are you even listening to me? THE CABIN IN THE WOODS thread (WARNING: SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILEROS! SPOILIDAD!)

the whole hilarious Whitford/Jenkins/title card thing

The title card thing is a total lift from Eastbound & Down, in execution, soundtracking, and even aesthetic (filling the whole frozen frame)!

no, it's from Funny Games

In Italian, but you get the idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgczUZXVKWA&feature=related

Inconsistency unrelated to enjoyment: how can such a regular huge-scale save the world ritual that takes place across the globe and regularly puts dozens of young people in danger at the hands of supernatural creatures, a game of sorts run by several hundred staffers and scientists and soldiers, possibly remain a secret?

well, we have to assume "massive government conspiracy", which seems sufficiently plausible to me for the purposes of meta-movie comedy

also agree completely with the excerpt from the slate review that lex posted. my emotional investment in the last ten minutes was practically zilch, and after the madhouse of the final act, it came as a bit of a letdown. didn't diminish my enjoyment of the film as a whole though.

But why would there even need to be a government conspiracy?

Because, like, those Japanese school girls? And all the other victors? Won't they just go home and tell everyone they conquered an ancient ghost spirit or giant ape? The gov conspiracy would therefore entail an elite squad killing all those Japanese kids to keep the secret secret. Which is possible (again, I'm just arguing for the sake of it, I liked the movie, and this aspect of it doesn't bother me for a second), but again begs the question: wouldn't it just be easier to kill a bunch of people then rely on this faulty Rube Goldberg scenario?

i don't think the survivors need to be killed. so long as they don't know anything about the involvement of the puppetmasters, their story is that they successfully defeated a ghost or demon or kevin or w/e. people tell crazy stories every day, after all. just provides more belief fodder for the next round of young victims.

i got the impression that the sacrifice's mechanics weren't entirely the result of the puppetmaster's desires. they pine for the simplicity of throwing a virgin in a volcano, after all. we don't really get any answer as to why things are the way they are, but that's okay, imo. an unanswered question isn't necessarily a plot hole. i assumed it was a product of the old ones desires, bureaucracy and the way we now process fear in our culture. the scenarios had to resemble horror movies because horror movies are the "myths" we now use to relate to the idea of supernatural terror and evil.

strike on or the other of those "after alls"

Kiko's spirit will live in the happy frog

lol at complaints about that this became less satisfying in "the last 10 minutes" [aka after the sacrifice is well and truly botched] - u r grumpy old ones do u see?

Kiko's spirit will live in the happy frog

I smell sequel!

Hell Comes To Frogtown!

lol at complaints about that this became less satisfying in "the last 10 minutes" [aka after the sacrifice is well and truly botched] - u r grumpy old ones do u see?

oh sure, but that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card. big exposition scene that reveals only what we already know plus a rote moment of crisis with no possible good outcome = a dud of an ending no matter what the genre or theme. plus shouldn't we old ones be thrilled that we finally got to smash the world at the end?

lol. best title card use since Drag Me to Hell, imo!

― Nhex, Sunday, April 15, 2012 10:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I thought the same thing! I enjoyed this movie much more than I expected to.

the more i think about it the more i think "sorry i let the werewolf attack you...and ended the world" is one of my fav all time last lines

holy shit, hell comes to frogtown! THE DANCE OF THE THREE SNAKES

i enjoyed this movie. my wife and i saw this and hunger games on the same day and i didn't realize til this morning that the dude who plays gale and the "jock" from this movie are brothers.

CITW was much better than hunger games btw.

Which one is Gale? Is he the bro who's in the background of that movie for, like, a minute? Must be, because the other one is Peeta, right?

Silly Hunger Games. Could have used more Kevin or Reptilius.

i think this was commented on above but it was weird to me that this was being reviewed as a satire of horror movies because as a satire it was pretty weak. "horror movies have stale character archetypes" is not much of a zing. but it worked as a straight-up comedy so whatever.

yeah gale is the dude who's back at home, he's more important in the rest of the series.

richard jenkins and bradley whitford were A+ in this movie btw

It's no satire. It's more subversive takedown.

how so

old ones are the horror audience; puppetmasters are horror filmmakers; pain, gore and death are the "sacrifices" offered by the genre to our baser selves

re: satire i loved the "remember when we could just do the girl and a volcano bit" har har

Yeah, as I mentioned above: we, the audience, pay to see innocent people killed in creative ways to appease ancient audience pleased by the same cliches we accept again and again. Real life audience on the losing end of this.

old ones are the horror audience; puppetmasters are horror filmmakers; pain, gore and death are the "sacrifices" offered by the genre to our baser selves

with this in mind, another way to go would have been to have the "puppetmasters" cheating and just showing horror movies to the old ones to keep them mollified. "look, we sacrified like 11 kids in this year's ritual. it's called friday the 13th. no just be good and go back to sleep for 12 months." they try to keep the gods in the dark about the subterfuge, but something happens and they rise up, hilarity ensues.

I really want to read a Geoffrey O'Brien review of this.

There are prob. tons of essays which dwell upon "the horror genre as a necessary ritual", but I keep flashing back to his chapter in The Phantom Empire, re: horror as a genre where quality may be welcome but simply isn't necessary - as long as certain rules are adhered to, the genre's central ritual has been performed well.

otm, and it helps explain horror fandom's happy acceptance of the most wretched drek, so long as it's "done right".

important to keep in mind that this isn't really unique to the horror genre, though. action movies, thrillers, sci-fi, comedies and even romances are similar. all that's really important is that the right sort of spectacle or reward is offered. this is even more apparent in genre fiction, where the production costs are lower.

