Author Archive: jsomers

Friends, I saw The Cabin in the Woods over the weekend. It’s rare these days that I actually buy into hype and get excited about a movie, but this one grabbed me. It just looked mysterious and cool, like that kid at a high school party smoking weed right out in the open, wearing sunglasses, and you’re fifteen and you see him and think, shit, if I could just hang out with that dude I’d be set for life.

So, this isn’t a review. I liked the movie a great deal, but everyone in the universe is reviewing it and breathlessly praising/criticizing the twists and turns and the premise, which is so huge and ungainly it either works for you or doesn’t, frankly. It worked for me. Enough said.

No, what I’m most excited about is the five minute sequence towards the end of the film where everything goes batshit insane. I think of this moment as the Natural Batshit Moment. Warning, I’m a gonna spoil the heck out of this movie.

The Natural Batshit Moment in a story is when you come to a point in the plot where something you’ve set up long before is sprung into action and the pace of the story goes into overdrive for a bit, careening off into complete joyous insanity – but it feels natural, like a piece clicking into place instead of a desperate attempt at injecting life into your moribund plot. Towards the end of The Cabin in the Woods, our two surviving sacrifices make their way down into the corporate offices. On the way they encounter a selection of the supernatural horrors kept in cages for use in their ritual sacrifice to the Elder Gods – it being revealed earlier that the evil they summon to destroy them all are trucked up in an elevator – and when pinned down by a cleanup SWAT team of sorts, they notice a huge, candy-like PURGE SYSTEM button. So they press it, releasing the horrors hidden under the cabin in waves, delivered promptly every few minutes by the dinging elevators.

Put aside the silliness of a PURGE SYSTEM button like that – we’re talking a universe where giant spiders and Pinhead-knockoffs are kept in glass cages to be delivered unto unsuspecting, drugged teenagers. Forget the silliness, and just sit back and enjoy the insane spectacle of the buttoned-down corporate environs being invaded by the nightmare creatures they’ve been serving upstairs as part of their jobs. This is batshit territory, but the story earned it. One, we’re shown how subdued and corporate the basement areas are – these fucks are killing innocent teens as part of their jobs. Two, we pretty much know the creatures are selected and delivered already, so the “storage system” isn’t too much of a stretch. Three, it doevtails nicely with the protagonists being pinned down with no way to fight back – except to purge the system.

The sequence that follows is fantastic. The quick shots of nightmare fuel killing the salarymen and women are quick and creepy. The throwaway scenes of people committing suicide rather than be taken by their worst nightmares are brutal and done with the right touch of blank affectlessness. The chaos, the panic – it all feels right. These people might work for some ginormous conspiratorial nightmare factory, but they woke up that morning, drank some coffee, went to their day job, and started making plans for diner. And then someone released the monsters, and the place became a massacre.

The rest of the movie is OK. Better than most, worse than others. This one sequence, however, will always raise The Cabin in the Woods up beyond the mediocre for me. When structuring plots it’s always hard to come up with a Natural Batshit Moment. You always want that crazy moment of freefall, that exhilarating sequence where plot points come together and send the reader/viewer on a brief gravity-free mission to fuck yeah. But it’s hard to pull off. The Cabin in the Woods pulls it off, and for a few minutes there every time the elevators dinged I almost cheered.

So there.

All right, let’s discuss Sucker Punch. First, some stipulations:

1. Sucker Punch is not a good movie.

2. However, something this banal and shallow almost certainly has to be this banal and shallow on purpose or life has no meaning and I might as well shoot myself in the head right now.

In fact, the banality, shallowness, and ridiculousness of this film is very likely the whole fucking point. I’m going to assume you’ve watched it, and thus know the story, as I will not offer a summary and will offer generous spoilers.

Here’s the thing: Zack Snyder thinks he’s smarter than he actually is, and to give credit where it is due, he tried to do something remarkable here. I think. The whole thing is so incoherent this all might be some sort of Dying Dream where my brain, murdered by awfulness, attempts to create a new reality that makes more sense. I think Zack Snyder made most of his movie ridiculous and meaningless on fucking purpose.

Consider: The title of the movie, when considered after having watched it, pretty obviously signifies a trick.

Consider: The set-up to the plot is perfunctory, barely sketched. I get the feeling Snyder would have preferred to just cold-open in the asylum and not bothered explaining how Baby Doll got there. In fact, that might have been the wiser choice, for all the good the wordless set-up actually does.

