The Cabin in the Woods

I was interested in The Cabin in the Woods from the moment I saw the poster at the movie theater.  I've always wanted to see a Joss Whedon horror movie, and his co-writer/producer credit here is as close as he's gotten to a classic horror film (unless you count Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I don't).  After a strong recommendation from Judas Pato, I had planned to catch it in theaters, but life got in the way and I waited until it was on Blu Ray.  The only reason I was simply "interested" in this movie and not "pee-my-pants excited" was because co-writer/director Drew Goddard had never actually directed anything before.  Like, at all.  On the one hand, it's not like you have to be a veteran director to make a good horror movie, but a little experience never hurts, right?

Cabin in the Woods starts out the way you might think it should.  A group of college coeds are heading off to a remote cabin to enjoy a weekend of drugs, alcohol and sex.  There is the jock (Chris Hemsworth), the slutty vixen (Anna Hutchinson), the stoner (Marty, played by Fran Kranz), the smart guy (Jesse Williams), and the virgin, Dana (Kristen Connolly).

You know, your average group of twentysomethings that are actually probably thirtysomething

Only...none of them actually fit those cookie-cutter molds.  Except Marty, because he is high as a muthafucka, or (as I like to call it) "awful roommate high."  These kids start out as well-rounded characters, but something just seems to change when they get out of their RV and spend some time in the cabin.  Granted, it's a creepy old cabin.  It's a little scary from the outside, but it has all sorts of mounted animal heads on the wall, and this picture in one of the bedrooms:

This is what you hang in the bathroom to subtly discourage guests

Things get even stranger after the group pokes around in the basement.  There, they find a number of curious objects, including a diary.  When Dana reads an inscription from the diary aloud, it awakens a family of hillbilly zombies from the grave.  Will these innocent coeds be able to fight off this undead terror?  Actually, surprisingly, that's not a big issue.  The better question is why are office workers monitoring everything going on in and around the cabin?  And what kind of a monster is Kevin?

"I'd rank him above the angry molesting tree, but beneath the dismemberment goblins"

In case the whole office-drones thing didn't clue you in, The Cabin in the Woods is not your typical horror movie.  It is, however, extremely aware of typical horror movies.  Specifically, horror movie tropes.  I'll get more into that in a bit, but it should be pointed out to the curious that this is a love letter to the horror movie genre.

If this image doesn't whet your appetite, you may want to try Saw XIII

The acting in The Cabin in the Woods is pretty solid.  The hottest actor in this cast is probably Chris Hemsworth, and it was nice to see him play an everyday sort of guy.  It was odd that his character never seemed to let go of his football (Remember, he's the jock!), but Hemsworth played his part well and showed that he can deliver witty dialogue.  He wasn't the main character, though.  That responsibility falls on Kristen Connolly, who was simply likable.  She didn't really stand out to me, but I never disliked her character and I thought the part was played well.  The standout in the cast was Fran Kranz, and he turned in one of the best stoner performances in cinema history.  He looks and talks kinda like Shaggy, but he had the best lines and delivery in the entire film.

"Like, zoinks!"

Speaking of actors who know a good line when they read it, Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford brought the B-plot to life.  It should be no surprise that these guys work well with witty dialogue, but it never hurts to say it out loud.  One of the nice things about this cast, though, is that they all had the benefit of a pretty clever script, which made otherwise dull roles a bit more fun to watch.  Amy Acker definitely benefited from that, as did Anna Hutchinson and Jesse Williams.  And, hey, Sigourney Weaver had a solid cameo, too.  Really, it didn't matter how many dumb things they were required to do as part of the script; they all knew what to do with the lines they were given.

Although not having Hutchinson sing "Oh, Wolfie" was a missed opportunity

I gave the script a lot of credit for how enjoyable the actors were in The Cabin in the Woods, and I don't think that can be overstated.  I am a big fan of Joss Whedon's quip- and pop-culture-heavy dialogue, and Drew Goddard has a history of working on Whedon's TV shows; when you factor that into my love of horror movies, it's pretty obvious that I am the target audience for The Cabin in the Woods.

