I kind of hesitated to call this “good
vs. bad”, because I don't think today's “bad” example is really
awful. I don't even really think that negatively of it. That said,
however, there are some real problems that I have with it, and I
think its far better handled in the “good” example. Today we're
going to talk about deconstructing horror movies with Tucker and Dale vs Evil and Cabin in the Woods.
The Bad: Cabin in the
Woods
Cabin
in the Woods is a Joss Whedon
film exploring why the stereotypical monster movie tropes exist in
the universe of the movie. It turns out that an ancient evil is
asleep in the Earth, and only the sacrifice of four to five people
can keep it dormant. But there are some specific rules to the
sacrifice: those being killed have to make the choices that lead to
their deaths on their own, and those doing the sacrificing can only
have minimal intervention in the process, or so we're told. The
sacrifice must include a whore, an athlete, a scholar and a fool. The
virgin of the group is an optional sacrifice. Underneath the cabin is
a huge military complex monitoring the situation and storing the
monsters that they will unleash on the unwitting teens, and we find
out that these places exist all over the world to ensure the success
of the sacrifice.
So
yeah, it kind of works. It explains why there is always those
particular archetypes of characters, and why there's so much demonic
stuff in the woods. They also explain that the characters are really
that dumb, the military operation has been secretly drugging them to
act less logically and heighten the chance of them getting killed.
This
is where I have my first problem with this movie: the drugging. They
keep spraying chemicals that effect the kids' behavior, like
phermones to make them hornier, or some really specific chemical that
somehow makes Thor (I know he has a name, but to me, he will ALWAYS
be Thor) go from making everyone stick together to telling them to
split up.
Bullshit.
The
whole chemical thing really seems like a cop-out by the writers, and
to me, it broke my suspension of disbelief. Also, why does the
monster care about those specific archetypes of characters? They
freely admit that the kids don't always fit, and they manipulate them
to “work with what they've got” so how does the creature know the
difference? This is especially apparent with “the scholar”, a guy
so bland that I barely remember what he looked like, and at no point
did anything to indicate that he was this “scholarly” individual.
It's just weak.
Finally,
if they need five sacrifices, this seems like an INCREDIBLY
convoluted way to go about it. Why not just use prison inmates? Are
you telling me you can't find a jock, a whore, an idiot and a guy you
can pass off as scholarly in American prisons? Also, they say the
monsters have to kill the people, but in the end they say just
shooting the stoner will do just as well, so why bother with the
monsters at all?
Like
I said, this isn't really a BAD movie, it just could have been told
better, and with far fewer plot holes.
The
Good: Tucker and Dale vs Evil
This is a movie about a pair of guys named Dale and
Tucker. Tucker has just purchased a summer home in hillbilly country,
and he and Dale are going to fix it up. Meanwhile, however, a group
of college kids are camping in the same woods as the cabin, and
mistake Dale and Tucker for killer hillbillies that they see in
movies. When on of the kids gets hurt and the two take her in to take
care of her wounds, the other kids assume Dale and Tucker have
kidnapped and killed her, leading to a series of misunderstandings
and accidents that end up getting most of them killed. Dale and
Tucker, meanwhile, are just as confused as the college kids, and
think that they are some kind of suicide cult that came out in to the
woods to end their lives and the lives of anyone they come across.
This is a great movie for exactly the same reasons that
Cabin in the Woods isn't. It doesn't resort to “chemicals” or
other far-fetched scientific things to make the story believable. The
college kids simply HAVE seen the kinds of horror movies that deal
with this situation, and are making it a huge misunderstanding. Dale
and Tucker aren't actually evil, and they actually do try to
straighten things out, but to no avail.
Finally, the main college kid (Chad) hits on what is a
real problem with the horror movie stereotypes, that I think needs to
be addressed more. Chad believes that they can take care of those
killer hillbillies themselves, and that they don't need the police to
save their friend. In any other movie, Chad would be the hero, but
here the other characters recognize how crazy he is, and that just
drives him even more mad. By the end, HE'S become the psychotic
killer, and the hillbillies are the heroes who have to stop him.
And finally, for a movie that pokes fun at horror
movies, this one is better in that its actually trying
to be funny, which is the genre I think that these movies need to go
for. Cabin in the Woods kind of tries to go for the serious angle,
while keeping those tongue-and-cheek nods to the audience, and I
really think it needed to go one way or the other.
So in the end, I have
to say that Tucker and Dale vs Evil is the
superior horror movie spoof.
