Cabin the Woods…

Updated on April 13, 2012 By Ken Begg 30 Comments

After sitting around for a few years, Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods is finally getting released today. One can only assume they are hoping to ride on the coattails of the upcoming Avengers movie, also made by Whedon and also starring Chris Hemsdale. (Cabin the Woods was actually made before Thor, I think.)

Astoundingly, the film is drawing a pretty spectacular 92% at RottenTomatoes. And it’s a nice, pithy 95 minutes, and you have to figure five minutes of that is end credits. I kind of wish the commercials didn’t give so much away; I’d have preferred to have been surprised by where exactly the story was going. But I can’t say Hollywood’s marketing instincts are wrong, since most people clearly really do seem to want to know everything that happens in a movie before they go to see it.

The Three Stooges got a 46% rating, which is probably about as good as one could hope for. I was never interested in that thing anyway. Still, maybe it’ll get some folks to check out the real Stooges.

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  • Toby C

    “also starring Chris Hemsdale”

    Hemsworth – and this isn’t the first time you’ve made that mistake…

  • The Rev.

    I haven’t actually paid attention to the trailers, so I have little idea what it’s about.  It was getting good word-of-mouth, and the RT rating seems to bear that out.  I may have to check it out, although first on the list is The Raid:  Redemption.

  • Its always been my opinion that the 3 Stooges are an act that is incapable of being imitated. Only the original Stooges could do what they did. Anyone else just looks, well, stupid.

  • Ken_Begg

     Actually, it’s his mistake. Clearly his name should be Hemsdale.

  • Ken_Begg

     What about the hil-arious drug-oriented Stooges bits they used to do on Fridays?

  • KeithB

    I am amazed at how much Abbot and Costello copy the Stooges. Costello does a lot of Curleyisms. Shemp shows up in several of their movies, so I don’t know who is copying whom.

  • Gamera977

    Yeah, I think the original Stooges were pretty much ‘lightning-in-a-bottle’.

    Curious about ‘CitW’ though. I loved ‘Firefly’ but wasn’t crazy about any of the other stuff I saw from Whedon. Haven’t seen the ‘Buffy’ TV series though. It seems more soap opera than the stuff I normally enjoy.   

  • Ken_Begg

    Well, they all worked in vaudeville (as did pretty much all comics / comedy acts of that period), and some of the routines they had in common were more or less standard ones–for instance, the Niagara Falls / Susquehanna Hat routine. Anyway, comics stealing from each other is a pretty hallowed tradition.The odious Joe Besser, the least of the Stooges, worked with A&C, and his childishness / prissiness certainly calls to mind Costello at times.

  • sandra

    No woman has ever understood men’s fondness for the Three Stooges.  Come to that, Abbot and Costello weren’t funny either.

  • Terrahawk

    Actually my wife and daughter both like the Stooges.  But, they don’t like chick films so they are definitely outliers.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    The Three Stooges got a 46% rating, which is probably about as good as
    one could hope for. I was never interested in that thing anyway. Still,
    maybe it’ll get some folks to check out the real Stooges.

    I wonder how many of those critics would have rated the original Three Stooges shorts above a 46?  Sad to say, even in their heyday the Stooges didn’t command much respect.

  • Beckoning Chasm

     I find Joe DeRita to be the least interesting Stooge…a sentence I never thought I’d type…

  • Ken_Begg

    I’ll buy that, but I still say Besser was the most odious, which is another matter entirely.

  • Perletwo

    Remember Lethal Weapon 3? Love for the Stooges was the final, undeniable tip-off that Rene Russo was The Perfect Woman. :D

  • Not only did the comics all come from the same field, but their writers usually came from the same place. John Grant (?), who wrote most of the material for Bud and Lou found a home at Universal International while contributing to the A&C features. He later joined the writing pool that worked on the Ma and Pa Kettle series, and Pa Kettle was suddenly doing versions of the same routines. That these worked so well in the hands of multiple comics really shines a light on the fact that the secret to all this gold was the writers as much as the actors.

    By the way, Abbott and Costello did have a more traditional version of “Slowly I turned”/Niagara Falls besides the Suquehanah Hat Co. bit (which is priceless all the same). Substituting the river of the “Pokomoko” for Niagara Falls, the familiar “Slowly I Turned” appears in, I think, LOST IN A HAREM, and at least one episode of their radio show. In the A&C version, the deranged gentleman is a cell-mate to poor Lou who gets tossed in jail.