I would rent the hell out of that cabin

It's not just the dialogue, though.  There are a ton of references and homages to horror movie cliches, and they're all funny --- the "let's stay together/let's split up" bit was priceless.  And those weren't even the funniest parts!  I almost fell off the couch when the Japanese subplot was resolved with a happy frog.  And the list of names on the betting board...!  There are so many instances of pure gold in this movie that I wanted to do an old-timey prospector jig!

Even better than those little tributes was the way that the script justified the actions of your typical dumb horror movie.  That.  Was.  Brilliant.  There was one notable omission, but I'll touch on that shortly...

Okay, so I liked the acting and writing of The Cabin in the Woods.  How about Drew Goddard's direction?  He did almost everything right.  The production values were excellent.  This movie felt like the same amount of attention went into a detail that was on-screen for a split-second as went into the main characters.

Meet Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain, and star of maybe 3 seconds of this film

The action in this movie looked good, the editing was spot-on in terms of maximizing comedic potential.  The cinematography was...well, it was fairly standard, but I won't hold that against him.  The important thing is that he was able to tell a story, a surprisingly complicated story, in a way that made sense.  I'm sure that the story falls apart a little if you watch with a more critical eye, but there was more than enough polish for me to not notice.  My main gripe with Goddard's direction is that there were no scares in this homage to horror movies.

Cool monsters, yes.  Scares, no.

It felt like the entire focus was on being clever --- which was done quite well, admittedly --- which left the true scares no room to grow.  Even when there was a kill that was well-done, the frequent cutting to the office drones commenting on the next trope robbed The Cabin in the Woods of any sense of suspense or drama.  I actually liked the main characters of this movie.  That never happens in horror flicks!  If you are going to develop these characters, I don't see how you can choose not to make their fates dramatic.

How does this scene not lead to horror gold?!?

That's really the only negative feedback I have for The Cabin in the Woods.  This isn't supposed to be as comedic as Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, but it also has fewer legitimate scares than Club Dread.  These three films have a lot in common (good scripts and gore, for instance), but The Cabin in the Woods is waaay smarter and is technically better in almost every way, except slapstick humor.  And yet the movie seems to outsmart itself at times.  I would have loved to jump in my seat at any point instead of laughing very hard when Thor rides his motorcycle.  For as much as I enjoy this movie --- and rest assured, I will be buying it and re-watching it many times --- I was left a little disappointed by the complete lack of horror.  Maybe I won't mind that lack the next time I watch this, now that I know what's in store, but for now I can only say that it's a lot of fun to watch.

The Avengers (2012)

Over the past decade, I (well, okay, we) have been blessed and cursed with the success of the comic book movie.  A sub-genre that was once scorned and ridiculed --- and rightly so, for the most part --- was given new life with the successful launches of the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises.  Since those days, we have seen some great comic book movies (The Dark Knight) and some truly awful ones (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), along with a scattering of less traditional/costume-free entries (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).  The true test of comic book movies, though, comes from how true they can stay to their roots.  I'm not arguing that movies should adhere to the ridiculous continuity of their pulped roots; I'm saying that the logic and tone of the source material is essential to a good adaptation.  One of the most common occurrences in comics is the cross-over; characters from one comic make a guest appearance in another, hopefully impressing new readers and gaining new fans.  Until recently, each comic book movie series took place on its own, in an isolated bubble.  Starting in 2008, though, Marvel Studios began to plan for a Marvel Movie Universe, where their superhero films would all occur in the same general time and place, eventually leading up to a huge team-up movie, The Avengers.  It's a simple idea, but it was also pretty damn risky.  It meant launching multiple movie franchises and having them all be successful enough to encourage the development of The Avengers, where characters require no origin stories and the film can focus on huge special effects.  Is comic book publishing logic enough to make an entertaining movie?  In a word, "yes."

