This past weekend saw one of those once-in-a-lifetime cosmic events, the kind that you will remember forever and tell your grandchildren about over Thanksgiving dinner while they struggle to pretend that they give a fuck about you or your stupid stories that they’ve heard a million times and don’t entirely believe are true anyway. This mind-shattering event for the ages: three movies opened in a single weekend that I actually wanted to see. This is unprecedented in my life, and I honestly didn’t know how to handle it. After a good deal of thought and meditation, consultations with my physician and my rabbi and a four-day soul-searching peyote marathon I decided that the only way to deal with the situation was to see all three movies in one day.
But one of them wasn’t showing at the megaplex, so I only saw two.
The one I didn’t see was Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary that’s said to be “thrilling and beautiful” and “a work of art”. What I saw was The Cabin in the Woods, a movie about five college students being killed by zombies, and The Raid: Redemption, a movie about a lot of Indonesian people murdering each other very violently. Never let it be said that I don’t live down to my standards. There’s really relatively little tying these two movies together except that they happened to be playing consecutively, so I’m going to tackle them one at a time, in the order they were seen.
Part One: The Cabin in the Woods
Ok, I said earlier that this was a movie about college students being killed by zombies, and…well, that’s mostly a lie. What this is is a complete and utter deconstruction of the horror genre. Screenwriters Drew Goddard (Cloverfield) and Joss Whedon (everything good and beautiful in the universe) take literally every horror movie stereotype, separate them into tidy piles, then put them back together in service of one of the most amazing pseudo-sci-fi/kinda-Lovecraftian/seriously-what-the-fuck stories Hollywood has ever produced. I’m going to not tell you anything about the plot here beyond what you already know if you’ve ever seen a preview for this movie: five college kids go to a cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway, and even though this is the setup of fully 1/3 of all horror movies ever made, that is precisely where the predictability ends. There are a group of people in an underground facility who are controlling everything that happens, but to what end is a mystery.
If you are a fan of horror movies, go see this right fucking now. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not take the time to buckle your seatbelt when you get in the car. GO NOW. The genius of this movie is staggering: Whedon and Goddard have constructed a scenario out of the tired tropes that we can all list off by rote that is not only wholly new and original, but weaves itself back into the fabric of what horror movies are. It is basically impossible to describe this process in any more detail than I already have without spoiling the fun, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave it a bit vague, but trust me when I say that this film had me in fits of hysterical laughter, then groaning in discomfort then back into hysterics. I wish I had a tenth of Joss Whedon’s imagination, because the last half-hour of The Cabin in the Woods is the kind of inspired insanity that regular mortals are simply not capable of.
The direction, by Goddard, feels sloppy at first. Then you slowly begin to realize that’s because he’s parodying the horror reboots that Hollywood is so fond of lately. And Goddard’s touch shifts as the tone of the movie shifts, keeping the heavy-handedness of a horror film while never being overwrought but also moving things along quickly enough that the comedy (and believe me, there is a lot of comedy here) never feels out of place. I won’t say that this is an especially scary movie – it’s certainly not devoid of scares, but it never really offers a real terror – but that’s simply not the point. The point is to take all of the things that we’re supposed to be afraid of and turn them 180-degrees back on themselves, and that end is achieved magnificently.
The performances are great as well, something that’s not always a feature in this genre. The mostly low-level cast (the only biggish-name actor – aside from a stellar cameo that I won’t ruin – is Chris Hemsworth, the shiny hair and improbable pectoral muscles behind Thor) do a stellar job of sliding between the characters we see in the beginning, the stereotypes they are forced to become and the confused, enraged and empowered survivors of the third act. And their adversaries – the mysterious people underground – are some of the most likeable villains you will ever see. They never become hand-wringing archetypes of evil, never overplay their roles, and remain pruriently fun throughout.
I sincerely cannot recommend this movie strongly enough. Even people with a glancing familiarity with the horror genre – if you know that people who go into the woods die one by one you’ll be just fine – will enjoy the ride, and those who are dedicated fans like me will most likely find themselves in fits of ecstasy by the time the credits roll.
Part Two: The Raid: Redemption
After a quick trip to the bathroom and a moment sitting in the lobby telling everyone on Facebook that they should run out immediately and see The Cabin in the Woods, it was time to move on with my day of death and take my seat for The Raid: Redemption. This is a movie about a raid. Where the redemption comes in is a bit less obvious to me.
Here is everything you need to know about the plot of The Raid: there is a crime boss at the top of an apartment block filled with criminals. Some cops want to get him.
Honestly, that’s it. I’m pretty sure there was something else going on, something about corrupt police and a couple of brothers, but it’s really fucking hard to care because just like being scary isn’t the point of Cabin in the Woods, having a plot isn’t the point of The Raid. The point is to watch a lot of motherfuckers die. Violently. Like really, really violently.
This film is a fucking ballet of exceptional violence. It starts with machine gun battles and slowly devolves into knife fights, ending in straight-up martial arts. It starts with 30 cops and an untold number of criminals, and ends with only four men standing, one of them in handcuffs. It is brutal and bloody, and exquisitely choreographed. It is quite possibly the finest pure action movie ever made. Picture an early Jet Li movie, or a Who Am I?-era Jackie Chan movie, except every third blow thrown in a fight is either a stab to the throat or a lightning-fast draw of a pistol to blow someone’s face across a wall. Apparently the entire cast trained with the Indonesian police force to learn their tactics, and it shows. I’m told the particular martial art at play here is Silat, but since that means nothing to me I’ll say only that it’s very stabby and awesome.
One of the most admirable things that writer/director Gareth Evans does here is to make sure that everything that happens looks fucking painful. This isn’t an 80s Schwarzenegger vehicle where someone gets shot and falls down. This is a movie where someone gets shot, they scream while trying to hold their hand over the wound, then whoever shot them runs up and finishes the job by hand. When people get thrown off the top landing of a staircase, they don’t splat on the ground floor, they land spine-down on a railing four flights up. In the climactic fight, the bad guy gets stabbed in the throat with part of a broken fluorescent light tube and keeps fighting, the blood literally squirting out of the end of the tube. It’s a movie about violence that never shies away from violence, but rather revels in it, and I absolutely love that.
It’s not a perfect movie, to be sure: there is an over-use of the shaky-cam that I hate so much (though not as egregious as some other movies I could name), and I honestly started to blank out a little toward the end because without a plot to tether you, it’s really just a string of exquisitely-executed murders with very little else of interest. But for fans of the genre, these are not problems. If Cabin in the Woods is a deconstruction of its oeuvre, The Raid is a distillation of its. It is the 100% beef hot dog of action movies: no filler, all meat.
