I HATE JOSS WHEDON / JOSS WHEDON SUCKS *
I haven't yet seen Cabin in the Woods. A lot of people have recommended it to me, many of them trusted sources with generally good taste in movies and who have no special love for Joe Whedon. And, you know, I don't want to offend any of you. I know you guys are cool and all, but I've got issues with Joe. Part of it is that I hate popular things on principle. Part of it is that, like Jesus and Ron Paul, he's got such a fucking obnoxious fan base. Anyway, what I'm saying is, I'm not trying to shit on you if you liked this movie. Not yet. Not until I've actually seen it. The movie could be great as far as I know. For a little while, I was almost convinced to put aside my usual revulsion for all things Whedon and give it a chance. After all, I love irreverent satire and I am a huge horror buff, so I'm probably the target audience for this flick, after all. But then that aforementioned idiot fan base got in the way when I read the world's smuggest Cabin in the Woods non-review and then I got so angry that I figured, fuck it, I'll wait for video.
Here's my thing about Whedon. First, I personally don't think he's very good. With the exception of Toy Story, my most positive reaction to any project he's been involved with has been tepid indifference. The Buffy Movie was a pointless mess, Alien 4 was an atrocity, Waterworld was a tedious bloated slog, and Dr. Horrible was blatant pandering nerdwank. People tell me that where Whedon really shines is in his TV writing, but I don't really see evidence of any great genius there either. Buffy was barely tolerable at best, Firefly muddled along pointlessly, and Dollhouse...the less said about that, the better. Fans say that Whedon's strengths are his witty dialogue, his strong feminist ethos, and his uncanny knack for setting genre conventions on their ear. Again, I'm not seeing it. Most of his witty dialogue consists of short shelf life pop-culture references, and he's so concerned with showing off how very very clever he is that he puts zany puns into the mouths of every character whether it makes sense or not. And his supposed feminism is pretty thin gruel. Sure, he fills his work with thin young beautiful women who beat up monsters. I suppose that's more feminist than, say, thin young beautiful women getting chased by monsters, but it's not exactly saying anything deep. When people talk about a STRONG female character, Whedon apparently thought they meant ONLY PHYSICALLY strong (But not, you know, all gross and muscular or anything, nono. They'd still have to be conventionally pretty and petite. ) It's exactly the sort of half-hearted Hollywood lip service that Kate Beaton lampooned in her "Strong Women" cartoons. As for upsetting genre conventions...
Dr. Horrible was touted as a "deconstruction" of the superhero genre, as if we needed Whedon to point out to us that, hey, turns out that the whole superhero thing is kind of silly. No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for the memo, I'm glad someone finally had the guts to knock those superheroes down a peg. Look, Whedon, let's assume that there are, somewhere, some people who still don't know that superhero stories are kind of goony. You're still late to the game, because every idiot who's ever worked on a comic book has had the EXACT same idea and they all think WOW, WON'T THIS BE THE MOST ORIGINAL THING EVER. And do we really need any more commentary on the problems of superhero narratives in a post-Watchmen world? My point is that Dr. Horrible's brilliant genre-busting innovation was that the villain was actually NICE and the hero was kind of a jerk. I've written about this elsewhere before ( http://agoutirex.livejournal.com/111310.html#cutid1 ) so I don't want to repeat myself too much, but, if that's enough to blow your mind...I dunno, it doesn't seem like much of a twist. What is he really saying about superheroes with that twist, anyway? That the black-and-white good vs evil morality of superhero stories is not reflective of reality, where morality comes in nuanced shades of gray? Again, not exactly an earth-shattering revelation.
Anyway, Whedon's got a big fetish for genre "deconstruction," because he's very clever, you see. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I saw he was turning the awful regard of his baleful gaze to horror. Like I said before, I love horror. And one of the things that I love about horror is that, even among genre fans, horror is considered something of a red-headed stepchild. That means that the same awful mouth-breathing fantards that have made it such a chore to enjoy science fiction and fantasy have largely kept out of horror, viewing it as gutter entertainment beneath their high-brow intellectual nerd sensibilities.
But now Whedon's gone and wiped his greasy mitts all over the horror film, helpfully pointing out to the hoi polloi that the cliches already rejected by any half-way decent flick are TRITE and OVER-PLAYED. But, you know, horror will TOTALLY never be the same after this fucking tour de force, assuming that you ignore the existence of Scream, Evil Dead, Dead Alive, Slither, Cabin Fever, There's Nothing Out There, Wes Carven's New Nightmare and countless other satire/deconstructions/whatevers that came before. Now all those fat beardy monsters in "Bazinga" shirts, who up til now were content to stay over THERE with their Dr. Who and their Game of Thrones, are going to come over HERE and talk about how they've all been LONG TIME HORROR FANS, going ALL THE WAY BACK TO CABIN IN THE WOODS. People who, like Whedon, have no real love or understanding for the genre, but who still feel compelled to pontificate at length about what's wrong with it. Thanks, we'll take all your input and put it in the file. Here, I'll file it under D. For DUMB.
So here's the review that turned me off of seeing Cabin in the Woods. It's called "Why Some People Hated "The Cabin in the Woods"" by Jess d'Arbonne of the [Joe] Whedon Examiner (what).
"Since [Joe] Whedon and Drew Goddard’s genre-defying horror film “The Cabin in the Woods” came out last week, it has been getting wildly mixed reviews. While it maintains a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, its Cinema Score has plummeted, with most viewers giving it a C, and women in particular ranking it with a D+."