In two words, "Hell, yes"

I don't feel like explaining the plot of The Avengers in detail.  It's not a bad story, but I'm going to go with a "simpler is better" attitude here.  A desperate and petty demigod, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has stolen a tesseract.  What the hell is a tesseract?  Well, here, it looks like a glowing cube, but can apparently do all sorts of things. 

Like make Loki give nasty grins

Loki manages to use this cube to open a doorway in space, allowing aliens to invade Earth because...well, I mentioned the desperation and pettiness, right?  Well, Earth has been through quite a lot over the past few summers, as chronicled in the documentaries Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger; in other words, Earth has some heroes available to defend it. 

Namely, Triangle Man and Person Man

And that's pretty much the plot.

Do you really need more than that in your action movie?  The Avengers does what it sets out to do; it combines a bunch of superheroes in a movie and gives them a suitably intimidating enemy to fight.  The acting in the film is not terribly dramatic, but it's pretty good for what it is.  Robert Downey, Jr is still great as the egotistical and charming Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man).  If this film leaned on any one character in particular, it was Iron Man.  Luckily, Downey is still enormously entertaining in this role.  Chris Evans showed a little bit more range as Captain America this time around, thanks to larger doses of humor and smaller doses of melodrama than in his own movie. 

...and lots and lots of posing

Chris Hemsworth is still fine as Thor, but he spent most of his time here fighting or standing in the background.  The big surprise in The Avengers was how awesome Mark Ruffalo was as the Hulk.  Ruffalo was less tragic than his Hulk movie predecessors, and that went a long way toward making him more fun to watch.  Of course, the most awesome Hulk stuff happened thanks to CGI, but Ruffalo set the stage for it well by making his character seem downright reasonable.

Above: realizing how much better 13 Going on 30 would be with a Hulk

But The Avengers are not made up solely of characters who have headlined their own films.  The group also includes the marksman archer Hawkeye (Jeremey Renner) and the super-spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).  Renner is okay --- it's hard to justify an archer on a team with Thor --- but this role doesn't have enough meat for him to really do much with.  Johansson was considerably less impressive.  Granted, her character was utilized decently, even if she seems way out of her class in the battle scenes; still, the character was boring.  She doesn't carry a lot of scenes on her own, though, so that and her tight pleather outfit more or less balances the defects in her character.

ScarJo, in her biggest action scene.  Even she doesn't buy it.

What about the rest of the cast of thousands?   Samuel L. Jackson finally got to be onscreen for more than a few minutes as Nick Fury and...honestly, I wanted to see him be a bigger bad-ass.  It's not a big deal, but I was hoping for at least one scene where he does something that made my jaw drop; he wasn't bad, but he wasn't jaw-droppingly good, either.  I enjoyed Tom Hiddleston as Loki, even if he was a touch whiny.  Clark Gregg had his most important part and surprisingly wound up being the heart of The Avengers.  It was a little melodramatic as a plot device, but Gregg very likable here.  The rest of the recognizable cast was fine, but contributed little.  Colbie Smulders, Stellan Skarsgard, and Gwyneth Paltrow had the most to do, although only Paltrow was particularly likable.  And if you like playing "spot the actor," you will enjoy looking for Powers Boothe, Harry Dean Stanton, and Alexis Denisof.

The key to the success of The Avengers came from screenwriter/director Joss Whedon.  Whedon has been able to deliver some great lines for many years, but this is easily the best script he has produced to date (that landed on the big screen, anyway).  It might be a little light on emotion, but what little heart it has is taken advantage of fully.  This is a very well-paced action movie, with enough downtime to allow for humor, but enough seriousness to not wind up a Last Boyscout clone.  The secret appears to be how well he times his beats; Whedon did a great job playing with audience expectations, even when it was only slightly.  I have never really thought of him as an actor's director --- I suppose I thought of him as a story-first sort of guy --- but I loved how he had all these heroes portrayed.  The characters butted heads in a believable way and worked together in a way that made sense, too.  Surprisingly, the least likable hero in the film (Black Widow) fell into Whedon's historical comfort zone (strong female leads), but that was a small price to pay for how well he handled the movie's headliners.  I was also impressed with some of the action scenes.  There is one in particular, which shows each Avenger doing their thing in turn, as the camera pans from one hero to the next, that was just awesome to watch on the big screen.

