Through the Woodsman: DOG SOLDIERS, THE FINAL TERROR, WITHOUT WARNING, THE HALLOW

The woods --alternately uncanny and familiar--are a 'free' way to draw value from trees that's less damaging than clear-cutting. Shit in the woods = archaic. Lost in the woods = easy to happen. Conclusion: shit in the woods and if only the bears hear it, you know you're fucked. I got lost once in the heart of NYC, just trying to get across the upper wild swaths of Central Park one lonesome afternoon. If you've been up there in the wilds of the Northern sections you know how creepy and forlorn it can get and how fast; I wound up going in a big ass circle for a full hour. Nothing more heartbreaking than walking ever more quickly with a mild panic generating in your stomach only to find you're right back where you started, still no one in sight to ask for help or direction, just some snooty squirrel that stands there staring, mocking you.

Blair Witch Project is still the high benchmark for that kind of unease. Those kids might have literally been a mere half mile from a highway and never known it. Once we lose our orientation in amidst the deep woods, it doesn't matter if civilization is right around the next hill or a hundred miles away; we're on our own.

DOG SOLDIERS

(2002) Dir. Neil Marshall

***

You think it's easy to be a straight male, age 11-55, when it comes to movies, TV, and commercials? Watching a movie on Syfy like Underworld: Awakening for the 100th time, and still not liking it, but sticking with it because it quenches some weird fanboy desire for monsters, sexy pale skin brunettes, violence, and car crashes (a need catered to with pandering directness, punctuated with bro-demo-angling commercials for fantasy football gambling sites, and chips flavored to taste like bacon). Kate Beckinsale, all smokin' crystal blue eyes, in a skin tight leather catsuit wielding twin .45 automatics: it's all for us, SMs age 14-55: for our stunted adolescent minds.  No matter how much our higher self sighs in disdain, we can't resist.

Hoping to galvanize rather than indulge, director Neil Marshall's 2002 debut is a Hawksian, darkly comic male group camaraderie version of his better-known female camaraderie DESCENT (2003). It's a gory, playfully macho, riveting, terse, gory, slightly cheeky 'werewolves vs. British infantry squad on maneuvers' sort of SOUTHERN COMFORT meets the initial 'moors' sequence of AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON sort of thing. Like THE DESCENT, it ends with an all-out balls-to-the-wall brawl, dwindling down the numbers on both sides until only the true toughies remain. While they last, the cast is tops, especially the cool-in-a-crisis, Max von Sydow-esque Pvt. Cooper (Kevin McKidd) and the bullet-headed badass Sgt. Harry Wells (Sean Pertwee, a kind of Michael Caine, Jason Statham, and Bob Hoskins bolted together with oily lug nuts). Their manly rapport and gives the film an adrenalin savagery-switchpoint boost. Hawksians wit, esprit de corps and armament savvy ("three-round bursts!") provides an outside-the-box form of survivalist enlightenment that overflows the boundaries of both the werewolf and survival-behind-the-lines genre parameters. Some choice dialogue worthy of Leigh Bracket ("I hope I give you the shits, you wimp!") flows in natural, overlapping style (clearly the result of diligent training and rehearsing as an ensemble). There's even a Hawksian woman (Emma Cleasby - top)--a local who takes the boys to the rustic soon-besieged cabin--who'd be right at home in THE DESCENT and it's great to see a strong woman rescue a squad of men rather than the reverse.