Critics love it, but audiences don't? Not surprising, mainstream reviewers rarely reflect the tastes of the public, no matter how much they claim to represent the COMMON MAN. Take a look at the slavish critical praise heaped on Martin Scorcese's Hugo and compare it to the lackluster response of the general public. Anyway, critics simply can't be trusted on horror; most don't know the first thing about the nature or purpose of the art. They like to look down on horror, imagining that anyone who enjoys on-screen mayhem must be by definition a drooling psychopath. They don't understand the first goddamn thing about horror, which is why the one slasher that received fairly decent reviews on its debut was the dull-as-dirt Wrong Turn. Wrong Turn is your bog-standard yuppies-get-lost-in-the-woods-and-killed-by-inbed-hillbillies plot that has served so many grindhouse directors so well -- exactly the sort of movie that Whedon is skewering with Cabin in the Woods. So why did it get so much praise when it first came out? Because you never get a clear glimpse of the hillbillies' faces. Here's the thing. Hillbilly slasher movies are like ragtag-team-of-underdogs sports movies. We already know how the movie's going to end, so the only thing to keep us invested is how interesting the canon fodder characters are and how grotesque the hillbillies are. And you know what's a lot more grotesque than seeing the back of a mutant yokel's head for an hour and half? SEEING HIS MESSED UP FACE. High-brow critics lapped it up, under the assumption that this weird little game of keep-away was a masterstroke of Hitchcockian tension building. Which was weird, because it's not like audiences didn't know what was happening. When a hulking brute in overalls shows up with his back to the camera, we don't all go "Gee, I wonder if he's going to murder someone? I can't be sure because I can't see his face!" It's like how proper, high-art critics can't stand the sight of gore. It makes their sensitive tummies hurt. So they're quick to dismiss any movie that wallows in grit and viscera as schlock but they'll praise the movie that keeps its pristine lily-white hands clean as a "psychological thriller." Critics apparently don't know what the point of horror is. Sometimes keeping something out of the audience's view works wonderfully to ratchet up the fear -- in Joy Ride, Rusty Nail was made all the more menacing by the fact that he was just a disembodied voice on the CB radio. But my point is that it doesn't work in EVERY instance as some people believe it does.
Speaking of interesting characters, I've noticed that non-horror fans will wring their hands over how MORALLY BANKRUPT a horror movie is when a sympathetic character is tortured or killed, but they go giddy when they see movie killers hack up cardboard caricatures. Lazy horror movies are always structured as simplistic morality plays, assuming that the audience comes just to see karmic justice visited upon unlikable jerks. There's some truth to that, but ultimately the whole point of horror is to shock, terrify and unsettle, and you're not going to get that reaction when you're only showing bad things happen to bad people. The horror-as-morality play structure is a cop-out; it lets the viewer enjoy horrible gory excess but then leave the theater with an unburdened conscious because, well, those characters in that movie deserved what they got. A truly nihilistic horror movie doesn't give you an easy out like that, and it's precisely because they don't give you that catharsis that they are so effective -- and so reviled by the most hoity toity of critics. EBERT, I AM LOOKING AT YOU.
My point is that you never get a good horror movie when you have a gaggle of characters that you want to see die. (The worst movie for this in recent memory was the Friday the 13th reboot). It honestly doesn't take much to get an audience invested in characters and it makes a horror movie infinitely more effective. I like to point to the remakes of House of Wax and The Hills Have Eyes as examples of two horror flicks that, while they aren't high art, manage to endow their characters with enough heft and substance that seeing them get killed one by one is actually kind of upsetting.
"As to why people loved “The Cabin in the Woods,” it’s not hard to figure out. As a film, it was clever, funny, entertaining, and very well-made. As a horror film… well, it defies the categorization of “horror film” on purpose, so one can’t really judge it against a scale of other contemporary horror."
So, apparently, Cabin in the Woods was not intended to be a horror film. Okay. That's convenient, because the number one complaint that I've heard about it so far is that it's not scary, and you would think that would be kind of a problem for a movie that's trying to say something about horror. But no, it's not scary ON PURPOSE. That's a new one. Usually when his movies flop, Whedon just blames it on executive meddling by those darn studio suits. But okay, let's assume it's not scary because of Whedon's genius. That's still odd. Because, you know, Watchmen was a deconstruction of the superhero genre, but it still essentially worked as a superhero story. High Noon was a deconstruction of the western genre, but it still stood up as a decent western in its own right. But Cabin in the Woods ISN'T intended to function as a horror movie? So if this movie isn't meant for horror fans, who are clearly too dumb to get it (despite a history of supporting tongue-in-cheek movies ike Evil Dead 2 that function as both horrors and satires), who's the target audience? Ironic hipsters? Whedon fans?
"But why did some people hate “The Cabin in the Woods” more than Rick Santorum hates the idea of women voting?"
Oh ho ho, I see what you did there! How clever, equating a viewer's dislike for a movie with Santorum's lunacy. The unstated implication, of course, is that both stances are equally bone-headed and that only loopy fundie noodleheads who probably voted for Santorum could dislike Joe Whedon's latest MASTERPIECE.
"It’s hard to pin down an answer when most of the documented reactions from normal movie-goers through social media is that “it's gay as shit.” I think we can all agree that anyone who uses “gay” as a pejorative is not exactly what you’d call "bright." The knee-jerk reaction from Twitter and Tumblr users who didn’t like the film has been unhelpful at best, and downright immature and stupid at its worst. Aside from critics, people who didn’t like “Cabin” are not particularly eloquent about their reasons why."
