LIE # 57: Bleak House—Some Notes on “The Cabin in the Woods”

The Cabin in the Woods (2011; directed by Drew Goddard; written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard) is hardly deep; but definitely fun.

It’s often like something the ghosts of Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft have conjured up—cruel surveillance-paranoia technocrats meet Cthulhu—and on second viewing, I noticed the flick has a nihilistic streak a mile wide.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

Not Quite Ozploitation (and two by Polanski!)

Wake In Fright (1971; Ted Kotcheff) has all the elements of a B-movie exploitation flick—a visitor to an remote town must deal with the place’s strange and foreboding customs—but wisely never plunges into obvious horror-movie territory.

There’s nothing supernatural going on, nor any superfluous “crime” subplots that are supposed to jack up the action.

However, Wake In Fright is a vicious anthropological study of the Australian continent’s worst citizens, both rural and urban, and as such is a top-shelf entry into a specific segment of “feel-bad” Savage Cinema.

LIE #13: Why Use Animation to Be Mundane? (a negative review of “A Scanner Darkly”)

A Scanner Darkly (2006; Richard Linklater) is an interesting failure.

It deserves praise for being the most faithful cinematic adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, but for me, the problem is its animation: Man, I can’t stand to look at this thing.