Mark Thomas's orchestral theme is mostly good though gets a little to bouncy for horror and at times seems remarkably similar David Julyan's in THE DESCENT... Marshall clearly needs to hear all the great retro-analog synth stuff being done these days, they would have helped, his nonetheless underrated and very Carpenterian DOOMSDAY). The special effects are first rate, creating a blackly comic Howling-esque body horror element without sacrificing terse vivid something-at-stake realness;  and the thick old growth of mountainous Luxembourg (filling in for Northern Scotland) makes ideal territory for such isolated do-or-die standing, and Marshall's gritty 16mm camera swoops around capturing events with an intriguing if washed-out low-light immediacy that evokes early films by Cronenberg, Stanley, Craven, Raimi, Barker, and Romero, and compares well against all of them. Final note: considering the shoddy treatment of dogs in horror films, I thought I should mention that the shifty MI-6 guy (Liam Cunningham) who tries to make Cooper shoot a dog to toughen him up in the intro (and kicks Cooper out of his elite squad when he won't) gets his canine comeuppance, so don't let that moment throw you.

WITHOUT WARNING

(1980) Dir. Graydon Clark

**1/2

There's a few things we need to get straight right now: I know this post is collecting cool woodsy horror flicks, and no one loves scary woods in movies more than me. But honey, this film's woods--supposedly dark and deep and perfect for hunters--looks like the scrub where all the cheap LA cop shows film bodies being dumped and cars pulling over to hand-off ransom money. There are almost no trees, just dry desert shrubbery, yet these woods hold not only bivouacking cub scouts led by a Patton-paraphrasing scoutmaster (Larry Storch), sets of necking teens, a greasy Cameron Mitchell using a very anachronistic blue collar Brooklyn goomba accent while trying to make a grouse-killer of his pacifist son, and a pre-Pedator alien who's been hunting the most dangerous game, using a nearby groundskeeper shed as his trophy room. If you watch Final Terror (reviewed below)--with its great old growth and beautiful stark photography--as I did, right before this, the thoroughly second-rate look of Without Warning can be a tough adjustment. Carpenter cameraman Dean Cundey knocks out a nice magic hour and the occasional Steadicam fleeing (and a funky bat shuriken POV), but couldn't they at least get a permit to shoot at Bronson Canyon like everybody else? And while David Caruso is one of the first-killed teens (during sex in a "lagoon" lower right), his death is mostly off camera! Why else are we here if not to see him die? Worse, the script includes enough strangely-emphatic anti-hunting oratory to count as passive-aggressive screed, even if the landscape looks like all it might yield is a stray golf ball or a shopping cart full of cans as far as game.

But hey, once-top drawer B-list stalwarts like Ralph Meeker, Jack Palance, Neville Brand and Martin Landau enter the story, via a Bodega Bay-ish bar of colorful drunks and eccentric locals, all of whom refuse to believe the outlandish story of our frantic college boy hero, well, things get quite tolerable, and so vividly rendered by Cundey's camera you can smell the blend of musty naugahyde, cigarettes and stale beer. And as much as the other older actors may be phoning it in or hamming it up (Landau especially is awful), Palance-as the big game hunting gas station herald who sees the chance to hunt the alien as a kind of two-way intergalactic Most Dangerous Game--is terrific. Palance never phoned it in or shouted it from across the street in his life, and here he's in his B-list element.

Thou shalt not suffer a ginger in a magic hour pond to live! 

But now to the one real liability (or strength depending on your frame of mind): the teenage male lead, Christopher S. Nelson, a kid who makes Zach Galligan seem like Humphrey Bogart by comparison. One can imagine an acting teacher showing this film as an example of "What Not to Do" in film acting. You can see the way he overthinks and sabotages himself time and again. Sometimes he'll fall into the swing of a scene almost by chance, helped along by the skill of the good actors around him--he'll just 'be' in the scene and not consciously trying to remember his lines---then you see the thought cross his eyes, oops, I forgot where I was! And with a sudden frenetic lurch he starts 'acting' again and you can feel the crew slap their heads and roll their eyes, and then just decide well, 45 takes are enough - we'll roll that one. Such spastic terribleness works when his character is supposed to be wildly unsteady, hysterical with fear, such as laughing maniacally when the windshield wipers knock off the monsters, or paralyzed by nervous confusion (and he does a good job in a scene spinning paranoid tales of world domination to stall paranoid psycho Landau) but everywhere else it seems more like he's auditioning for a student film or trying to make his acting teacher kill himself. He's very pretty though, and, I hate to say it, but Landau's performance is almost just as bad!