She's saying that, if you didn't like the movie, it's because you're dumb. She's supporting this by noting that people are posting shitty rants on Twitter and Tumblr, the two greatest hives of retardation on the Internet. Because I'm sure that the people who enjoyed the film are tweeting and tumbling in prose worthy of Oscar Wilde himself. No, they are not. They are saying EPIC WIN and SHINY. Now, I personally know a few intelligent people who liked the movie, but the vast majority of the reaction I've seen online is typical Whedon blow-jobbing, where no one bothers to explain why they liked his work because IT'S JUST SO OBVIOUS and EVERYONE ALREADY AGREES and let's just say it was AWESOME.
"And it's not people who hate horror movies who are hating on "Cabin." Quite the reverse. People aren't objecting to it because of the scary parts or the blood, gore, and dismemberment. They're objecting to the plot."
This isn't surprising to me at all. It was marketed as a horror satire, so most people probably went in expecting something that worked on both levels. Everything that I hear indicates that it's very clever in that affected, twee way that all Whedon films are, but the zany, wacky dialogue constantly undercuts any tension that might be had. Not surprising, humor and horror are a delicate blend and they're hard to do right together. Whedon can only write in one style, so he probably thought he would port over his usual pop-culture-reference stew without any modification.
"The answer might be very simple: People don’t like surprises. Judging by some of the more… simple… reactions on Twitter and Tumblr, some people went into “Cabin” expecting a by-the-book horror movie, and were startled when they got something completely different. They were forced out of their comfort zone. Their expectations were thwarted and stomped upon. And they did not appreciate it."
"Try to put yourself in the shoes of a casual movie-goer, someone who doesn’t gush over a particular director like Drew Goddard, or go into paroxysms of joy at the mere mention of Joss Whedon’s name. We’ll call this person “Bob.”
"Bob works hard five days a week and doesn’t have a lot of time to relax. When Bob does get the change to indulge in some entertainment on a Friday night, the last thing Bob wants to do is be forced to actually think about his entertainment. He wants mindless, stress-free entertainment to distract him from his life for an hour or two. And there's nothing wrong with that."
Here's where we get into the real meat of the argument, and it's basically the same snobbish disdain that horror movies and fans always get from other nerds.
Because horror movies are stupid, you see. Whedon is so clever, he's created a horror movie so clever that he excised the horror. This horror movie is better because it's not scary and if you think different it's because you're a country-fried rube who probably drove to the see the movin' picture show on a tractor while gnawing on a corncob pipe.
It's all there. The horror fan caricature presented here is slightly different than usual -- he's usually described as a drooling serial killer in training rather than a dimwitted yokel, but still. And then there's the weird assumption that the appeal of horror movies is "mindless entertainment," that the same person who enjoys whiz-bang action flicks like Transformers or Rush Hour must by necessity be the same person who likes horror, because what's the difference? They're all interchangeable, those mindless unintellectual non-Whedon-appreciating drones out there in middle America in their relax-fit jeans and ten gallon hats. I know it's difficult, but try to imagine that you're one of those sub-human troglodytes, your sloping rodent-like brow furrowed in terrified confusion as Whedon's opus plays on the screen before your piggy little eyes, the sublime symphony of his Whedonesque bon mots sloughing, uncomprehended, over your reptile brainstem.
"So Bob goes to see “The Cabin in the Wood,” expecting to put his brain to rest for the duration of the film and see the same slasher plot and gruesome effects he’s come to know and be comfortable with from the last unimaginative horror thriller he saw. But instead poor Bob is faced with a complex, multi-layered plot with a quirky sense of humor and more than a little commentary on the entertainment industry and the human condition itself."
"Poor Bob. No wonder he was disappointed--nay, furious--with “The Cabin in the Woods” and its symbolism, subtext, and very Whedony dialogue."
Because horror is all about comfort and soothing familiarity, apparently. That's an odd claim and clearly wrong: horror movies draw people in who want to see visceral, gut-wrenching thrills, who want to be shocked out of their normal work-a-day world by something uncanny, something terrible, something beyond the pale. You leave the theater with your pulse pounding, not a hazy "gee wasn't that nice" sense of well-being. Yeah yeah, I know, poorly made horror movies rely on cliche and refuse to surprise and challenge you... but who goes to a movie wanting it to be dull? And besides, poorly made movies in EVERY GENRE rely on bad cliches. It's not like horror has a monopoly on them. Plus it's not like you never see humor in a genuinely scary movie -- I'm convinced that one of the funniest lines in film history was the deadpan warning delivered by the convenience store clerk in The Ring. And, gee, it's not like horror has ever been used as a vehicle to say anything about the human condition. No, it was just filth until Whedon came along and redeemed it.
Poor Bob. Poor dumb Bob. He's so dumb. What a dumb dummy.
"Then again, maybe marketing is at fault. If someone saw the commercials for “Cabin” and went in expecting yet another “Hostel” or “Saw”-esque slasher, and then got… well, got “Cabin,” then perhaps it was simply that the marketing was misleading or completely ineffective."
Finally! Glad that she recognizes that the problem might be with the marketing rather than the audience. BUT WAIT-
"Marketing “The Cabin in the Woods” presented a uniquely difficult problem. How best to get across the idea of the film without revealing the multiple twists and spoiling the experience for viewers? How to say “This isn’t a horror film. It’s a film about horror films… and it’s funny… and it’s literally not at all what it looks like,” without giving anything away? You can’t. Or at least, you can try, as the ad campaign for “The Cabin in the Woods” did, but you might not be particularly successful."
