Grabbers (2012) - 3/4

Making an independent, quirky horror-comedy that 'hits the right spot' is hard to do. More and more filmmakers try to do it, leaving more and more failures to wash onto our shores. Grabbers is another independent, quirky horror-comedy, this time from Ireland, and it's mostly a success.

The plot starts typically enough. A meteor, an island, a small town, and a hideous, tentacle monster from another planet, bake at 350 until golden brown. The fun quirk is that the locals--a charmingly grumpy alcoholic policeman, an uptight rookie from off-island, the village drunk, and a marine biologist--discover that the blood-sucking tentacle-beasts just can't hold their liquor. In fact, it kills them. So the village has to remain drunk while they take on the molusc menace.

The idea is great on its own. But it works especially well with its cast of characters. Each one, however insignificant to the overall plot, seems to have a fully fleshed-out personality. You almost imagine you could visit to island and see these people living there, unaware their encounter with space monsters was ever filmed. In fact, it's the characterizations of the supporting locals that are the most endearing.

As with many movies of this sort, the need to 'have a heart' and give us a coy romance has both advantages and disadvantages. Because--and only because--the characters are likeable, the romance is mildly charming and will put a smile on your mother's face. As a subplot in an already-packed, relatively short film, it is necessarily rushed, with little dramatic satisfaction as a consequence. I also think the need to include a romantic subplot when there isn't really time to develop it may come across as syrupy and ingratiating, which it is.

Also rushed is the pressure to reach a conclusion. The creatures are destroyed too easily as soon as the protagonists really have to get killing and have their big kiss. There is never any serious suspense, nor any serious monster mayhem--a shame given how well-designed the monsters are.

However, with such likeable characters, what screenwriter would want to do serious killing? The real fun with Grabbers is hanging out with these locals as they drunkenly struggle with tentacle monsters and their own personal issues. They're hilarious folk inhabiting a film with plenty of well-written jokes. No-one could go wrong visiting them once or twice and having a pint.

The Bay (2012) - 2.5/4

Directed by Barry Levinson of Rain Man fame, propagandizing an ecological message, and presented as a found-footage horror, The Bay is a very strange film however you look at it. The experience it provides is perhaps equally as strange and mismatched as you`d would expect. That`s not necessarily a bad thing.

The plot concerns an unexplained illness that suddenly and ubiquitously breaks out on July 4th in a small, coastal town. Local doctors struggle with the CDC to figure out what`s going on. Individuals enjoying a boating trip come home to find the town a blood mess. And an amateur public access reporter covering the July 4th festivities becomes, with the aid of her diligent cameraman, the world`s eyes and ears for the horrific event. Some time after the incident and the ensuing cover-up, she`s cobbled together her own material and some locals` amateur footage to make the film we see.

What The Bay really had going for it is that it`s probably the purest `mockumentary` horror made thus far. Nearly all found-footage horror films come across as either a few dolts with a camcorder or an overprocessed narrative movie masquerading as found footage. The Bay is, in a sense, an actual documentary of a fictitious event in a fictitious town. The movie plays and evolves like a documentary, following the development of the event, trying to explain it, and in doing so building toward a point.

Because The Bay does play out as a documentary, a lot of the conventional narrative benefits are lost. The closest The Bay gives to a protagonist is the reporter, but she`s no more a protagonist than Michael Moore is in his documentaries. We never feel for her as a character, except perhaps amusement over her ridiculously tight pants. There is, then, a degree of emotional detachment from what`s happening and our emotions can only engage with responding to the events themselves.

Fortunately, The Bay provides quite a few good events to engage with. There are some excellently revolting gore effects. There are some moments that are genuinely intense. Some that are shocking. There are even a number of effective scares. Taking tally, that`s more than a lot of recent narrative horror films offer.

Where The Bay does suffer somewhat is in finally explaining the mysterious disease. The explanation comes as a mild let-down because it`s slightly silly and a bit short on imagination. But, the disease must be explained to make the ecological point and the explanation given serves that well. Chicken feces, water treatment, the CDC--who knows what the point really is, but these are some vague targets. The explanation also ties the film in with 1950s nature-amok movies and could really be seen as parodical of ecological scaremongering.

Ultimately, the experience of watching The Bay is uneven, but strangely satisfying in many ways. I have no idea what Levinson was really going for with this movie, whether it`s an eco-horror message-movie or big, mockumentary joke, I just know that once I got into The Bay, after the first thirty minutes or so of wondering what I was watching, I enjoyed it.