Hard to believe? See this film! And realize the way older character actors were valued in the late 70s-early 80s in ways they're not now. Once, nearly every old star could still get work for scale as expository landlords on TV movies or old timer sheriffs on cop shows, or barflies mouthing old timer-style exposition to frightened kids. As long as they weren't too proud--in Dinner at Eight parlance--to play the beachcomber, they were working. But where are they now, aside from dead?

Final girl Tarah Nutter rocks cute braids (above) but her character is such a useless cringing liberal you'll want to jab her with an NRA button 

Things really pick up in the last few reels, even if it never quite gets to its feet. The idea that Invasion of the Body Snatchers-meets-Red Dawn 'nam paranoia would turn Landau into a second threat ("Sarge, you are not in the army no more." shouts the barkeep) is pretty original, as far as it goes, so it's too bad the posters show off the alien right off the bat, squashing the big reveal. But hey, if you've seen Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster as many times as I have, you may appreciate the strength of Without Warning's destitute delusions. Many of my fellow writers saw it and loved it as kids in the early-early 80s on late-night cable (at a time where there often weren't even movie descriptions in the TV Guide, let alone spoiler-alert posters). I never saw Without Warning back then, but I can pretend.

If only I could pretend its canyon scrub was actual woods.

THE FINAL TERROR

(1983) Dir. Andrew Davis

**1/2

If, to savor WW's Corman-like deadpan self-aware humor and adherence to a beloved formula, you sometimes need to let go of any sense of atmosphere, coherence, or quality, it's just the opposite with The Final Terror. Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) not only directs, he does the cinematography, and very well, so there's a total harmony between atmosphere and actors one rarely sees outside, say, John Boorman. This is partly because Davis shipped his cast and crew up to Northern California's old growth forest for his film, and what could be too dark (especially in muddy VHS) or too washed out due to the canopy is--instead--just right on Blu-ray: gorgeous yet ominous, claustrophobic yet Wagnerianly vast.

It’s the tale of some young park rangers rafting downriver with their girlfriends and enjoying a week of freedom from parental restrictions (sleeping bag fornication unfettered) that--as might be inferred-- turns mighty terrifying as someone starts killing them off. A religiously uptight local boy-- played with the usual zest by a miscast Joe Pantoliano--is their chief suspect but, well, I can't spoil the events further except to note that the real message at work isn't the usual slasher covert return to conservative values (i.e. sex leaves you very vulnerable to attack, so return to repression) but the reverse, a realization that no uptight slasher can stand a chance against a crew of outdoorsy young people with some basic training (National Guard, ROTC) under their belt if they stick together.

In other words it's almost a a 'response' to the slasher craze rather than a part of that craze. It's certainly quieter. The cast is a-brim with both future stars (Rachel Ward, Daryl Hannah) and semi-familiar faces (Lewis "Perfect Tommy" Smith, and Mark "Is that a pledge pin? On your uniform?!!" Metcalf) but some unknown named John Friedrich steals the show after he avails himself of too many of the killers' psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and starts oscillating between being the group's military tactician savior and biggest liability (shades of Patton!). He'll evoke Harold Wayne Jones in The Crazies for you one minute, and the next you'll wish there were more guys like them in these kinds of movies, dudes who illustrate how he who protects you from outside evil can't save you from the evil of themselves.

I don’t want to give too much away, but you know that, queasy feminist that I am, if I can enjoy a film in this disreputable subgenre it’s only because there’s no sexual assaults, unnecessary cruelty, terrible gore effects, or shitty dialogue. Final Terror does not have those things... in spades. If it has little else either, hey, the old growth woods look literally dark and deep; the skulking killer's camouflage leaf jacket blends so well into the surrounding vegetation that it’s startling when a filthy hand emerges to smooth a sleeping girl's hair in the early dawn; Susan Justin’s weird piano and atonal synth score hits the right notes every scene... except one... and Daryl Hannah.