Though horror films are the only ones that specifically trade in sadism and blood. Those aspects are ancillary to action flicks and rom-coms and whatever. In a lot of horror films (most horror films?) the promise of blood and death is the draw. I mean, tons of action films are violent, but the creative kills scenes themselves are not the specific draw. Hence the advent/rise of torture porn, wherein the elaborate, prolonged, horribly graphic kills are the main attraction, much as explicit sex is the main attraction in conventional porn.

Like, there are "rituals" to all these genre works, sure, in the form of cliches or whatever, but I'd suggest the rituals in horror films reflect the most poorly on the audience.

Yeah - you could extrapolate it to pretty much every genre, though it does resonate specifically w/ horror; I don't know any rom-com fanatics who spend every Saturday with three nigh-random dvds...

oh yeah, horror fandom is intense. it's like metal fandom that way. but sci-fi fandom is v similar, and that doesn't typically revolve around death/killing at all.

my point was that it's a little to easy, imo, to get caught up in the specialness of horror's "sacrificial offering". lots of popular genres exist to provide a certain type of reward (or punishment, perhaps).

edit: "a little too easy"

"horror as a genre where quality may be welcome but simply isn't necessary - as long as certain rules are adhered to, the genre's central ritual has been performed well"

Yes you'd think the Old Ones (as genre aficionados) might have decided against bringing on the apocalypse, given the undeniably spectacular upside to their ritual going wrong.

Maybe the Old Ones just really hate that whole Lovecraft thing.

Meantime:

http://io9.com/5902424/everything-you-didnt-know-about-cabin-in-the-woods

Though horror films are the only ones that specifically trade in sadism and blood.

r e e a l l l l y? -- 'sadistic' always used to be in the top three adjectives used to negatively describe crime fiction and spy fiction; i think maybe it's a thing lost sight of in the later progress of those genres but there's so much of it buried on some level. how i hate sex murderers, thought morse.

I mean, tons of action films are violent, but the creative kills scenes themselves are not the specific draw.

hm.

Hence the advent/rise of torture porn, wherein the elaborate, prolonged, horribly graphic kills are the main attraction, much as explicit sex is the main attraction in conventional porn.

think about the work 'as' is doing here

"hence the advent/rise of fx porn, wherein the lovingly crafted computer-generated effects shots are the main attraction, much as explicit sex is the main attraction in conventional porn"

That's fine, if you want to split hairs. The only reason there's no real dismemberment in movies is because it's illegal, but the simulation is not so inaccurate as to preclude the comparison. I mean, if you used animatronic dummies, squibs and prosthetics to graphically simulate porn-sex, it'd be close enough to porn to count as porn. But most movies don't bother, because the real thing is a real, real cheap alternative.

r e e a l l l l y? -- 'sadistic' always used to be in the top three adjectives used to negatively describe crime fiction and spy fiction; i think maybe it's a thing lost sight of in the later progress of those genres but there's so much of it buried on some level.

I get it, but here I am being literal. Horror films, at least in the golden years of gore and beyond, are by and large about someone or something doing physical or mental harm to someone. In other genres, said harm is often incidental, not the be-all. That is, no action movie is literally just about some guy blowing things up, though that happens. But many gory horror films are about people getting killed. Like, that is the plot, basically. That's what I mean by sadism; we watch to see horrible things happen.

sure, but there are degrees of sadism

Of course! But I can't think of any genre other than horror where watching people get killed is the whole point. That's what makes, I dunno, "Ten Little Indians" not horror but a who done it.

That's certainly true of certain subgenres within horror, and for the last few decades has often been true of the genre as a whole.

Nevertheless, his tangent grew out of my attempt to make the point that people put up with sub-par filmmaking in other genres, too, so long the films in those genres provide their expected rewards. I agree that horror is somewhat unique in its dedication to death and bloodshed, but it's not unique in offering a reward to the faithful.

"this tangent"

And I agree! I was just stressing that the reward in horror's case is often sadism, which is why it reflects more poorly on the audience than, say, sub-par romantic comedies, sports movies and other films that trade entirely in routine and cliche. It doesn't say anything bad when some plops in a movie, craving nothing more than two attractive people getting together, or the underdog team overcoming the visitors. it does when someone plops in a DVD hoping for just a few creative kills. And maybe a couple of boobs in the process.

And by reflect poorly, I really do mean this in the abstract. People watch movies for all sorts of reasons.

i watch horror in part for the gore, transgression and titillation. perhaps this does reflect badly on me, but c'est la guerre, it's by far the least of my faults and vices

also, i'm not sure why such things should "reflect badly" anyway. genres such as the war film, the thriller, the action movie and the murder mystery play to similarly macabre, brutal and/or bloodthirsty interests, and no one seems to have a problem with that.

ironically, i'm very vocal about the fact that i draw the line at prolonged depictions of helpless suffering, which i see as unbearably sadistic. perhaps i'm trying to excuse my own base appetites by condemning them in others. and perhaps we all draw a similar line somewhere, i dunno...

I hold that onscreen violence/gore is one of the few (or only) instances where a filmmaker has to create something that exists irl, but that s/he's likely never seen. Aside from other dramatizations. (Unless there's a secret vault of filmed decapitations at Horror School)

i don't think anyone i've ever known who has been into deeply over the top and horrible horror film has been into it for reasons of sadism ... ?

(or, okay, none of them have gone 'man, i really enjoyed watching that man's head be sliced open like a cantaloupe with that machete. it just did it for me, it did')

& going from my own experience of watching ... any horror movie ever, my feelings at scenes of on-screen violence are way, way less likely to be pleasure-at-another's-pain than feelings associated with on-screen violence in a cop film or an action film -- the audience is invited to empathise w/ james bond's sadism more than it is jigsaw's. whatever that means -

also josh you kind of completely missed the point about why the porn comparison doesn't work, but i'm assuming that's because you hate women