The Cabin in the Woods (2011) - 3.5/4

The Cabin in the Woods is a wet-dream to smug, intellectual students of horror movies. Wes Craven is still making Scream movies, but Cabin is the real heir to what the first Scream movie did, which is turn a critical eye and a smart mouth on horror movies while still trying to offer one. An essay on how horror films are often so banal and uncreative wouldn’t be half as entertaining as the Joss Whedon-penned epic we have here. But if a critique—even an entertaining one—is all there was to Cabin, I wouldn’t be writing about it. I think there’s more to Cabin.

Cabin begins with the clichés of a group of college students—a jock, a serious guy, a jokester, a bimbo, and a serious girl—heading out to a cabin with the intention of drinkin’ beer and havin’ sex. They’re carefully prepped by technicians to fulfill these roles, we discover, and the cabin is just as carefully rigged to watch their progress into the various possible nightmares they can unleash from the cellar. The really smart move that makes Cabin so much fun is that we’re often treated to the point of view of the amoral, manipulative technicians, who playfully enjoy their jobs like video game programmers.

The conceit of this narrative is that it’s explaining, as if horror films are records of real, historical events, why the characters in so many horror films are stereotypes who make really foolish decisions, release unspeakable evil, and all die (except, as is so often the case, one girl). The technicians did it, you see! They injected stupidity serum into the hairdye, sprayed pheromones, implanted tiny microphones--they did it! That’s pretty clever and funny, I think, because it’s kinda true. Screenwriters, like technicians, do reduce real, flesh-and-blood beings into bland stereotypes of ‘jock’ or ‘nerd’ and force them to make incredibly stupid decisions to move the plot along.

Cabin gets even better. The conceit is not just to explain why the characters are so stupid and the plots cliché, but to playfully offer a justification for it. The characters are being so manipulated because they have to be sacrificed to a primordial, destructive deity beneath the technicians’ office. The method of sacrifice must be punishment for transgression--destruction deities are very particular. And the transgressors have to occupy particular archetypes, like ‘athlete,’ ‘virgin,’ ‘fool.’

What I enjoyed about this is how it mocks not just horror screenwriting, but much of the academic criticism on horror filmmaking. Robin Wood’s influential Freudian reading of horror, in which the horror film brings the Id's repressed urges before the Ego in order for it to re-repress them, is dramatized, for instance. The primordial deity is the Id and its various, repressed urges to consume and destroy. The deity, like us, needs to see horrors like the undead raised and repressed; and (to Jung it up) archetypes like alpha males crushed. Cabin goes on through theorists like Bruce Kawin, who uses Fraizer’s anthropological theories to explicitly treat the horror film as a kind of ritual sacrifice. The setup in Cabin is a literal ritual sacrifice to the primordial deity. Similarly, Kawin’s argument that horror movies are an externalization of nightmare is also met by Cabin’s suggestion that its monsters are literally the stuff of nightmares. Most overtly, Cabin tackles Carol Clover’s theories about the ‘Final Girl,’ which stipulates that the pleasure-seekers must be punished for their transgressions and the virginal, androgynous girl purified through abject terror. This obviously informs the entire setup in Cabin.

Again, if this is all Cabin had to offer, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it. This is fun and playful, but kind of smug and appeals to an inner smugness in me that I don’t like. Where Cabin earns my admiration is in making its own argument, which it does with the character of Marty. Marty, the ‘Fool’ archetype and constant pot-smoker, is the only one of the numbskulls to notice that they’re being manipulated. I don’t think Cabin’s point is that we must all smoke weed. I think the point is that we all want to be free. Weed was smoked in the Sixties and onward as a means of seeing beyond convention. LSD as a means of seeing even further beyond. What’s wrong with much of horror screenwriting is that the full freedom of humanity is abandoned to laziness—not ideology, but laziness. What’s wrong with much of academic criticism on horror is that it writes humanity into the corner of watching horror movies just to satisfy that primordial deity in the depths, or to see women punished for their freedom.

Human beings don’t like being pigeonholed as jocks, sluts, or virgins. We don’t like being forced into situations and experiments without our consent. We don’t like being force-fed thoughts, ideas, and viewpoints that are not our own. And we would rather incur the end of the world than have it live in without freedom. That is a fundamental truth about humanity and a much better starting point for comprehending horror movies than repression and gender. Why people enjoy reading Robin Wood and Carol Clover is not necessarily because she was right, but because she said something new—a new way of looking. But these old keys shouldn't be forged into new cages. With that point made, Cabin may be offering one of the most invaluable critiques made on horror cinema in a very long time. But I have no doubt the technicians of our world will nevertheless go on with what they do best.