THE HALLOW

(2015) Dir Corin Hardy

***

Irish horror--drawing on their national arts funding, eerie emerald-colored landscape (often enhanced with green tints and filters), and dark Celtic folk tales--is on a roll these days and THE HALLOW is a worthy example. Bojana Novakovic and Joseph Mawle star as new parents moving into a woebegone house at the edge of a foreboding Irish forest and the ominous trouble starts the moment mom takes down the window bars. The locals tell the dad--a botanist intent on researching local tree blight--not to wander too deep off the path through the woods, and to take nothing he finds home with him. But he needs samples, and it looked like blight, so no woodland sprite might object to some tree blight being scraped off. But is it blight?

Not according to the legends.

But who believes auld legends these days? Only the spooked locals with their allegedly ignorant tradition. So the wife takes down the bars and charms from around the windows to let in what passes for sunshine in Ireland and dad finds, as you might imagine, some mighty strange black mold samples to bring home. That night they're besieged by an array of Irish faerie lore-originated spooky tricks, the worst of which is the swapping out human babies with weird changelings, raising the human kids in the woods (like the changeling in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM so coveted by Oberon) and generating weird suspicion betwixt the couple, and tracking mold all over the walls and floor.

They told ye not to go into those damn woods, ya bómán! Ye auld Leathcheann! 

The feature debut of Corin Hardy. The Hallow is not quite the resounding announcement of 'I am here, I am now!' horror genius we got with Jennifer Kent's BABADOOK or Robert Egger's THE WITCH or David Robert Mitchell's IT FOLLOWS, but it's close enough, and the monsters are interesting fusions of trees, mold and people (like the 1951 THING coupled to the hyper-evolutionary mutation ability in the remake), and the idea of the changeling is very subtle and creepily represented, as Clare must decide if it's her infanticidal husband (mutating from woodland fairy venom infection) or the baby (which she dredged up from the bottom of the lake) who's still 'real.'

Despite semi-strange interludes toward the end (which decency forbids me to explain) everything is fairly believable and all fast moving in the kind of tight kinetic 'all in a single long late afternoon-through-to-dawn' (tick-tock) momentum. You might come away only mildly plussed when all's said and done but it's quite a ride. I didn't get up to refill my drink or have a slash once during the whole 90-minute running-time. The lighting is moody and the acting terrific - I mean Novakovic and Mawle are committed, and at times seem like--institutionally-speaking--they literally should be. They're more terrifying than the monsters crawling through their vents, and their veins, and vice versa.

And like all the films discussed here, the woods are a major element --psychologically and diegetically. Filmed with an ingenious palette of murky green colors seemingly culled from the depth of darkness, they've never looked so creepy and gorgeous. Best of all, there's no gibbering rapists, claustrophobic abductions or sadistic cruelty, all which I'm bloody sick of. I like my horror to be supernatural and trading on deep unconscious drives rather than brutal true crime torture porn. Our world is bad enough on its own! No wonder the trees want to leave.

But in Ireland, aye, the trees seem to be coming back... le bhfeice!

For the whole drunk family: GRABBERS

Ah laddies and lassies faire, are ye home this Thanksgiving? Will the family be looking to you to pick a film from the Netflix once all football and food is done and the wee ones and pious old folks safe in bed, and only the serious drinkers left coherent (read "serious" in that beautiful accent Claire Florani uses in those "All Hail the Drinkin' Man" commercials for Johnny Walker Black, the only reason to watch TV anymore - my praise here)?

Well, of course Netflix'sh got you covered.