First and foremost, though, The Avengers is an action movie.  And that is an understatement.  Free of boring origin stories or emotional investment, this film was able to provide action scene after action scene, many of which could have been the cool climax to a lesser movie.

 Each scene wowed, but the final battle, which took up a substantial portion of the movie, was thoroughly awesome.  This didn't have to be the case; wanton destruction does not necessarily make a movie fun or exciting (Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I'm looking at you).  But The Avengers was both.  I think it is because each hero had multiple occasions to do something cool; with so many characters swaggering onscreen without interfering with each other, the audience gets scene after scene of characters taking turns at awesomeness.  I should also point out how fantastic the Hulk looked in this movie.  This isn't the first time somebody has created a CGI Hulk, but this was the first time that they used full motion capture; I don't know how much of a difference it made, but his face did look pretty Ruffalo-like.

Remember that time Mark Ruffalo was shot with lasers?

Even better than the motion capture was the general attitude of the Hulk in this movie.  I don't want to spoil it for anyone by over-explaining it, but the Hulk almost stole the show.  To put it another way, The Avengers does such a good job rehabilitating the Hulk character that I can't wait for another Hulk movie.

The Avengers is, of course, not blemish-free.  It is a big, dumb action movie, after all.  The general plot of the first half was a little weak; "get captured" is rarely a step in an excellent scheme.  The aliens were a little generic.  I would have liked to see more types of alien attackers, but I suppose they were all essentially faceless henchmen.

Literally faceless

Hawkeye and Black Widow never really justified their inclusion in this story.  I don't think either character was far off from fitting in, but neither really clicked, either with each other or the rest of the cast.  The post-credits reveal of the behind-the-scenes villain might have made a handful of comic fans titter, but it was nowhere near enough to get the average moviegoer excited.  Are any of these problems enough to seriously dent the fun factor of this movie?  Not really.  Of course, an action movie is only as good as its villain, and Loki wasn't quite dastardly enough for my tastes.  Still, Hiddleston played the part well and made him evil to a satisfying degree.

Another flaw: when was Hawkeye in Inception?

How good is The Avengers?  I would argue that it is the best pure action movie to come out in at least a decade.  Please feel free to disagree with that statement; I have put some serious thought into it already and am primed for a fight.  Chances are, you already know how much you will enjoy The Avengers.  Fans of action movies and comic book flicks will be in love.  No matter how good you think it will be, you're underestimating it.  If you're on the fence, this is one of the most pleasurable summer popcorn flicks ever.  If you are tired of soulless comic book movie adaptations, then this Frankenstein's monster made of the wet dreams of every marketing team everywhere will not change your mind.  It is what it is, and it's possibly the best of what it is.  I normally have to take a few grains of salt when sitting down to enjoy a comic book flick, but The Avengers is so much fun that I fully expect it to join the illustrious ranks of Die Hard and Predator in my action movie library.  In other words, I'm planning to watch this a few dozen more times and expect to love it every time.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Every so often, I watch a movie that reminds me of the decade in which I came of age: the 90s.  While not as sleazy as the 70s, and not as absolutely stupid as the 80s, American pop culture in the 90s was still fairly ridiculous.  I don't often watch movies that are defined by their decade, but I made an exception for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"Ridiculous"how?  Two words: Butterfly Vagina

Before I continue, I have to admit that I am a fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show.  I'm not much of a TV fan, but I have been sucked into that teen melodrama and found it surprisingly entertaining.  I am not going to compare the two, though; I believe that serial storytelling is vastly different than filmmaking.  I just want to acknowledge ahead of time that I might have a soft spot in my heart for Joss Whedon, who created the TV show and wrote the screenplay to the film.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the story of (not surprisingly) Buffy (Kristy Swanson), your average, run-of-the-mill Valley Girl stereotype, circa-1992.  Basically, she cares about fashion, shopping, boys, and using "like" at least three times in every sentence.  Like, gag me with a cliche.  Buffy's life would be normal, if not for the intervention of Merrick (a slumming --- even by his low standards --- Donald Sutherland).