Oh, never mind, turns out the movie is just SO BRILLIANT that it transcends marketing and there's no way to market it right, so, yeah, the real problem is just that you're too stupid to get it after all.
"Looking at the marketing efforts of “The Cabin in the Woods” objectively, it’s hard to tell what exactly the film is about. And that was no doubt intentional. What viewers process is a group of young people who go out to a remote location and get systematically dismembered and messed with by an unseen menace that is probably either a) A psychopath, b) A deranged evil genius, or c) An experimental government agency enacting all this carnage for its own nefarious purposes. But of course, that is not what “Cabin” is. And if you look no further than the trailers to figure out this film, you’ll go in expecting it to be exactly what it looks like… which it’s not."
You know, I feel kind of bad for the marketing team, because look what they've been given to work with. I mean, Whedon fans are pushing it as a deconstruction of horror but NOT actual horror. Again, who's this movie meant for? People who like seeing things deconstructed? A DECONSTRUCTION? MAN, I LOVE DECONSTRUCTIONS. DON'T EVEN TELL ME THE GENRE, CUZ I DON'T CARE, I JUST WANNA SEE SOMETHING GET DECONSTRUCTED!!! Like all Whedon vehicles, it's clearly meant for Whedon's pre-existing fanbase, the sort of people who will forgive any problems as long as Whedon's name is on it. I know a lot of non-Whedon fanboys liked it too, but I think even they will agree than fanboys are the primary target. They should have just advertised this as HEY IT'S BY JOE WHEDON, GO SEE IT I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ANYMORE
"Normal people don't read interviews with the director before deciding to go see a film. They don't read 1,000 word-long early reviews by scholarly reviewers. They don't read about the symbolism or artistic intent of a movie before buying their ticket and their popcorn and kicking back for an hour or so. Why should they? And because of that, some viewers were completely unprepared for "Cabin." It was not what they wanted, what they were looking for, or what they were willing to consume."
I know she says that "normal" people don't have an obligation to do any further research into a film beyond viewing the trailers, but it's hard not to pick up the faint whiff -- nay, the heavy, cloying stench -- of elitism there, yet another jab at THOSE NON-WHEDON-LOVING DUMMIES who totally deserve what they get for just wanting to sit and drool.
"So essentially, it’s impossible to market to the average movie viewer without spoiling everything and defeating the purpose of the film."
Is this true? The trailers seemed pretty up front about the fact that the cabin was really some sort of elaborate high-tech movie set and the monsters were all fake. The only twist not revealed in the trailers is the WHY of it all. And that, right there, is another indication that Whedon doesn't understand horror. Horror is not concerned with the WHY of things, it's concerned with the WHAT. Do you really care why Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees kill teenagers? Is the motivation behind the villain's random slaughter really the carrot that's luring you into the theater? Sure, it could be interesting, but, unless the reasons behind the villain's actions are themselves so monstrous and unbelievable that they ramp up the terror to the next level, then they're not really all that important. For a good example of a film where the ultimate revelation of the villain's plan makes things infinitely worse, see French torture porn Martyrs. In fact, most horror works better when we don't know the WHY of it. In The Ring, Samara was all the more frightening when she was an unplacatable, unknowable force that came out of nowhere and killed for reasons we couldn't hope to understand. When the sequel actually gave her a backstory...well, it made her kind of dull, to be honest.
I mean, I don't know the ultimate twist here, so maybe it is worthy of the hype. I'll see it when it comes out on video and report back to you. I'm just saying, it better not turn out that they're just filming a reality show.
"While it would be rather rude to say that those who hated “The Cabin in the Woods” are just not intelligent enough to get it, the negative reactions might actually say more about the average movie-goer than about the movie."
She's not saying that you're dumb, but she's saying that you're dumb.
"It’s not that hating “The Cabin in the Woods” makes you unintelligent. As we’ve already discussed, there’s no harm in wanting and expecting mindless entertainment sometimes. It's that "The Cabin in the Woods" is one big, elaborate inside joke. It's a satire on the horror genre, the archetypical "some kids go to a cabin in the woods and all hell breaks loose" movie. And if you're not in on that joke, you can feel... well, dumb.
Nobody likes to be left in the dark, to miss the joke, to feel like their intelligence is being insulted. And that uncomfortable feeling likely happened to a lot of people who were not prepared for "The Cabin in the Woods" by the ineffective marketing, and who were simply looking for mindless, relaxing entertainment."
Relaxing entertainment? Seriously, is this what non-fans think horror is? That's weird. Also, she's saying that you're dumb. She's really laying it on thick here. But, hey, it's okay that you dumb proles like dumb things. You are dumb, after all.
"If you hated "The Cabin in the Woods," it might be that you just didn't get it, but that's not entirely your fault. Do yourself a favor and go watch the next stock horror slasher to come to theaters--something like "Final Destination 13" or "Dismemberment Hotel" or "Psychopaths on Steroids Hunt and Torture Beautiful Young People" or any of the dozen rote, safe, unsurprising horror movies we can expect to see within the next year. Forget "The Cabin in the Woods" ever happened, or leave it to those who are looking for genre satire."
