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 incestual serial torturer pair bonds, in ways shows like DEADLY WOMEN on Investigative Discovery only sometimes 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.

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, 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 only stupid college kids and burnouts take shrooms on, 'cuz they're young and optimistic and drugs managed to lift them out of depression... once. And the goddess of the fungus took one peek down your flooded basement soul and decided to lay into you like a bitchy girlfriend-mom hybrid... for eight miserable hours, and then you couldn't even sleep because the third eye visuals, sink-holes and leprous faces in tedious black and white, kept picking at the scabs of your soul.

But hey, there's a film called SHROOMS, and they 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 they should have been smoking pot instead. Shrooms can be hit or miss, pummeling you or protecting you depending on the spore's magic mood, but pot never fails.

The signifiers and signs of horror (masks, knives, corridors, POV steadicams, phone calls, Martin Balsam in PSYCHO-style unmaskings) are 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. 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, into Lovecraftian abstraction. And stoners--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)--shall rise among them. A stoner... shall rise... man and survive, or the past tense, survave, man. And instead of a fifth wheel, lo! The unicyclist.

Yes, horror has recognized in its target audience 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, and we need Mary Jane's plant power on our side. 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. You know the types: maybe the pot ban is good for that as so many of them die from being unable to keep food down after chemo. They refuse to smoke the pot that might help with that since it's 'the devil's weed' when all along it was their only true cure. Part of growing up should be the realization you can't believe a word Uncle Sam tells you. If you refused to read that memo, well, Darwinian nature shall take its course. Ignorance of a law doesn't make you immune, only weed.

In the recent Aussie tor-porn prom rom-com THE LOVED ONES (2009), pot brings a hot Goth girl Mia and a nervous hipster together. I shan't discuss the 'main attraction' of the film, a protracted torture sequence, but suffice it to say that 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 prom date 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 the arm of depressive super hot Goth chick Mia (Jessica McNamee). She proceeds to smoke all his pot, embarrass him in front of the entire prom and look askance upon his chosen corsage... but she also puts out, even if its 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 around me just to watch the ashes fall (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 portrayal. And yet, we had a week or two that ranks as the most romantic, swooning, delirious of my life. 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 zombie hands stretching back into my frozen Swedish heritage, bony carpels and metacarpels twisting like the yellow lines of a woebegone stretch of Mad Max Aussie highway, I could relate to the Aussie Stoner Goth Chick's discontent and the tragic self-cutting of Kristen Stewart - Hillary Swank lesbian lovechild, Xavier. It all coincides perfectly with that Saturday night fall depression when kicking it with the Bravia for endless blu-ray moviethons instead of going to the beach comes back to haunt you.

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. 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 IF YOU CARE - mirror HAUTE TENSION down to the wire.

Top: Shrooms / Bottom: Cabin in the Woods

The best of these stoner horrors is obviously CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012), a pothead Truman Show, with a Lovecraftian chaser but instead of comedy it's only terrifying farce, featuring a WAXWORKS edge of sanity collection of Escher-esque monsters and the feeling of constantly being watched 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... did I mention colorful yet? 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 97, and one particularly colorful LSD trip in Sheep's Meadow (Central Park, NYC) back when you could smoke there and homeless guys regularly patrolled selling waters ($1) and cold Heinekens bottles ($2) from rolling coolers, but 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, in a flash the thing came to me, every homeless guy selling beer looked like Harry Belafonte. Within minutes I could see the way Sheep's meadow was an experimental grid, the beautiful Kentucky grass now glowing blue and green above it, the blazing reflection hiding the cracks of the secret trap doors, the Belafontes as we called them retreating down there to their lair to get more beer and monitor us from dozens of cameras, directly below us. 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? Just as in SHROOMS, the world 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 nauseous after awhile, 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 descriptions on Netflix, I generally love crazy SPIDER BABY type freaks torturing guys. But giving victims lobotomies via drilling a hole through the third eye and then pouring in boiling water, that's horrible to imagine. Killing is one thing, but burning away a human's pineal gland, their third eye? Who could be so cruel? I mean aside from our own government and its absurd marijuana laws, it's fear of anything consciousness-raising, 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 - ***3/4

PS -11/13 The marijuana laws are slowly being reformed! Was it this blog post that brought people around? Swaaanneee, how I love ya how I love ya... 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)