GRABBERS 

(2012) Dir Jon Wright

***1/3

It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid that's part of the lineage of solid drinking films from the more remote and storm-swept parts of the UK, like LOCAL HERO, TIGHT LITTLE ISLAND, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING, and MAN OF ARAN. Drunker family members might scoff during the first bits, but hush them and soon they'll be noting how gorgeous the emerald scenery and the leads most attractive. Ere long they'll be singing "Jug of Punch" and recalling aloud John Wayne in THE QUIET MAN and Gene Kelly in BRIGADOON with a merrye twinke in their eye. 

And there's a great hook: to avoid being eaten all the residents of this tight little island must drink, a lot. 

Dig that caption!

H.R. Giger-esque (but not too much) industrio-tentacledness

There's an adorable little lady ball-busting cop (Ruth Bradley), similar to how Holly Hunter used to be, pre-PIANO, but cuter even, and it's rewarding watching her character get drunk for the first time, like a little two-fisted Gallic faerie, falling for the drunken officer who decides to stay relatively sober just this once, even though it means having to stall the first kiss with this newly forged firebrand. Bradley makes the most of the chance to cut loose and is a wet-eyed mussy haired miracle in a big jeep stakeout, which is also craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and/or romance. There's some taking time to capture lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline, a few too many green and azure filters, overdoing it just a dram like we're watching the film through green sunglasses, but the whole third act is over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all my favorite films, it ends at dawn.

AGE GROUPS: Unlike most monster films, the American ones for example, there's no guns on the island, it's Europe, after all, so when monsters come they have to improvise with various devices of a non-gunpowder-related nature. Violence is mostly of the squishing and severed head variety, nothing the hip kids haven't seen in frog-cutting class; there's nothing sexual or overly traumatic, and even old grandma can respect how, even under monster duress and whiskey inhibition lowering, the romance stays chastely Fordian. By the same token, fans of the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost films (such as SHAUN OF THE DEAD) shall know it by the same approximate seriocomic fan's eye view attention to squeam-and-squish minutiae. In sum, if your family's been known to have a wee dram, slither in. 

A Stoner Shall Rise: SHROOMS, THE LOVED ONES, CABIN IN THE WOODS

Oh my are the demons ever colorful this season. Clad all in pink and wrapped up in bizarre incestuous serial torturer pair bonds in ways shows like DEADLY WOMEN on Investigative Discovery dream about. It makes me understand the frailty of demons and the necessity of pot for modern survival and to blazes with anyone who'd tell you different. To blazes with those not blazin'...

SHROOMS (2007) had been staring me down from my Netflix Streaming cue for years now, since before you or your grandchildren were even born, in a way, so finally I went for it one soggy afternoon, sprinkled atop a peanut butter and cracker to mask the taste. But, aside from a talking cow and some nice Irish gloom, the trip was a bummer, more muddled than that stale yellow film feeling I used to get trying to snap into action through taking--as these kids did--shrooms on a rainy camping trip when I was so full of whiskey I could barely talk, and yet painfully sober, stuck with people I did or didn't like as companions that never understood what I was trying tray abthing haren't sewa theem? Whoa, I thought I'm guess hard tripping was!

You know how it is, those soggy six AM Sundays after the bars are closed and only stupid college kids and burnouts take shrooms to get over the hump, 'cuz it worked... once. And whoa, that stupid college burnout, baby, is maybe you. And the goddess of the fungus takes one peek down your flooded basement soul, senses your weakness and decides rather than heal your wounds, to lay into you like a bitchy girlfriend-mom hybrid... for eight miserable hours. And even after her cruel relentless mockery mellows out and your closed-eye hallucinations fade back to normal blurry bands of gray, even then you can't sleep because by then its three in the afternoon and the third eye visuals, sink-holes and leprous faces keep picking at the scabs of your soul.