And finally the coup de grace: You didn't like it because you're dumb and you didn't get how clever it is, but we don't hold your tiny pea-sized brain against you. This is like the constant argument that I have with my wife about [i]Mulholland Drive[/i], which she loved and I did not. She keeps trying to get me to read academic critiques of the movie, telling me that they'll totally explain everything and then I'll like it. And I have to tell her that it's not that I didn't get it. I understand Lynch's weird dream logic and how everything is symbolic and how it's really just a guilt hallucination -- I mean, the last twenty minutes of the movie basically lay it all out for you. It's just that I don't like the movie -- not because it's confusing but because it's boring and heavy-handed and ultimately not nearly as deep as it seems to think it is. And d'Arbonne's article makes me suspect that Cabin in the Woods will be the same way.
* Now let's see how long it takes to become the #1 google result for those phrases.
Here's my thing about Whedon. First, I personally don't think he's very good. With the exception of Toy Story, my most positive reaction to any project he's been involved with has been tepid indifference. The Buffy Movie was a pointless mess, Alien 4 was an atrocity, Waterworld was a tedious bloated slog, and Dr. Horrible was blatant pandering nerdwank. People tell me that where Whedon really shines is in his TV writing, but I don't really see evidence of any great genius there either. Buffy was barely tolerable at best, Firefly muddled along pointlessly, and Dollhouse...the less said about that, the better. Fans say that Whedon's strengths are his witty dialogue, his strong feminist ethos, and his uncanny knack for setting genre conventions on their ear. Again, I'm not seeing it. Most of his witty dialogue consists of short shelf life pop-culture references, and he's so concerned with showing off how very very clever he is that he puts zany puns into the mouths of every character whether it makes sense or not. And his supposed feminism is pretty thin gruel. Sure, he fills his work with thin young beautiful women who beat up monsters. I suppose that's more feminist than, say, thin young beautiful women getting chased by monsters, but it's not exactly saying anything deep. When people talk about a STRONG female character, Whedon apparently thought they meant ONLY PHYSICALLY strong (But not, you know, all gross and muscular or anything, nono. They'd still have to be conventionally pretty and petite. ) It's exactly the sort of half-hearted Hollywood lip service that Kate Beaton lampooned in her "Strong Women" cartoons. As for upsetting genre conventions...
Dr. Horrible was touted as a "deconstruction" of the superhero genre, as if we needed Whedon to point out to us that, hey, turns out that the whole superhero thing is kind of silly. No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for the memo, I'm glad someone finally had the guts to knock those superheroes down a peg. Look, Whedon, let's assume that there are, somewhere, some people who still don't know that superhero stories are kind of goony. You're still late to the game, because every idiot who's ever worked on a comic book has had the EXACT same idea and they all think WOW, WON'T THIS BE THE MOST ORIGINAL THING EVER. And do we really need any more commentary on the problems of superhero narratives in a post-Watchmen world? My point is that Dr. Horrible's brilliant genre-busting innovation was that the villain was actually NICE and the hero was kind of a jerk. I've written about this elsewhere before ( http://agoutirex.livejournal.com/111310.html#cutid1 ) so I don't want to repeat myself too much, but, if that's enough to blow your mind...I dunno, it doesn't seem like much of a twist. What is he really saying about superheroes with that twist, anyway? That the black-and-white good vs evil morality of superhero stories is not reflective of reality, where morality comes in nuanced shades of gray? Again, not exactly an earth-shattering revelation.
Anyway, Whedon's got a big fetish for genre "deconstruction," because he's very clever, you see. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I saw he was turning the awful regard of his baleful gaze to horror. Like I said before, I love horror. And one of the things that I love about horror is that, even among genre fans, horror is considered something of a red-headed stepchild. That means that the same awful mouth-breathing fantards that have made it such a chore to enjoy science fiction and fantasy have largely kept out of horror, viewing it as gutter entertainment beneath their high-brow intellectual nerd sensibilities.
But now Whedon's gone and wiped his greasy mitts all over the horror film, helpfully pointing out to the hoi polloi that the cliches already rejected by any half-way decent flick are TRITE and OVER-PLAYED. But, you know, horror will TOTALLY never be the same after this fucking tour de force, assuming that you ignore the existence of Scream, Evil Dead, Dead Alive, Slither, Cabin Fever, There's Nothing Out There, Wes Carven's New Nightmare and countless other satire/deconstructions/whatevers that came before. Now all those fat beardy monsters in "Bazinga" shirts, who up til now were content to stay over THERE with their Dr. Who and their Game of Thrones, are going to come over HERE and talk about how they've all been LONG TIME HORROR FANS, going ALL THE WAY BACK TO CABIN IN THE WOODS. People who, like Whedon, have no real love or understanding for the genre, but who still feel compelled to pontificate at length about what's wrong with it. Thanks, we'll take all your input and put it in the file. Here, I'll file it under D. For DUMB.
So here's the review that turned me off of seeing Cabin in the Woods. It's called "Why Some People Hated "The Cabin in the Woods"" by Jess d'Arbonne of the [Joe] Whedon Examiner (what).
"Since [Joe] Whedon and Drew Goddard’s genre-defying horror film “The Cabin in the Woods” came out last week, it has been getting wildly mixed reviews. While it maintains a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, its Cinema Score has plummeted, with most viewers giving it a C, and women in particular ranking it with a D+."
