The Cabin in the Woods
By Steve Newton
The scary season is upon us again, so here’s my freelance reviews of 10 select horror flicks, originally published between 1988 and 2012.
All the movies were shot, in whole or in part, in my stomping grounds of Metro Vancouver, and range from the excellent (The Cabin the Woods) to the bloody awful (Watchers).
As the Vancouver correspondent for fabled New York City horror magazine Fangoria I covered the filming of some of the worst pictures listed here, including Bordello of Blood, Bones, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, and the above-mentioned Corey Haim debacle, Watchers.
Please don’t hold it against me.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012, Lionsgate).
The Cabin in the Woods is crammed with so many twists and turns that the mere thought of reviewing it and ruining the fun for others is scary in and of itself. But I don’t feel bad about revealing at least one huge surprise: it’s the best horror flick ever made in Vancouver.
A gaggle of attractive young victims-to-be head out for some weekend fun in what looks like your typical Friday the 13th–style slaughterfest, but for some reason the group’s every move is being tracked by a shadowy team using state-of-the-art gadgetry. The operation is overseen in a NASA-like control room by a pair of total dickheads—brilliantly played by Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) and Bradley Whitford (TV’s The West Wing)—whose manipulations drive the action once the human lab rats arrive at the titular location.
Why, exactly, these two assholes subject their innocent prey to deadly torment won’t be exposed here, but the hoops the victims are forced to jump through in order to survive (if they’re lucky) makes for some of the most exhilarating horror action since Scream revitalized the genre back in 1996.
Working from an idea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Joss Whedon, cowriter and director Drew Goddard goes hilariously nutzoid, testing people’s preconceptions of scary movies while at the same time questioning humanity itself. Things just keep getting wilder and more intense as the shocks and bodies pile up, but the entertainment level never wavers.
The Cabin in the Woods really is the most fun you can have at the movies with your clothes on.
Slither (2006, Universal Pictures).
Before breaking through in the horror realm as the screenwriter of 2004’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, James Gunn spent years toiling for Troma Entertainment, the New York company famous for campy, no-budget shockers like The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. The gonzo, gore-oriented Troma spirit is clearly evident in Gunn’s directorial debut, Slither, an over-the-top splatter-comedy about sluglike thingies from outer space that infest a backwoods community of brain-dead hicks and turn them into bile-spewing zombies.
It’s the kind of nutzoid movie for anyone who’s looked twice at warped Troma titles like Surf Nazis Must Die and Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town.
The fun starts when a meteorite lands in the forest, unseen by the dimwitted cops nearby, who are more concerned with using their radar guns to track the speed of whippoorwills. As well as the local constabulary, the town’s hotheaded mayor, Jack MacReady (Body Double‘s Gregg Henry), is a piece of work; we’re introduced to him when he bellows on the street, in front of a mother and child, “Get the fuck out of the way, you cocksucker!” (Unfortunately, MacReady’s outbursts get less and less comical as the movie unfolds.)
Genre fave Michael Rooker, noted for his chilling portrayal of murderous drifter Henry Lee Lucas in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, steals the show as low-key local businessman Grant Grant. During a booze-addled stroll in the woods, he discovers the meteorite cracked open like a gooey coconut and makes the honest mistake of poking its icky contents with a stick. The pulsating ooze shoots a dartlike tentacle into his belly, setting off Grant’s transformation into a pustule-covered, raw meat-crazed host for the alien parasite.
Before you can say Shivers or The Hidden, sluglike critters are everywhere, attacking young women in bathtubs and forcing themselves into people’s mouths. Makeup and creature-effects artist Todd Masters (Predator, HBO’s Six Feet Under) has a field day with the slimey foam-latex and silicone prosthetics that compete for screen time with the suitably cheesy CGI.
Slither‘s demented charm gets stretched pretty thin under the near-numbing shower of flying flesh and hokey one-liners (“He looks like something that fell off my dick during the war!”), but its cringe/chuckle quotient should satisfy most fans of such low-budget gross-out endeavours.
