu screen up, which helps lighten the image, but blocks part of the picture. Finally I just said "screw it" and checked to see if this film was streaming anywhere just to finish the film without getting too pissed off, even though it was clearly already too late for that.
Anyway, I persevered, and what the hell did I just watch? Admittedly I added this to my list months ago after reading some internet article about, "Hey, here's like the craziest horror movie that you probably haven't seen" which mentioned that it was full of in-jokes and Easter eggs and maybe it was clickbait of the highest order, but I'll admit that I was intrigued. OK, put it on the list. Tomorrow's film was, for a very long time, the planned start of this year's horror chain, then a review of the cast lists suggested that I could tack this one on at the start, and this freed up the films that I was going to use to link TO the horror chain, like "Frailty", and so that became part of the McConaughey chain earlier this year. Somehow, these things keep finding ways to work out for the best this year, but then again, it takes a lot of work on my part to make them work out that way.
Reportedly, this film flew under the radar for several years - it was filmed back in 2009, before "The Avengers" and before "Thor" made Chris Hemsworth a star, and some say that his performance here had a lot to do with casting him as Thor. (Joss Whedon, director of "The Avengers", wrote this one). This was going to be theatrically released in 2010, but then its studio, MGM, had financial problems and sold several films to Lionsgate, who planned to release it for Halloween 2011. It finally hit festivals like South by Southwest in 2012 and then got a theatrical release, April 2012. Even then, I think it was rarely discussed, because I didn't learn about it until this year. But then, I'm still not any kind of horror enthusiast, I still have to force myself to devote time to this genre every year - and now it's more of a habit for me than, say, a true love of the subject matter.
Part of that, I think, is because the entire genre is so ridiculous - that, plus as a kid they scared me silly, I couldn't sleep for days after seeing "Poltergeist" in a theater - so I really needed to get my head straight at some point, and clarify what is real and what is not real. To do that, I had to dismiss all horror movies everywhere and maybe that's why it took me so long to circle back to them. Sci-fi I could watch all day long, and in many ways those films are just as ridiculous, but what makes some horror movies scary is that they're about people just like us, who want to do something completely normal, like go on vacation or go party in the woods, and then something terrible happens. The fact that this WORKS to scare people means that Hollywood is going to use that same tactic again and again - jeez, how many "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm St." movies are there? Not that I've seen any of those...
(ALERT: Possible SPOILERS ahead, turn back now if you haven't seen this or plan to in the future.)
But every once in a while, a film comes along that subverts a whole genre - the last one I saw that did that for horror was "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil", which re-imagined the whole "Chainsaw Massacre" slasher film topic with a bunch of teens who were very accident prone and these two poor innocent rednecks kept getting blamed incorrectly for their deaths. This one goes even a step beyond that, and re-imagines the whole "haunted cabin" motif as a secret cover for a giant corporate or government conspiracy - I don't want to give away the whole plot here, but it involves a giant mission-control sort of set-up, which the film does show us very early on. It's extremely cagey about it for a very long time, like is this a VR simulation, a TV reality prank show or a terrible theme park gone wrong, or what? More to the point, who's watching, who's in charge here? Maybe there's an answer at the end, maybe not, and maybe you buy it and maybe you don't, but life's a journey, not a destination, so I'm not even going to get into all that.
They could have introduced the whole "mission control" storyline much later, if you ask me - but there was a conscious choice made to do that early, but it's an indicator that this is not your standard horror film. Horny teens go to a remote cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash an ancient evil, sure, that's fairly standard. But if the house is full of cameras and microphones, and everyone's actions are being recorded and, to a certain extent, controlled, then that's a whole new layer of extra crazy. Someone's pumping the woods full of pheromones to make the teens horny, and then other drugs in the house to make them stupider - which could go a long way towards explaining why teens make such dumb moves when they know there's a killer stalking the campgrounds. (I think there was a car commercial a couple years ago that riffed on that, with a bunch of teens choosing not to jump into the car and drive to safety, but instead hide in the shack full of buzzsaws, axes and other sharp objects - which allowed the backwoods serial killer to do a take for the camera, as if to say, "Really?").
The thing I wanted to go back and take a look at, which led to all my technical problems while viewing this film, and which was also mentioned in that article I read about the film, was the big white-board in the control room, which detailed all the possible scenarios that could befall our heroes, since the cabin essentially allows them to choose their own path to destruction. Could be vampires, could be ghosts, could be zombies. It's a little like that bit in "Ghostbusters" where a random thought was used to choose the form of the Destroyer. Place your bets, because everyone working in the control room's got money on something, like a giant football pool. One guy keeps betting on "Merman", and it's never going to be "Merman", is it? Not until "The Shape of Water" got released six years later, and I don't know how this movie could possibly have predicted that. (Hey, wasn't Richard Jenkins also in THAT film? Hmm...)
I think in many ways the technicians pulling the strings here are a stand-in for the audience, and this is sort of how some people watch horror movies, they tune in knowing very little and then try to predict where the film is going to go. This can be a tricky thing, because we all love to be surprised, but we also don't want to waste our time and money on a film that doesn't deliver, so some research is required before selecting a movie to watch, but too much knowledge about what's going to happen is also bad, because then we could also feel like we've wasted our time and money if there are no surprises. So that's why I stop talking about the plot at a certain point, because I'll always try to preserve the payoffs if I can. But I don't think it gives away too much to say that the last half hour of this is just plain batshit crazy.
Really, there's no better way for me to celebrate horror films in this Year of Weird Movies than by kicking things off with one of the weirdest. This meta-level horror film somehow explains everything and nothing, and folds the whole genre in on itself so many times that it nearly implodes in an avalanche of crazy nonsense, but I think in a good way. Extra points, I think, for including both a character who's a bigger burnout stoner than Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo" and also working in the REO Speedwagon song "Roll With the Changes".
Also starring Kristen Connolly (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Anna Hutchinson, Fran Kranz (last seen in "Orange County"), Jesse Williams (last seen in "The Butler"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Liberal Arts"), Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Other People"), Brian J. White, Amy Acker (last seen in "Catch Me If You Can"), Sigourney Weaver (last seen in "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years"), Tim DeZarn (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Jodelle Ferland (last heard in "ParaNorman"), Matt Drake, Dan Payne, Dan Shea, Maya Massar, Tom Lenk, Greg Zach, Patrick Sabongui, Nels Lennarson (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Terry Notary (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Patrick Gilmore (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Richard Cetrone, Naomi Gantug, Phoebe Galvan.
RATING: 7 out of 10 Japanese schoolgirls
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