Critics love it, but audiences don't? Not surprising, mainstream reviewers rarely reflect the tastes of the public, no matter how much they claim to represent the COMMON MAN. Take a look at the slavish critical praise heaped on Martin Scorcese's Hugo and compare it to the lackluster response of the general public. Anyway, critics simply can't be trusted on horror; most don't know the first thing about the nature or purpose of the art. They like to look down on horror, imagining that anyone who enjoys on-screen mayhem must be by definition a drooling psychopath. They don't understand the first goddamn thing about horror, which is why the one slasher that received fairly decent reviews on its debut was the dull-as-dirt Wrong Turn. Wrong Turn is your bog-standard yuppies-get-lost-in-the-woods-and-killed-by-inbed-hillbillies plot that has served so many grindhouse directors so well -- exactly the sort of movie that Whedon is skewering with Cabin in the Woods. So why did it get so much praise when it first came out? Because you never get a clear glimpse of the hillbillies' faces. Here's the thing. Hillbilly slasher movies are like ragtag-team-of-underdogs sports movies. We already know how the movie's going to end, so the only thing to keep us invested is how interesting the canon fodder characters are and how grotesque the hillbillies are. And you know what's a lot more grotesque than seeing the back of a mutant yokel's head for an hour and half? SEEING HIS MESSED UP FACE. High-brow critics lapped it up, under the assumption that this weird little game of keep-away was a masterstroke of Hitchcockian tension building. Which was weird, because it's not like audiences didn't know what was happening. When a hulking brute in overalls shows up with his back to the camera, we don't all go "Gee, I wonder if he's going to murder someone? I can't be sure because I can't see his face!" It's like how proper, high-art critics can't stand the sight of gore. It makes their sensitive tummies hurt. So they're quick to dismiss any movie that wallows in grit and viscera as schlock but they'll praise the movie that keeps its pristine lily-white hands clean as a "psychological thriller." Critics apparently don't know what the point of horror is. Sometimes keeping something out of the audience's view works wonderfully to ratchet up the fear -- in Joy Ride, Rusty Nail was made all the more menacing by the fact that he was just a disembodied voice on the CB radio. But my point is that it doesn't work in EVERY instance as some people believe it does.
Speaking of interesting characters, I've noticed that non-horror fans will wring their hands over how MORALLY BANKRUPT a horror movie is when a sympathetic character is tortured or killed, but they go giddy when they see movie killers hack up cardboard caricatures. Lazy horror movies are always structured as simplistic morality plays, assuming that the audience comes just to see karmic justice visited upon unlikable jerks. There's some truth to that, but ultimately the whole point of horror is to shock, terrify and unsettle, and you're not going to get that reaction when you're only showing bad things happen to bad people. The horror-as-morality play structure is a cop-out; it lets the viewer enjoy horrible gory excess but then leave the theater with an unburdened conscious because, well, those characters in that movie deserved what they got. A truly nihilistic horror movie doesn't give you an easy out like that, and it's precisely because they don't give you that catharsis that they are so effective -- and so reviled by the most hoity toity of critics. EBERT, I AM LOOKING AT YOU.
My point is that you never get a good horror movie when you have a gaggle of characters that you want to see die. (The worst movie for this in recent memory was the Friday the 13th reboot). It honestly doesn't take much to get an audience invested in characters and it makes a horror movie infinitely more effective. I like to point to the remakes of House of Wax and The Hills Have Eyes as examples of two horror flicks that, while they aren't high art, manage to endow their characters with enough heft and substance that seeing them get killed one by one is actually kind of upsetting.
"As to why people loved “The Cabin in the Woods,” it’s not hard to figure out. As a film, it was clever, funny, entertaining, and very well-made. As a horror film… well, it defies the categorization of “horror film” on purpose, so one can’t really judge it against a scale of other contemporary horror."
So, apparently, Cabin in the Woods was not intended to be a horror film. Okay. That's convenient, because the number one complaint that I've heard about it so far is that it's not scary, and you would think that would be kind of a problem for a movie that's trying to say something about horror. But no, it's not scary ON PURPOSE. That's a new one. Usually when his movies flop, Whedon just blames it on executive meddling by those darn studio suits. But okay, let's assume it's not scary because of Whedon's genius. That's still odd. Because, you know, Watchmen was a deconstruction of the superhero genre, but it still essentially worked as a superhero story. High Noon was a deconstruction of the western genre, but it still stood up as a decent western in its own right. But Cabin in the Woods ISN'T intended to function as a horror movie? So if this movie isn't meant for horror fans, who are clearly too dumb to get it (despite a history of supporting tongue-in-cheek movies ike Evil Dead 2 that function as both horrors and satires), who's the target audience? Ironic hipsters? Whedon fans?
"But why did some people hate “The Cabin in the Woods” more than Rick Santorum hates the idea of women voting?"
Oh ho ho, I see what you did there! How clever, equating a viewer's dislike for a movie with Santorum's lunacy. The unstated implication, of course, is that both stances are equally bone-headed and that only loopy fundie noodleheads who probably voted for Santorum could dislike Joe Whedon's latest MASTERPIECE.
"It’s hard to pin down an answer when most of the documented reactions from normal movie-goers through social media is that “it's gay as shit.” I think we can all agree that anyone who uses “gay” as a pejorative is not exactly what you’d call "bright." The knee-jerk reaction from Twitter and Tumblr users who didn’t like the film has been unhelpful at best, and downright immature and stupid at its worst. Aside from critics, people who didn’t like “Cabin” are not particularly eloquent about their reasons why."
She's saying that, if you didn't like the movie, it's because you're dumb. She's supporting this by noting that people are posting shitty rants on Twitter and Tumblr, the two greatest hives of retardation on the Internet. Because I'm sure that the people who enjoyed the film are tweeting and tumbling in prose worthy of Oscar Wilde himself. No, they are not. They are saying EPIC WIN and SHINY. Now, I personally know a few intelligent people who liked the movie, but the vast majority of the reaction I've seen online is typical Whedon blow-jobbing, where no one bothers to explain why they liked his work because IT'S JUST SO OBVIOUS and EVERYONE ALREADY AGREES and let's just say it was AWESOME.
