Good read.
And props for including Don't Look Now. Sutherland was great in that.
On a sidenote: I don't think I have ever hated a movie that the rest of the world loves as much as I hated The Babadook.
Essential The Official Coli Horror Film Thread: Discussion, Recommendations And Murder.
- Thread starter Dominic Brehetto
- Start date
Good read.
And props for including Don't Look Now. Sutherland was great in that.
On a sidenote: I don't think I have ever hated a movie that the rest of the world loves as much as I hated The Babadook.
*Bookmarked for later.Children of the corn had me shook as a kid
especially living beside a corn field at the time I saw it
I have questions
Think we’ve all been dipping in and out of here bc holidays. Lots to discuss in 2021.
Good read.
And props for including Don't Look Now. Sutherland was great in that.
On a sidenote: I don't think I have ever hated a movie that the rest of the world loves as much as I hated The Babadook.
why so
I watched the OG Silent Night Deadly NIght and Silent Night (2012) on XMas morning.
Of course you did
Think we’ve all been dipping in and out of here bc holidays. Lots to discuss in 2021.
Word! this year took a lot out of all of us on every single level. hopefully we can get back to somewhat normal soon
I despised everyone in the movie especially that slowful little boy and as a result I never gave a damn about whether The Babadook was going to get him or his mess of a mother.
I watched a grip of horror movies over the weekend and after the experience of Hunter Hunter none of them did anything for me.
These new horror flicks are going to have to step their game up.
These new horror flicks are going to have to step their game up.
Lord_nikon
Veteran
Watched this about two nights ago,, reminds be of The Witch (2015 film) 3/5
storyteller
Superstar
So I decided to dive into the Cube trilogy because I've never actually watched them together. I just catch 'em when they're on and I always enjoyed the hell out of the first two. I usually rail against ambiguous threads but the first Cube movie does it perfectly and the second one does alright until a disappointing ending. Anyway a bit of Cube talk...
A Non-Spoiler intro to the Cube series (if you know the deal, start at the last paragraph):
So for the uninitiated the Cube is a sort of prison with a bunch of interconnected rooms. Some of the rooms are rigged with all sorts of traps and to make it even more dangerous, everything shifts around which means the layout can change on you. Cube movies always start with people waking up in the prison without recollection of how they got there. Then we watch characters try to survive and answer all of the questions that this scenario creates.
Here's a spoiler that ought not to ruin the movies for you...the questions don't all get answered. As a matter of fact, there are no definitive answers about anything until part three takes a baseball bat to the fun of theorizing on what it's all meant to be. What makes the first two movies so golden is that they play on the unreliable narrator concept in two ways. First, we only know the characters through what they reveal about themselves how they behave in this scenario. Second, the desperate situation drives them all to behave in ways that contradict what we initially know about them.
So Cube becomes a big interrogation about what a person's true nature is. If you haven't watched and are interested, hop out and check these out. The first two hold up surprisingly well for seemingly low budget films. If you liked the Platform, I'd rate that very similar in the spirit of their exposition and explorations. Now...Quick hitters on each flick with spoilers...
Cube:
The first Cube is the cream of the crop because it's not worried about answering the big questions. It's your first time watching the Cube drive characters mad, so when the fearless leader snaps and becomes a bigger threat than the traps there's something fresh to it. Characters' personality changes from typical roles in a film to funhouse mirror reflections hit harder, it's visceral.
Cube is a movie to watch twice. A second run through is worth it just to see how much subversion is going on. There's also some nifty stuff like paying more attention to the idiot savant early and some of the personality quirks that will twist later on. The traps are a lot more simple in this one, but that simplicity helps them to be my favorite in the series because it makes this one the most character focused.
The lower budget and limitations meant that this Cube really did focus on one question. Everything else that the characters ask and every discussion that follows becomes a deeper introduction to who they truly are. It's a "Who am I" movie where you think you know the answer and can move on to bigger things. Then the movie ends with the characters right back at the room they started in, where they introduced themselves. Except none of the characters are the same person that they introduced themselves, now you're asking "Who am I...really?" I love it!
Cube 2 - HyperCube:
So the first movie went heavy on concepts of identity through traps and desperation. The second movie basically chases the same thing but tries to go bigger. You get a lot of the same character archetypes; the boots to check for traps; and room to debate if characters were always dangerous or lost their minds over the course of the experience. But there are more characters, crazier traps and the Cube itself is not rearranging time on top of the space.