Bones (2001, New Line Cinema).
Lately, it seems as though a deluge of gory, made-in-B.C. horror flicks has been unleashed upon the moviegoing public. First to drench local screens with blood ’n’ gore was Thi13een Ghosts, the noisy and nauseating haunted-house flick that’s about as intriguing as a 90-minute Rob Zombie video.
Then came the low-budget, shot-in-Victoria slasher flick Ripper: Letter From Hell, which—although overly sadistic in its drawn-out murders—actually turned out to be better than similar Hollywood fare such as Urban Legend, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and Scream 3. (Unfortunately, Ripper lasted all of one week in local theatres.)
Now up for perusal is Bones, which stars rapper Snoop Dogg as franchise-ready character Jimmy Bones, a benevolent patron of an urban neighbourhood who is murdered in the ’70s and returns to wreak ghastly vengeance on his betrayers in the present. It was filmed in Vancouver two years ago and shelved until now, and boy, is it a mess.
For starters, Dogg can’t act. Dogg can sneer and look menacing—he’s practised that for years in his role as a gangsta rapper—but that’s about it. Not that he’s required to do much in Bones. When Dogg isn’t getting shot and stabbed repeatedly—or, once resurrected, slashing throats with great aplomb—he just strolls around in a pimp outfit like he’s God’s gift to whatever.
Ice Cube and Ice-T are rappers who can also act; not this guy.
Then again, the bogus script doesn’t leave anyone in the cast, including the usually impressive Pam Grier, much chance of a stellar performance. It tries its damnedest to parlay an air of urban hipness and street cred—know what I’m sayin’?—but ends up burdening its young leads with hokey lines like “I can’t keep this joint lit, and that’s drug abuse.”
Director Ernest Dickerson—an award-winning cinematographer for Spike Lee who did a commendable job helming horror with 1994’s Demon Knight—deals with Bones’ script-related shortcomings by turning it into a multicoloured, psychedelic wank-off reminiscent of The Cell.
The voluptuous Bianca Lawson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is shown rolling in her underwear in a sea of blood for no apparent reason. Bright-red goo flows freely from the pipes in Jimmy Bones’s decrepit old “crib”, but the dimwitted DJs who want to turn the dump into a fashionable dance club aren’t fazed. It takes a huge shower of maggots—falling into drinks and onto pizza slices and unwittingly consumed—to clear the place out.
Discriminating moviegoers will surely feel the need to vacate the premises long before that stomach-churning scene unfolds.
Deep Rising (1998, Hollywood Pictures).
What’s up with Vancouver and the scary movies that are made here? This town may be tops in TV terror (Millennium, The X-Files, The Outer Limits), but it sure has trouble producing decent horror flicks for the big screen, as anyone who’s suffered through Watchers, Needful Things, Hideaway, or Bordello of Blood can attest.
And then there’s Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan. Sure, nobody expected that one to win an Oscar, but it was so wretched that it made its seven predecessors look okay.
The legacy of “Horrorwood North” doesn’t get any richer in the wake of Deep Rising, a so-called high-seas action thriller that sees the man-eating worms from Tremors transplanted to the South China Sea in the guise of snaky squid things that infest a luxury cruise ship and suck the flesh off nearly everyone aboard.
Into the corpse-strewn fray swaggers wisecracking sea captain John Finnegan (Treat Williams), who boards the ocean liner with a group of heavily armed mercenaries bent on evacuating and sinking the vessel so its owner (Anthony Heald) can collect the insurance. The rest of the movie is a predictable guns ’n’ beasts gorefest that wants to be equal parts Aliens, Titanic, and Anaconda but winds up being all parts crap.
Writer-director Stephen Sommers honed his chops on kid flicks such as The Adventures of Huck Finn, which may account for the incessantly juvenile dialogue that pervades this $45-million bomb. His script strives desperately to be hip and clever but only comes off as square and dumb.