"And it's not people who hate horror movies who are hating on "Cabin." Quite the reverse. People aren't objecting to it because of the scary parts or the blood, gore, and dismemberment. They're objecting to the plot."
This isn't surprising to me at all. It was marketed as a horror satire, so most people probably went in expecting something that worked on both levels. Everything that I hear indicates that it's very clever in that affected, twee way that all Whedon films are, but the zany, wacky dialogue constantly undercuts any tension that might be had. Not surprising, humor and horror are a delicate blend and they're hard to do right together. Whedon can only write in one style, so he probably thought he would port over his usual pop-culture-reference stew without any modification.
"The answer might be very simple: People don’t like surprises. Judging by some of the more… simple… reactions on Twitter and Tumblr, some people went into “Cabin” expecting a by-the-book horror movie, and were startled when they got something completely different. They were forced out of their comfort zone. Their expectations were thwarted and stomped upon. And they did not appreciate it."
"Try to put yourself in the shoes of a casual movie-goer, someone who doesn’t gush over a particular director like Drew Goddard, or go into paroxysms of joy at the mere mention of Joss Whedon’s name. We’ll call this person “Bob.”
"Bob works hard five days a week and doesn’t have a lot of time to relax. When Bob does get the change to indulge in some entertainment on a Friday night, the last thing Bob wants to do is be forced to actually think about his entertainment. He wants mindless, stress-free entertainment to distract him from his life for an hour or two. And there's nothing wrong with that."
Here's where we get into the real meat of the argument, and it's basically the same snobbish disdain that horror movies and fans always get from other nerds.
Because horror movies are stupid, you see. Whedon is so clever, he's created a horror movie so clever that he excised the horror. This horror movie is better because it's not scary and if you think different it's because you're a country-fried rube who probably drove to the see the movin' picture show on a tractor while gnawing on a corncob pipe.
It's all there. The horror fan caricature presented here is slightly different than usual -- he's usually described as a drooling serial killer in training rather than a dimwitted yokel, but still. And then there's the weird assumption that the appeal of horror movies is "mindless entertainment," that the same person who enjoys whiz-bang action flicks like Transformers or Rush Hour must by necessity be the same person who likes horror, because what's the difference? They're all interchangeable, those mindless unintellectual non-Whedon-appreciating drones out there in middle America in their relax-fit jeans and ten gallon hats. I know it's difficult, but try to imagine that you're one of those sub-human troglodytes, your sloping rodent-like brow furrowed in terrified confusion as Whedon's opus plays on the screen before your piggy little eyes, the sublime symphony of his Whedonesque bon mots sloughing, uncomprehended, over your reptile brainstem.
"So Bob goes to see “The Cabin in the Wood,” expecting to put his brain to rest for the duration of the film and see the same slasher plot and gruesome effects he’s come to know and be comfortable with from the last unimaginative horror thriller he saw. But instead poor Bob is faced with a complex, multi-layered plot with a quirky sense of humor and more than a little commentary on the entertainment industry and the human condition itself."
"Poor Bob. No wonder he was disappointed--nay, furious--with “The Cabin in the Woods” and its symbolism, subtext, and very Whedony dialogue."
Because horror is all about comfort and soothing familiarity, apparently. That's an odd claim and clearly wrong: horror movies draw people in who want to see visceral, gut-wrenching thrills, who want to be shocked out of their normal work-a-day world by something uncanny, something terrible, something beyond the pale. You leave the theater with your pulse pounding, not a hazy "gee wasn't that nice" sense of well-being. Yeah yeah, I know, poorly made horror movies rely on cliche and refuse to surprise and challenge you... but who goes to a movie wanting it to be dull? And besides, poorly made movies in EVERY GENRE rely on bad cliches. It's not like horror has a monopoly on them. Plus it's not like you never see humor in a genuinely scary movie -- I'm convinced that one of the funniest lines in film history was the deadpan warning delivered by the convenience store clerk in The Ring. And, gee, it's not like horror has ever been used as a vehicle to say anything about the human condition. No, it was just filth until Whedon came along and redeemed it.
Poor Bob. Poor dumb Bob. He's so dumb. What a dumb dummy.
"Then again, maybe marketing is at fault. If someone saw the commercials for “Cabin” and went in expecting yet another “Hostel” or “Saw”-esque slasher, and then got… well, got “Cabin,” then perhaps it was simply that the marketing was misleading or completely ineffective."
Finally! Glad that she recognizes that the problem might be with the marketing rather than the audience. BUT WAIT-
"Marketing “The Cabin in the Woods” presented a uniquely difficult problem. How best to get across the idea of the film without revealing the multiple twists and spoiling the experience for viewers? How to say “This isn’t a horror film. It’s a film about horror films… and it’s funny… and it’s literally not at all what it looks like,” without giving anything away? You can’t. Or at least, you can try, as the ad campaign for “The Cabin in the Woods” did, but you might not be particularly successful."
Oh, never mind, turns out the movie is just SO BRILLIANT that it transcends marketing and there's no way to market it right, so, yeah, the real problem is just that you're too stupid to get it after all.