But hey, there's a film called SHROOMS, and no, here the shrooms don't really cause evil in and of themselves, in fact they're kind of a red herring. But they're there. They're not going away. The trouble is, maybe these campers should have been smoking pot instead, and passing around some whiskey and just calling it a day. Shrooms can be hit or miss, pummeling you or protecting you, depending on the spore's magic mood, and of course set and setting are so important. A sunny day with your favorite people at, taken a few hours after a light lunch, at, like, three PM, with good music and incense and some minor butterflies over the excitement? That's ideal. But pot never fails us... just as it never quite succeeds. That's just part of its deal. Pot's hangover is included in the high, there's no misery deferred and returned with interest at a more convenient time. It's pay as you go. Shrooms though, are paid off in installments for weeks, or else you end up drinking and taking more to taper off, and that never works.

The signifiers and signs of horror meanwhile (masks, knives, corridors, POV steadicams, phone calls, Martin Balsam in PSYCHO-style unmaskings) are now so beyond cliche they don't even need to be tied to anything substantial; having a stoned hipster gesture towards them with his thumb is enough. The hipster's thumb is the new black and CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012) has taken this idea farther than anyone yet this year. Metatexually refracting the cliche of attractive high school seniors heading off to the woods for R&R, T&A, death and Lovecraftian abstraction, cometh the humble stoner--the inevitable fifth or seventh wheel in gangs of young people heading off into the wilderness since that obnoxious brother in the wheelchair in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1977).

In this sea of cliche, this stoner shall rise. As the smoke rises, man, so the stoner...


And instead of a fifth wheel, lo! The unicyclist.

Yes, in exploring this character, horror has recognized its target audience and isolated a common thread that runs counter to general programming: the insider realization that pot protects you from evil. All along we were right to be paranoid, man, things are all... weirder and more perverse and vile than we imagined in our trippiest delusions. And Mary Jane's loyal sheepdog sanity never abandoned us and won't now.

And as so often happens, this concept is literally true as recent studies show. 

 What is even more troubling is that the United States Government actually did a secret follow up-study on the Virginia findings, in the mid '90's. When it only served to confirm the results of the 1974 research, and showed that THC (one of the main active ingredient in cannabis – and the one the government loves to hate), when administered to mice, protected them against malignancy, true to form, our government attempted to bury the results. Fortunately, a draft copy of the study was leaked to the journal, AIDS Treatment News, and the media covered the story. An excellent article by Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML, covers this part of our shameful history. (more)

I can't really reveal what happens in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS since 'holy shit! no way! Really? O man!' reactions are so essential, but I will quote Gregory Cwik's article on it in the current issue of Acidemic's Journal of Film and Media: 

"... after Halloween was labeled a morality play, its character's seemingly punished for acting immorally, smoking became a death sentence for horror characters. Instead, Whedon's pothead uses his bong as a weapon against the enemy. Maybe its a sign of changes to come." 

Maybe it is, if we kill enough old people first, by which I mean those who think it should be illegal (because they have never tried it). Maybe their personal embargo serves us not them. Unable to keep food down after chemo, they nonetheless refuse to smoke the pot that might help with that since it's 'the devil's weed' when all along it was their only truly safe and effective remedy. They die sooner and so can't vote anymore, and progress moves forth. Part of growing up should be the realization you can't believe a word Uncle Sam tells you, and that doctors sometimes are barred from recommended holistic and herbal remedies, as the AMA won't acknowledge their effectiveness (having never tested them, because tests are too expensive and herbs can't be patented so there's no return on investment which is a bit like saying water isn't good for quenching your thirst because we can't patent it... yet). Fail to realize this and Darwinian nature shall take its course.

Ignorance of a law doesn't make you immune, only weed does that. Is there any better reason why the law is so scared of it?

In the recent Aussie tor-por prom-com THE LOVED ONES (2009) pot brings a hot Goth girl Mia (Jessica McNamee) and a nervous hipster together for prom. I shan't discuss the 'main attraction' of the film, a protracted torture sequence, but suffice it to say that torturer Lola (Robin McLeavy) is a stunning psychotic presence, bringing so much whacked-out gusto she single-handedly elevates the whole production to near-cult status. If HEAVENLY CREATURES' Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey were Horace and Rebecca Fem in THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), McLeavy would be the locked upstairs brother, Saul. Maybe you don't get that reference, but if you don't you should see both films fast, before it's too late.