None of this actually means better though. There aren't any new, big existential questions. We get the same ones with some new more basic stuff thrown in like "who is the mysterious hacker that conceptualized this Cube?" Even with some twists to characters and traps, the formula is mostly the same but there is one really dope bit early on. Since this thing plays with time and parallel universes, the characters stumble upon themselves further along their journey and straight up murdering each other. So this encounter might actually be the trigger for eventual breakdowns.
Anyway, this one's not bad. But it does follow the last one's path a bit too closely. They added bells and whistles to the Cube, not much else. The ending is especially bad fam. It does create new questions but lame ones. We now have a more concrete idea on how at least one character got in there and it's a generic government conspiracy angle. That conclusion doesn't even jive with the madness we just saw.
Cube Zero:
By this point, the creators need a new angle for their cube. So the perspective completely shifts this time to two Cube operators. These guys are watching people trapped in the Cube and noting their behaviors as if it's some sort of test. There are references to consent forms and people getting what they deserve. It also plays out like one guy is just a worker, the next dude is middle management and they both answer to "executives" that are feeding them a lot of crap to justify the torture going on in the Cube.
That's kind of cool as a concept, but it shreds the existentialism of the first two movies. It's like the first two films asked a bunch of superfluous questions as red herrings, then revealed that the real question was "who are these people really" all along. The third one actually tries to answer all of the superfluous crap. We see a woman's dreams to let us know for sure that she's an innocent victim dragged into this. We find out the violent characters are under some sort of hypnosis in this version. It takes away all the best parts of the first movies.
There's one cool twist with potential though. The main protagonist is that grunt level worker. He's a genius at chess and math in general. Once he realizes people in the Cube are innocent, he winds up working his way into the Cube. So now there's a character in the Cube that understands the layout and wants to help everyone escape. This sets up a game of cat and mouse between the executives and the genius who knows the Cube...but it falls really, really flat. The executives aren't very creative so the danger isn't either and it plays out just like the formula from prior ones with a small tweak...
This one ends with that genius fellow being lobotomized and sent back into the Cube. He's essentially become the idiot savant from the first movie, playing that role for a group of new characters that fit the archetypes we always see. Ladies and gentlemen...the Cube has come full circle! It's a nice touch but doesn't save this one from kinda ruining the other two. If there is one nice bit, it's that when the genius plays chess, his mind works in a manner really similar to what they did in the Queen's Gambit. So this B-movie schlock has a cool visual mechanic that wound up mimicked by the biggest Netflix hit of 2020.
Wrap Up: So Cube one...proof that less if more and a damned fine film. Cube 2 is the same basic plot but more convoluted because they need cooler traps. Cube 3 takes that plot but then fills in every blank that made the first two special. Cube one is damned good. Cube 2 is solid. Cube 3 makes me angry.
A Non-Spoiler intro to the Cube series (if you know the deal, start at the last paragraph):
So for the uninitiated the Cube is a sort of prison with a bunch of interconnected rooms. Some of the rooms are rigged with all sorts of traps and to make it even more dangerous, everything shifts around which means the layout can change on you. Cube movies always start with people waking up in the prison without recollection of how they got there. Then we watch characters try to survive and answer all of the questions that this scenario creates.
Here's a spoiler that ought not to ruin the movies for you...the questions don't all get answered. As a matter of fact, there are no definitive answers about anything until part three takes a baseball bat to the fun of theorizing on what it's all meant to be. What makes the first two movies so golden is that they play on the unreliable narrator concept in two ways. First, we only know the characters through what they reveal about themselves how they behave in this scenario. Second, the desperate situation drives them all to behave in ways that contradict what we initially know about them.
So Cube becomes a big interrogation about what a person's true nature is. If you haven't watched and are interested, hop out and check these out. The first two hold up surprisingly well for seemingly low budget films. If you liked the Platform, I'd rate that very similar in the spirit of their exposition and explorations. Now...Quick hitters on each flick with spoilers...
Cube:
The first Cube is the cream of the crop because it's not worried about answering the big questions. It's your first time watching the Cube drive characters mad, so when the fearless leader snaps and becomes a bigger threat than the traps there's something fresh to it. Characters' personality changes from typical roles in a film to funhouse mirror reflections hit harder, it's visceral.
Cube is a movie to watch twice. A second run through is worth it just to see how much subversion is going on. There's also some nifty stuff like paying more attention to the idiot savant early and some of the personality quirks that will twist later on. The traps are a lot more simple in this one, but that simplicity helps them to be my favorite in the series because it makes this one the most character focused.