"Looking at the marketing efforts of “The Cabin in the Woods” objectively, it’s hard to tell what exactly the film is about. And that was no doubt intentional. What viewers process is a group of young people who go out to a remote location and get systematically dismembered and messed with by an unseen menace that is probably either a) A psychopath, b) A deranged evil genius, or c) An experimental government agency enacting all this carnage for its own nefarious purposes. But of course, that is not what “Cabin” is. And if you look no further than the trailers to figure out this film, you’ll go in expecting it to be exactly what it looks like… which it’s not."
You know, I feel kind of bad for the marketing team, because look what they've been given to work with. I mean, Whedon fans are pushing it as a deconstruction of horror but NOT actual horror. Again, who's this movie meant for? People who like seeing things deconstructed? A DECONSTRUCTION? MAN, I LOVE DECONSTRUCTIONS. DON'T EVEN TELL ME THE GENRE, CUZ I DON'T CARE, I JUST WANNA SEE SOMETHING GET DECONSTRUCTED!!! Like all Whedon vehicles, it's clearly meant for Whedon's pre-existing fanbase, the sort of people who will forgive any problems as long as Whedon's name is on it. I know a lot of non-Whedon fanboys liked it too, but I think even they will agree than fanboys are the primary target. They should have just advertised this as HEY IT'S BY JOE WHEDON, GO SEE IT I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ANYMORE
"Normal people don't read interviews with the director before deciding to go see a film. They don't read 1,000 word-long early reviews by scholarly reviewers. They don't read about the symbolism or artistic intent of a movie before buying their ticket and their popcorn and kicking back for an hour or so. Why should they? And because of that, some viewers were completely unprepared for "Cabin." It was not what they wanted, what they were looking for, or what they were willing to consume."
I know she says that "normal" people don't have an obligation to do any further research into a film beyond viewing the trailers, but it's hard not to pick up the faint whiff -- nay, the heavy, cloying stench -- of elitism there, yet another jab at THOSE NON-WHEDON-LOVING DUMMIES who totally deserve what they get for just wanting to sit and drool.
"So essentially, it’s impossible to market to the average movie viewer without spoiling everything and defeating the purpose of the film."
Is this true? The trailers seemed pretty up front about the fact that the cabin was really some sort of elaborate high-tech movie set and the monsters were all fake. The only twist not revealed in the trailers is the WHY of it all. And that, right there, is another indication that Whedon doesn't understand horror. Horror is not concerned with the WHY of things, it's concerned with the WHAT. Do you really care why Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees kill teenagers? Is the motivation behind the villain's random slaughter really the carrot that's luring you into the theater? Sure, it could be interesting, but, unless the reasons behind the villain's actions are themselves so monstrous and unbelievable that they ramp up the terror to the next level, then they're not really all that important. For a good example of a film where the ultimate revelation of the villain's plan makes things infinitely worse, see French torture porn Martyrs. In fact, most horror works better when we don't know the WHY of it. In The Ring, Samara was all the more frightening when she was an unplacatable, unknowable force that came out of nowhere and killed for reasons we couldn't hope to understand. When the sequel actually gave her a backstory...well, it made her kind of dull, to be honest.
I mean, I don't know the ultimate twist here, so maybe it is worthy of the hype. I'll see it when it comes out on video and report back to you. I'm just saying, it better not turn out that they're just filming a reality show.
"While it would be rather rude to say that those who hated “The Cabin in the Woods” are just not intelligent enough to get it, the negative reactions might actually say more about the average movie-goer than about the movie."
She's not saying that you're dumb, but she's saying that you're dumb.
"It’s not that hating “The Cabin in the Woods” makes you unintelligent. As we’ve already discussed, there’s no harm in wanting and expecting mindless entertainment sometimes. It's that "The Cabin in the Woods" is one big, elaborate inside joke. It's a satire on the horror genre, the archetypical "some kids go to a cabin in the woods and all hell breaks loose" movie. And if you're not in on that joke, you can feel... well, dumb.
Nobody likes to be left in the dark, to miss the joke, to feel like their intelligence is being insulted. And that uncomfortable feeling likely happened to a lot of people who were not prepared for "The Cabin in the Woods" by the ineffective marketing, and who were simply looking for mindless, relaxing entertainment."
Relaxing entertainment? Seriously, is this what non-fans think horror is? That's weird. Also, she's saying that you're dumb. She's really laying it on thick here. But, hey, it's okay that you dumb proles like dumb things. You are dumb, after all.
"If you hated "The Cabin in the Woods," it might be that you just didn't get it, but that's not entirely your fault. Do yourself a favor and go watch the next stock horror slasher to come to theaters--something like "Final Destination 13" or "Dismemberment Hotel" or "Psychopaths on Steroids Hunt and Torture Beautiful Young People" or any of the dozen rote, safe, unsurprising horror movies we can expect to see within the next year. Forget "The Cabin in the Woods" ever happened, or leave it to those who are looking for genre satire."
And finally the coup de grace: You didn't like it because you're dumb and you didn't get how clever it is, but we don't hold your tiny pea-sized brain against you. This is like the constant argument that I have with my wife about [i]Mulholland Drive[/i], which she loved and I did not. She keeps trying to get me to read academic critiques of the movie, telling me that they'll totally explain everything and then I'll like it. And I have to tell her that it's not that I didn't get it. I understand Lynch's weird dream logic and how everything is symbolic and how it's really just a guilt hallucination -- I mean, the last twenty minutes of the movie basically lay it all out for you. It's just that I don't like the movie -- not because it's confusing but because it's boring and heavy-handed and ultimately not nearly as deep as it seems to think it is. And d'Arbonne's article makes me suspect that Cabin in the Woods will be the same way.
* Now let's see how long it takes to become the #1 google result for those phrases.