A typical example occurs while Finnegan and an inept jewel thief played by GoldenEye bombshell Famke Janssen are frantically warding off the rampaging creatures in a corridor. She yells something like “What are those things?!” and his deadpan reply is “Really unfriendly.”
You’ve gotta feel sorry for the former Prince of the City here, as his top billing in Deep Rising can’t help but hinder the big-screen comeback he’s enjoyed lately thanks to acclaimed performances in The Devil’s Own and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.
If you thought he was embarrassed by his role opposite Joe Piscopo in the much-maligned 1988 zombie-cop flick Dead Heat, just wait till the pans of this soaking-wet sucker start surfacing.
Disturbing Behavior (1998, MGM).
With the abundance of failed horror-thrillers made in Vancouver (Hideaway, Watchers, Needful Things), I wasn’t expecting the locally shot Disturbing Behavior to be anything special. And it isn’t, really. But it does boast an impressive cast and some keen direction, and—considering its stable of young TV stars and ultrahip dialogue—deserves credit for not becoming a total Scream clone.
The film follows the social misadventures of troubled teen Steve Clark (James Marsden of TV’s Bella Mafia), who, after the suicide of his older brother, moves from Chicago with his family to start a new life in the quaint island community of Cradle Bay. Unfortunately for Clark, he finds himself enrolled in Hell High, where a clique of model students named the Blue Ribbons holds sway over the general populace.
Seems these arrogant bookworms and sports stars are all former rebels who’ve been “programmed” to be goody-two-shoes types by sinister school psychiatrist Dr. Caldicott (a slumming Bruce Greenwood from The Sweet Hereafter).
Clark takes up with outcast Gavin Strick (The Man Without a Face’s Nick Stahl), who tries to warn the newcomer, via his slacker-philosopher ramblings, about the town’s evil secret. But Stevie-boy doesn’t listen, and besides, he’s more interested in scoring points with Gavin’s sassy gal pal Rachel Wagner (Katie Holmes from TV’s Dawson’s Creek).
As we discover in the film’s crass opening scene—in which a promiscuous teen’s eagerness to perform fellatio gets her neck casually snapped—Caldicott’s “treatment” has serious side effects. Whenever his overachieving automatons have naughty thoughts, their eyes light up and they fly into a murderous rage, laying the boots to whoever is nearby.
Most prone to violence is pudgy bully Chug Roman, whose clean-cut creepiness is superbly rendered by A.J. Buckley. Also fun to watch is genre veteran William Sadler (Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight), whose over-the-top portrayal of nutcase janitor Dorian Newberry provides the film’s best comic moments.
Director David Nutter, whose credits include various episodes of The X-Files and Millennium, deftly handles the action scenes, and he brings an eerie kind of X-Files quality to sequences that unfold in a dilapidated insane asylum. His obvious talents aren’t enough to make Disturbing Behavior a first-rate fright flick, but as relatively low-budget and quickly made teen shockers go, it’s not too hard to take.
Bordello of Blood (1996, Universal Pictures).
About halfway through Bordello of Blood, the second of three features slated to come from the producers of TV’s Tales from the Crypt, private detective Rafe Guttman (Dennis Miller) makes a lame wisecrack that stands out from the multitude of others infesting this puerile horror-comedy.
While he and Bible-thumping babe Katherine Verdoux (Erika Eleniak) search a spooky industrial site for her missing brother Caleb (Corey Feldman), the smart-ass dick takes in his surroundings and quips: “I feel like I’m in a bad Tales from the Crypt episode or something.”
Of course, if they edited this stinker down to 30 minutes and showed it on the tube, that’s exactly what it would be.
Bordello of Blood is a colossal step down from last year’s Demon Knight, the Crypt feature that drew two severed thumbs-up, thanks to the feverish direction of ex–Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, the inspired performances of stars William Sadler and Billy Zane, and the dynamic makeup FX of Todd Masters.