Sutherland, contemplating seppuku

Merrick finds and trains the Chosen One in each generation (he's old) to battle the vampire master, Lothos (Rutger Hauer).  The Chosen One is always a teenage girl, and she always loses to Lothos; this time, it's Buffy's turn.  On a side note, though, Merrick has a worse losing record than my beloved Chicago Cubs; if this were professional sports, he would have been fired at least a hundred years ago.  Anyway, in a bit of plot convenience, Lothos likes to treat his only viable opposition as sport, so he and his vampire minions set up shop in Buffy's hometown of Los Angeles.  Can Buffy defeat the dastardly vampire leader?  What effect will Merrick have on this Valley Girl?  What the hell is an Oscar winner doing in this movie?  All this, and more, can be answered by watching this movie. 

But who would want to do that?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not, by any imaginable definition, a good movie.  You can blame many people for that, but I think the first targets should be the actors.  Kristy Swanson is, quite simply, not much of an actress.  Unfortunately, her character goes through a pretty typical story arc, so her performance seems even more bland and predictable than usual.  Donald Sutherland is pretty decent as a creepy old man, but he does make me wonder exactly what his acting standards are; does he look for choice roles, decent money, or just someone who will offer to buy him Funyuns?  Rutger Hauer had swelled to his current size by this point, so he wasn't as physically intimidating as Blade Runner-era Rutger would have been.  Hauer is only a little subpar in this role, primarily because his character is stupid (he deliberately allows his enemy to get stronger) and his costumes and makeup were occasionally laughably bad. 

Smirkingly bad, at the very least

Surprisingly, the supporting cast is pretty solid.  Luke Perry played Buffy's love interest, and he managed to have some reasonable reactions --- when weird stuff starts happening, he tries to leave town --- as well as some of the better lines in the movie.  David Arquette has a small role, but the banter between him and Perry was one of the better aspects of the film.  Paul Reubens doesn't make for a very fearsome vampire, but his comic timing provides some of the movie's best jokes, particularly with his death scene.  You might also recognize Stephen Root and Hilary Swank in fairly boring character roles, as well as Ben Affleck, Ricki Lake, and Thomas Jane in bit parts.  None of them are particularly interesting to watch here, but it can be fun to spot them before they were famous.

Vampire or extra from Wayne's World?

This is the only feature film directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui and I think I know why.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a story that, probably, shouldn't work.  The premise alone guarantees a fairly cheesy movie experience.  Kuzui doesn't go much further with the idea than that; in fact, I believe that the Wisconsin-ish levels of cheesiness present in the movie are due to Kuzui making lazy choices and settling for stereotypes and easy jokes.

Thankfully, no stakes-for-dildos jokes

I suppose you can blame a lot of that on Joss Whedon's script, too.  This is an odd script, though; while there are a lot of lame jokes and gags, there are also a few genuinely funny and clever moments.  For every Valley Girl-ism, there's a line like, "He ruined my new jacket...!  Kill him a lot."  I hesitate to say that the filmmakers butchered his script, but...this screenplay draft is a lot cooler than what ended up on-screen.

For example, Luke Perry's friend didn't look or sound like an Arquette

That's not to say that the movie is awful...it's just not very good.  There are some clever lines and it managed to blend comedy and horror together --- unfortunately, it was neither scary or funny enough to truly work.  Still, it's kind of cute for what it is: a stupid comedy-horror hybrid.