Lola's unwilling prom date-torture boy is the beautiful boy Xavier Samuel, whose best bud is the smart aleck stoner Jamie (Richard Wilson), a hipster nerd with fearful, darting eyes who snags Mia for the prom. She proceeds to smoke all his pot, embarrass him in front of distrustful teachers. and look askance upon his chosen corsage... but she also "puts out," even if it's kind of a train wreck version. For better or worse, hotness and reefer heal all wounds. Having dated a girl who not only looked a lot like Mia but was just as bi-polar and brilliant and sexy and crazy and burning every bridge I ever built just to watch the fire (then crying that it was so sad, then laughing, etc... but who cares because she was so damned hot yeah you tell yourself that but gradually your own emotions start to buckle under the strain of her DSM-IV), I can vouch for the realism of McNamee's fearless portrayal. For all the damage our time together wrought upon the life I had built, it ranks as the most romantic, swooning, delirious year of my life, even if it lasted only a few weeks, tops.

It was all good, the love far past the point of bearability, but then her polar cap shifted. And torture commenced.

Now that I'm older, crippled by the psycho bitch stalker of time, hobbling around with the TV blasted and a sense of irrelevance hanging on me like a wet afghan woven by elderly skeletal hands, the boiling water lobotomy wiping out everything but the archaic recesses of my frozen Swedish heritage. And my hands! My elderly carpels and metacarpals twisting like the yellow lines of a woebegone stretch of Mad Max Aussie highway, I finally relate to Mia's level of discontent and the tragic self-cutting of the Kristen Stewart-Hillary Swank lesbian lovechild, Xavier, and of my own past DSM-IV-quoting love in ways as prosaic as a summer's day. It all coincides perfectly with that Saturday night fall depression when all those days wasted kicking it with the TV for endless Blu-ray moviethons instead of going to the beach come back to haunt you.

The eyes, Manolo. They never lie.

That's because psilocybin can awaken spiritual visions but also conjure nightmares that can creep into this plane thanks to your expanded ability to see them, like strangers across the room who take your noticing them as an invitation to manifest further, like the strange  guy in the corner who you made the mistake of making eye contact with and now he stalks you all through the party, working up the nerve to come say hi, his shyness slowly creeping you the fuck out. Can anyone else at the party even see him?

These thoughts can be horrifying to the shroomer. The stoner, on the other hand, can't hold onto them long enough.

The film SHROOMS crashes and rises from the moldy Irish mud and shows how some days the psilocybe spirits are less kind than in others. And heavy Catholic guilt makes murder of 'sluts' an easy sacrificial treat on some elder god level. But this film isn't satisfied with just squirming down that dark poison trail, there has to be big twists which SPOILER ALERT.... ah, you guessed it already.

Top: Shrooms / Bottom: Cabin in the Woods

The best of these stoner horrors addressed in this post is obviously CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012), a pothead Truman Show, with a Lovecraftian chaser, but instead of comedy it's only a terrifying farce, featuring a WAXWORKS edge-of-sanity assortment of Escher-esque monsters and the feeling of constantly being watched (and waxed) by unseen cameras, which is what paranoia on pot is all about--both fun and unnerving, colorful and creepy...relaxing and nerve-wracking... and, uh... colorful? Did I say that one? Yo, did I mention it cures cancer? I shall now gargle whiskey while my little friend sings "Swanee River," I thank you.