This time the director-cowriter (Gil Adler) is a guy who often writes, produces, and directs Crypt episodes for the small screen, and instead of hiring skilled actors for the main roles, they’ve got second-rate performers whose main claims to fame are the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” segment (Miller), Baywatch (Eleniak), and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (Angie Everhart, who portrays the titular whorehouse’s head vampire).
It’s no wonder Bordello of Blood fails as anything but a gory T&A spectacle for the mouth-breather set.
The fact that this movie was shot in Vancouver isn’t going to attract any big film-development bucks to our town, but familiar locations such as the North Shore Mountains and the B.C. Pavilion at least provide distraction from the ill-plotted proceedings.
The pavilion is the headquarters for Rev. Jimmy Current (the slumming Chris Sarandon), a guitar-toting televangelist who resurrects “the mother of all vampires” (Everhart) so she and her scantily clad cohorts can tear the hearts out of horny sinners at a cathouse operating beneath a mortuary. When Feldman’s 30ish-looking “teen” headbanger gets vampirized while on a nooky hunt, his protective sis hires the bland Guttman to locate the nauseating twerp.
And that’s it for story line. The rest of the film is devoted to the setting up of juvenile one-liners, close-up breast shots, and a “look who we’ve got!” cameo by Whoopi Goldberg. It all leads to a predictable climax of exploding vampire hookers when Guttman pulls an Arnie with a Super-Soaker full of holy water.
Whoopee ding.
Isn’t it a bit early for a semiremake of From Dusk Till Dawn?
Hideaway (1995, TriStar Pictures).
Before actually seeing Hideaway, I had mixed feelings about the potential of this Vancouver-made thriller. On the positive side, I was a big fan of both star Jeff Goldblum and the Dean R. Koontz novel on which the film is based. But I also knew how another of my favourite Koontz books, Watchers, had been filmed here and turned into a piece of crap. Then I heard that Koontz, after viewing Hideaway, had requested the filmmakers take his name off the project.
Not a good sign.
The flick starts off strongly enough. After murdering his mother and sister, young satanist Vassago (Jeremy Sisto) impales himself on a set of wickedly sharp shears. Through stunning computer-graphics sequences, the dead kid’s soul is shown being rebuffed at the crystalline entryway to heaven and sent careering through weird, shocking landscapes to the fiery pit of hell.
It’s quite a wild ride.
Shortly thereafter, following a nasty car accident, antiques dealer Hatch Harrison (Goldblum) has the same initial peaceful vision of nirvana, including the sight of his dead daughter joyfully beckoning him to join her, but before he can pass through heaven’s gate his soul is abruptly yanked away as he’s brought back to life by resuscitation expert Dr. Jonas Nyebern (Alfred Molina).
Soon we see that Harrison’s afterlife experience has psychically linked him with Vassago—whom Nyebern also resuscitated—and that during times of pain or stress, these opposing embodiments of good and evil can see through each other’s eyes. Vassago gets a load of Harrison’s beautiful teenage daughter, Regina (Alicia Silverstone), and instantly becomes obsessed with killing her.
This is when Hideaway starts to falter, because—unlike in the book—the motivation behind Vassago’s cruelty is never revealed. The threat of danger to Harrison’s last living child certainly gives Goldblum good cause to pull his trademark bug-eyed freak-outs, but it’s hard to believe that svelte pretty boy Vassago is evil incarnate, no matter how many gratuitous throat-cuttings he dishes out.
Black leather and sunglasses do not a scary guy make.
Besides its failure to generate real dread, Hideaway includes some embarrassingly corny bits that had audience members chuckling. Its computer-generated climax seemed hokey, too (shades of Children of the Corn). And only about 30 people at the packed premiere I attended actually hung around to see the trick jolt ending, a Carrie rip-off tossed in after the credits.
Needful Things (1993, Columbia Pictures).