The lower budget and limitations meant that this Cube really did focus on one question. Everything else that the characters ask and every discussion that follows becomes a deeper introduction to who they truly are. It's a "Who am I" movie where you think you know the answer and can move on to bigger things. Then the movie ends with the characters right back at the room they started in, where they introduced themselves. Except none of the characters are the same person that they introduced themselves, now you're asking "Who am I...really?" I love it!
Cube 2 - HyperCube:
So the first movie went heavy on concepts of identity through traps and desperation. The second movie basically chases the same thing but tries to go bigger. You get a lot of the same character archetypes; the boots to check for traps; and room to debate if characters were always dangerous or lost their minds over the course of the experience. But there are more characters, crazier traps and the Cube itself is not rearranging time on top of the space.
None of this actually means better though. There aren't any new, big existential questions. We get the same ones with some new more basic stuff thrown in like "who is the mysterious hacker that conceptualized this Cube?" Even with some twists to characters and traps, the formula is mostly the same but there is one really dope bit early on. Since this thing plays with time and parallel universes, the characters stumble upon themselves further along their journey and straight up murdering each other. So this encounter might actually be the trigger for eventual breakdowns.
Anyway, this one's not bad. But it does follow the last one's path a bit too closely. They added bells and whistles to the Cube, not much else. The ending is especially bad fam. It does create new questions but lame ones. We now have a more concrete idea on how at least one character got in there and it's a generic government conspiracy angle. That conclusion doesn't even jive with the madness we just saw.
Cube Zero:
By this point, the creators need a new angle for their cube. So the perspective completely shifts this time to two Cube operators. These guys are watching people trapped in the Cube and noting their behaviors as if it's some sort of test. There are references to consent forms and people getting what they deserve. It also plays out like one guy is just a worker, the next dude is middle management and they both answer to "executives" that are feeding them a lot of crap to justify the torture going on in the Cube.
That's kind of cool as a concept, but it shreds the existentialism of the first two movies. It's like the first two films asked a bunch of superfluous questions as red herrings, then revealed that the real question was "who are these people really" all along. The third one actually tries to answer all of the superfluous crap. We see a woman's dreams to let us know for sure that she's an innocent victim dragged into this. We find out the violent characters are under some sort of hypnosis in this version. It takes away all the best parts of the first movies.
There's one cool twist with potential though. The main protagonist is that grunt level worker. He's a genius at chess and math in general. Once he realizes people in the Cube are innocent, he winds up working his way into the Cube. So now there's a character in the Cube that understands the layout and wants to help everyone escape. This sets up a game of cat and mouse between the executives and the genius who knows the Cube...but it falls really, really flat. The executives aren't very creative so the danger isn't either and it plays out just like the formula from prior ones with a small tweak...
This one ends with that genius fellow being lobotomized and sent back into the Cube. He's essentially become the idiot savant from the first movie, playing that role for a group of new characters that fit the archetypes we always see. Ladies and gentlemen...the Cube has come full circle! It's a nice touch but doesn't save this one from kinda ruining the other two. If there is one nice bit, it's that when the genius plays chess, his mind works in a manner really similar to what they did in the Queen's Gambit. So this B-movie schlock has a cool visual mechanic that wound up mimicked by the biggest Netflix hit of 2020.
Wrap Up: So Cube one...proof that less if more and a damned fine film. Cube 2 is the same basic plot but more convoluted because they need cooler traps. Cube 3 takes that plot but then fills in every blank that made the first two special. Cube one is damned good. Cube 2 is solid. Cube 3 makes me angry.
storyteller
Superstar
Didn't want to comment until I could really sit back and give this a proper read. I dig the hell out of the examples you gave and some of the perspectives you took on films. I never thought of It Follows from a "trauma" perspective and overlooked the grief part of the Exorcist too.
I also really gotta check out We Are Still Here and The Changeling now. You've got me eager to peep those!
Great piece fam!
Thanks man. Gotta give props to my best friend for it follows. He’s a social worker and talked about it from that perspective and he blew my mind. Just opened that movie up on a different angle when he talked about the signs he recognized and patterns of behavior.
I was scratching and cleaning for number 10 and he sealed the deal.
I don't think I have seen Cube 2 and I know I never saw Cube 3.
I think I might check them out this weekend.
Good write-up, chief.
Coulda used Friday the 13th...Pam Voorhees was driven by so much grief, trauma and anger that it made her go nuts and kill a bunch of white teens in the woods.
storyteller
Superstar
Many thanks fam. If you liked the original, the next two are definitely worth a look. 2 tries to get more creative with the traps, 3 goes damn near cronenberg on the trap deaths but also butchers the story imo.