It was in the summer of 1997, when I was still drinking, and so very social, and constantly amidst a sexy posse and one particularly colorful LSD trip in Sheep's Meadow (Central Park, NYC) back when you could still smoke outdoors and enterprising homeless guys regularly patrolled between the blankets selling waters ($1) and cold Heinekens bottles ($2) from rolling coolers. As we consumed the Heinekens and the acid made the trees glow like a beautiful Shakespearean jigsaw classical painting I'd dimly remembered seeing at the Met, which was right behind us... Because this was Central Park, where everyone from George Washington to Treat Williams in HAIR had hung out, getting toasted. Then, in a flash the thing came to me: Every homeless guy selling beer looked like Harry Belafonte. Within minutes I could see the way these were clones using Sheep's meadow as a testing ground, selling Heinekens laced with chemicals and monitoring the results with secret cameras placed on the heads of dragonflies, and the Meadow itself, with its glowing blue and green Kentucky grass, was an experimental grid, the blazing reflection of the grass blades in the sun hiding the cracks of the secret trap doors where the Belafontes, as we called them, retreated when their coolers were empty. They went down long stairs to get more beer, and check in with their overlords, and monitor us and our reactions.

How else did they get the beer so cold and sell it so cheap, and why else would they all look so Belafonte-ish if they weren't ghostly clones of Belafonte who probably has some great beer-broker DNA? See? You can't answer.

Just as in SHROOMS, the world kicks in around you when your senses are enhanced. The landscape seems designed to heighten whatever your brain tells your eyes and ears to see. And the bastards down there finally decided to make it plain to the rest of the world, via the film THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. This film is my proof about the Belafonte system.

End of meaningless anecdote.

"Belafonte!"

In THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, there's a found diary written by a tragic one-armed mutant hillbilly cannibal girl, who at the time of writing had been watching her family slowly disappear into the dad's HOSTEL-like 'black room' and it's this grisly idea that provides the film's only real unpleasantness. In my metatexutal undercurrent journal I marked this family down as relatives of the crazy Lola from LOVED ONES and the unstable murderer in SHROOMs, but the torturer in LOVED takes the cake and her victim could surely use some pot. Hell, even I was deeply nauseous after watching it, and while the tropes of male-on-female psycho torture porn cinema are so grisly and unpleasant my feminist liberal arts programing won't allow me to even read the synopses, I generally love crazy SPIDER BABY / AUDITION type girls torturing guys- as nature intended. But giving victims lobotomies via drilling a hole through the third eye and then pouring in boiling water, that's horrible to imagine, horrible to think anyone could even think like that, anyone presumably sane and just writing a screenplay. Then again, my childhood friend Alan used to think like that. Yeesh, I forgot about that.

Killing is one thing, but burning away a human's pineal gland, their third eye? Who could be so cruel? Who could deny a person the ability to dream and see the world beyond 3-D space? I mean, aside from our own government and its absurd anti-drug hysteria, of course, for their fear of anything consciousness-raising is the great tragedy of our modern age. Lumping psychedelics in with neighborhood scourges like heroin and crack? Dumb, man. Because we take those drugs and KNOW they're scuzzy - but a scumbag gives us LSD and our minds expand, we follow them into the meat-grinder, not your dumb naysaying church, because if you're that wrong about one drug, maybe you're wrong about crack, too. This is what Graham Hancock calls The War on Consciousness, a war so insidious he was scheduled to speak about it at TEDtalks, but they waffled and pulled him last minute (1). This shit's real. Science is scared of its own shadow. This is your brain on drugs, smelling hmmmm-mmm good in their frying pan home. This is your brain slowly dying in jail for trying to save your grandmother's life by spiking her brownies. Better she be vomiting a slow agonizing post-chemo death than getting the munchies and spending too much time on the couch, right, "America"?

Final Score:
SHROOMS - **
THE LOVED ONES - ***
CABIN IN THE WOODS - ***1/2

PS -11/13 The marijuana laws are slowly being reformed! Was it this blog post that brought people around?  (no). 
NOTES:
(1) this happened after the original date of this post, but I'm doing some rewrites as is my wont here in 4/13)