“Hollywood North” has been quite a hotbed for horror films in the past few years. But whether it’s a direct-to-video gorefest (The Resurrected), theatrically released slasher entry (Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan), or big-budget TV miniseries (Stephen King’s IT), there has been nothing truly impressive among the bunch.
With the $10-million psycho-thriller Exquisite Tenderness now in production in a closed-down wing of Riverview Hospital, and acclaimed director Martin (Apartment Zero) Donovan’s killer-teacher show, The Substitute, set for U.S. cable release this fall, this dismal record could change. Unfortunately, Needful Things won’t be the film to enhance Vancouver’s reputation as a viable “Horrorwood North”.
Directed by Fraser Heston (Charlton’s son), Needful Things is based on the sizable Stephen King novel of 1991, and therein lies its downfall. Not that some fine movies haven’t been made from King’s shorter novels (The Dead Zone, Carrie, Misery), but when you try to film a work that is bursting with as many characters and intricate character conflicts as Needful Things, trouble looms.
The novel relied on how engrossed the reader got with the various small-town characters who are turned against each other by the devil, but that involvement just doesn’t carry over in the celluloid version. By the end of the film, I couldn’t have cared less if the town’s entire population had been dragged down to Lucifer’s fiery abode.
Gibsons, B.C., doubles as Castle Rock, the coastal Maine burg to which Leland Gaunt (Max von Sydow) moves and where he opens his Needful Things curiosity shop. Before long, almost everyone in town, it seems, visits the shop, and, under the spell of the satanic shopkeeper, finds the thing they need to satisfy their lust for power, glory, riches, etc.
Whether it is a personally autographed Mickey Mantle card for young baseball fanatic Brian Rusk (Shane Meier), a magical horse-race game that predicts real winners for desperate gambler Danforth Keeton (J.T. Walsh), or an ancient locket that provides instant relief for arthritis sufferer Polly Chalmers (Bonnie Bedelia), each item comes with a stipulation that the purchaser pull a small prank on one of their neighbours.
But the wee pranks—like tossing turkey shit on the clean sheets of psychotic farmer Wilma Jerzyk (Valerie Bromfield) or pasting police citations all over paranoid embezzler Keeton’s house—are just the thing to send the town’s already half-mad populace over the edge and into a series of vengeful killing sprees.
As greed-ridden yacht salesman Keeton (“Don’t you ever call me Buster!”), Walsh gives a memorable, over-the-top performance, and his character’s relationship with the sarcastic Gaunt—“You’re disgusting, Dan; I like that in a man”—provides most of the film’s comic relief.
Von Sydow’s understated role as the schemin’ demon is effective at times, but also pretty boring, since almost all he does is talk and hand out the shop’s evil inventory. And top-billed Ed Harris—a fine actor in his own right—is totally wasted as the baffled Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who lumbers from one grisly encounter to another, his stereotypically dim deputy (Ray McKinnon) in tow.
After watching Harris scratch his head and look confused for 80 minutes, it isn’t fun to sit through the sheriff’s climactic lecture/speech, during which he explains to the rioting townsfolk—the rubble of their ruined city all around them—just exactly what their problem is.
We are told that the upright cop once “hit a man too hard” while on duty in another town, but the fact that Pangborn moved to Castle Rock to start a new life hardly justifies him being the only guy in town without a “needful thing”.
Does the love-struck lawman’s impending marriage to café owner Chalmers make him immune or something?
At any rate, Pangborn’s oratory wins the people over to the side of good just in time, and the devil leaves town in his big black car, never to be seen again. Or at least not until Needful Things 2: Beelzebub’s Back.
Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989, Paramount Pictures).
Okay, okay–so the Friday the 13th movies are not exactly cinematic works of art. But people realize, when they lay down their money, that they’re not getting The Last Emperor. They’re only going to a Friday movie for two things: to see Jason kill people, and to get scared. Unfortunately, they don’t always go away satisfied on even those two points.