And then, just as Don Draper is about to shove a pick up Baby Doll’s nose and lobotomize her, bam! We are dropped into two levels of bullshit in which nothing matters. The use of the word levels is intentional, because while the first part of this portion of the movie is just a bad, boring Caged Heat riff, the second part is best described as Extended Video Game CutScenes. In the first level of bullshit, Baby Doll filters actual events in the asylum through her imagination as she sketches a plan to break out. In the second level of bullshit, she and her fellow inmates murder hundreds of mooks in order to prosecute their plan. But don’t worry; it is specifically stated that the mooks are not human, so we shouldn’t feel at all conflicted about their wholesale murder.

That’s important.

So here, then, is the trick, the sucker punch. We’re told explicitly not to worry about the slaughter, because it doesn’t matter. And the artificiality of the bordello level appears to imply that none of the main characters will be killed. It’s falseness, stylized design, and clear implication that it’s all a dream coupled with the ludicrous nature of their bloodless adventures makes your mind wander, secure that none of the pretty girls will get killed. Maybe they’ll be in danger, as Rockett is once or twice early on. Maybe a mission will go wrong somehow. But nothing’s going to happen in these two layers, because these two layers are bullshit, and Snyder works hard to make sure you’re aware they are bullshit. And we, the audience, are familiar with the tropes that apply to these kinds of bullshit and so we think we know what’s going to happen.

And then, boom! The girls die.

That, of course, is the sucker punch of the movie. After working hard to convince you that none of the main characters is going to die, he kills off three main characters in ten minutes. Their deaths are not really heroic or beautiful. They don’t really die for anything. After spending an hour or more convincing you that the story is just cutscene nonsense, he shoots them in the head, smears blood on his fingers, and paints a question mark on your forehead with it.

I’m not sure I would have liked a successful Sucker Punch, to be honest. This kind of haughty See? You’re the Monster! kind of storytelling is dull. Yes, yes, I am desensitized because of media violence. Fuck you, Zack Snyder. However, at least Snyder tried something. It didn’t work, and maybe it sucked, but he tried. I give him that.

Let’s also consider, as a parting gift, the clear implication that Blue the Orderly has been forging lobotomy documents for years in order to rape lobotomized girls. That, my friends, is what scientists call Entertainment.

Is there anything less engaging on television than The Walking Dead right now? I mean, Jebus. This show is becoming a seminar in how to take apocalyptic zombie fiction and make it boring. Here’s the recipe, in case you’re interested in creating your own boring apocalyptic zombie story as a sleep aid for the restless:

1. Have very, very few zombies. Zombies do show up from time to time on this show, and when they do it’s usually effective. But for a world overrun by the walking fucking dead, the characters spend a lot of time sitting around, sunning themselves, with no zombies, like, anywhere near them.

2. Put your characters in stasis for long periods of time. By my reckoning, the survivors have been at the farm for sixty or seventy years at this point. The farm is magically resistant to zombie invasion, so the characters are just sitting around talking endlessly about … being on the farm. When they originally arrived at the farm I thought this was a decent idea: On the one hand, the implied security of the farm, it’s resemblance to a normal life would tempt our merry band of survivors to steal it, or force their way into it. And of course I fully expected – and still expect – the survivors to destroy the place, to lead the Walkers there and see it burned to the ground. The fact that neither of these things – or something else I didn’t predict – has happened means the characters have just been sitting around, with occasional bouts of action clearly thrown in just to jolt the audience from its nap.

For a short while, admittedly, the missing girl storyline justified this. I could get behind that. But then the girl was missing for what seemed like years, and I’d lost interest in her story long before the Reveal. The Reveal was decent enough, yes, but would have worked better if they’d snipped a lot of the intervening story out, like a tumor.

3. Revert to SitCom character stability. I think we get it by now: Rick is moral, indecisive, and prone to lengthy sermons on This Is How We Live Now. Shane is angry and unstable, prone to violence. All of the characters now have a schtick, and by gum they are steady. Any time the show flirts with the possibility that Rick might grow a little less conflicted, or Shane might restore some of his humanity, or Dale might stop being the nagging, ineffective Voice of Timid Reason, they find a way to write their way out of it. God forbid a character actually evolve, because that would mean they’d have to find something else to write instead of another scene where Shane rants and raves about how he’s the only one capable of keeping everyone safe.

This is, of course, can be easily corrected, and likely will be by the end of the season as they ramp up a spectacular finale. In the mean time, I’ve stopped watching. If I read some reviews that urge me to reconsider, I’ll be happy to. until then, I’m sick of the Hand Wringing Zombieless Zombie Apocalypse Gang.