After eight outings, the potential for Jason Vorhees to frighten an audience has dwindled considerably–as has that of Freddy Krueger, whose fifth film was just released. Both characters were definitely scary in their first appearances, but the immortal status that brings them back, sequel after sequel, has taken the edge off their ability to terrify. It’s hard to get emotionally involved when you know the villain can’t lose.
In Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, old hockey-face is resurrected from his watery grave at the bottom of Crystal Lake when an unsuspecting teen drops his anchor to indulge in a little nookie. The anchor catches an underwater cable, which snags on to Jason and shoots him full of electrical life. Puritan that he is, Jason quickly boards the vessel and puts a stop to any further hanky-panky–with the business end of an empty harpoon gun!
From them on it’s Jason versus any naughty (and even nice) teens, as he boards a cruise ship full of Crystal Lake High School grads on their way to the Big Apple. As usual, Jason relies on the traditional sharp and blunt instruments for his work, but he occasionally comes up with something new–like an electric guitar, which he plants up-side the the head of an irritating headbanger (played by local singer-actress Saffron Henderson).
When Jason and a few survivors finally get to New York (which for the most part is Vancouver dressed up), that’s when the real fun starts. The jaded Manhattanites barely blink as Jason rampages the streets, and in one hoot of a scene the unstoppable killer proves that Mike Tyson is definitely not the only boxer with a deadly right hand.
As usual, Jason’s unsocial shenanigans end with him in more than a spot o’ trouble–but don’t count him out quite yet. The makers of the Friday films wouldn’t even consider stopping the series till they hit that magic number: Part XIII.
Watchers (1988, Universal Pictures).
When novelist Dean R. Koontz was asked, after reading a screenplay based on his book Watchers, how he thought the film would turn out, he said, “I think they’ve done a good job with the [scary] throat-clutching parts, but the rest of it I’m not sure about.”
Well, Dean, sorry to tell you, but they didn’t do a good job with any of it. Watchers is a real mess, and it’s only a couple of steps up from the dismal Maximum Overdrive, the last Stephen King story to be slaughtered on the screen.
Things don’t even start off well. As the movie opens up, we see an exterior shot of a building at night–but why is the camera shaking ever so slightly? Could it be that the cameraman is trembling in anticipation of a huge explosion that will demolish the place? Probably, because that’s just what happens.
It turns out the building is a top-secret government lab where animals are genetically programmed to become the perfect killing machines in time of war. In the blast that opens this flick, a golden retriever equipped with near-human intelligence and a hybrid creature called Oxcom (Outside Experimental Combat Mammal) are set loose. The Oxcom is after the dog, and so is government agent Lem Johnson (Michael Ironside of Visiting Hours and Scanners), and neither wants to feed it Alpo.
Typical teenager Travis Cornel (Corey Haim) adopts the brainy mutt, and the rest of the film is taken up with him and his mother (B.C. native Barbara Williams of Thief of Hearts) trying to keep “Fur Face” safe from harm. The people who sold fake blood to the Watchers effects crew must be happy, though, because plenty of people get offed in the crossfire.
But even the fright sequences aren’t much to scream about here. Hackneyed horror tricks like the head in the clothes dryer and the body through the window have been done to death by the likes of Jason and Freddy. Ironside doesn’t evince any of the menace that made his other baddie roles so effective. And the film’s humour–which is essential to offset the terror in a good fright flick–is not funny.
I doubt if even the most starry-eyed Corey Haim fans would chuckle at his phony one-liners.
About the only decent thing about Watchers is the fact that it was filmed in B.C. at locations in Ladner, Port Coquitlam, Buntzen Lake, the Seymour Watershed, and Lynn Canyon. As such it employed a lot of area talent, including local theatre stars Blu Mankuma, Norman Browning, and Suzanne Ristic.
The local settings are interesting, but it’s still not worth $6.50 to see a poster of local pop-rockers Go Four 3 on Corey Haim’s bedroom wall.
To read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018, go here.