  • I think that might be because he was so similar, physically, to Curly. I remember as a little kid watching DeRita and getting angry that he wasn’t doing the “woo woo woo” stuff that the first Curly did (It didn’t really occur to me that by the 60’s, the boys were a lot older than they were in the 30’s. With some years on them, Moe’s verbal humor took place of the more strenuous physical stuff).

    I’m a Shemp man, myself.

  • The movie just scream “Horrible Mistake!” to my ears. The Stooges, in the public mind, weren’t characters to be recreated by new actors down the road. No, they were the alter-egos of the actors themselves, like the characters always portrayed by Bob Hope or Jack Benny. I similarly cringed when I saw a preview for THE HONEYMOONERS. The whole idea of doing an updated version just seemed wrong. It wasn’t Ralph and Alice and Ed and Trixie that made the original shows (The Honeymooners, and it’s parent series The Jackie Gleason Show) work so well, it was Jackie and Audrey and Art and Joyce! What’s next, I LOVE LUCY starring Cathy Griffin*?!!

    (*Cathy Griffin is that foul-mouthed redhead, right?)

  • Petoht

    Well, the made-for-TV biopic in 2000 with Michael Chiklis as Curly was pretty good, but that was kind of a different beast than this, I suppose.

  • Toby C

    After looking it up, I gotta say I’m curious to see what Whedon’s given Anna Hutchison (previously seen in Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities (Australia’s largely non-fictional answer to The Wire) and before that in Power Rangers: Jungle Fury) to do.

  • The Rev.

    My mom actually got me into the Stooges, as she loves them.

  • The_Shadow_Knows

    It’s a pretty good movie.  It’s what Scream was supposed to be – a parody and deconstruction of horror movies – except that, unlike Scream, it’s actually funny and it actually succeeds to some extent.

  • The_Shadow_Knows

    If she’s the blond, I give her performance two thumbs up.

  • BT

     Ken, you really need to see this movie. Probably the highest praise I can give it is that you have NOT seen a horror movie like it. The trailers give a ton away, but they don’t give everything away. The_Shadow_Knows nails it, in that it truly is a deconstruction of horror movies. I never truly bought that about Scream. To me Scream was simply a movie populated by self-aware characters. Cabin in the Woods goes much deeper. You really should check it out before people start letting more about the plot out of the bag because it’s a pretty unique movie, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

  • Ken_Begg

     Thanks! I’ll probably see it Saturday morning, before the teens are up and about.

  • I saw the Three Stooges movie.  I put it in the OK range.  It was a nostalgia film like the recent Muppets movie.  Long time Stooge fans can spot all the slapstick routines that were used.  I hate to admit it but I laughed at the baby scene. 

    I agree with the posters here who said that the Stooges are hard to replicate.  Especially Curly.  I think he was really unique.  When I heard about this project I was hoping they would first make a couple 16-18 minute films just to build the team up. 

    My favorite Three Stooges short is Hoi Polloi, for the record.

  • Ken_Begg

    Dizzy Pilots has my favorite bit, where Moe is coated with rubber and they inflate him with hydrogen so as to cut it off in strips. (Pretty much one of the greatest ‘bad idea’ moments of all time.) I also have an insane passion for the Elaine song from the Shemp short Squareheads of the Round Table.

    Favorite actual short, though? Lots of competition. pretty much half of the first 20 Curly shorts are just brilliant. Punch Drunks, maybe. That was only their second short, by the way. They were firing on all cylinders that quickly.

  • A she can’t be a blond, they’re blonde. Men are blond, but for some reason the spell check doesn’t recognize blondes, though I certainly do!

  • Can you really narrow the field down to a single favorite short? I can think of many great moments, but I’m not sure I can single out one specific two-reeler that I’d hold above all the others. Punch Drunks, though, really is a classic. I love how the boys are playing different characters who all meet for the first time. It makes it more of spoof of real movies than just comedy skit. Moe as the cynical fight manager was just perfect.

  • There’s a scene in Brideless Groom where the actress who sang that Elaine song mistakes Shemp for her cousin, and let’s him have it.  (TAKING slap! ADVANTAGE slap! OF A slap! POOR, slap! WEAK, slap! HELPLESS WOMAN! punch!)  It’s a classic Three Stooges scene, and I love the story behind it.  The actress blew a couple takes because she didn’t want to hurt Shemp, so he basically told her “A lot of half-hearted slaps hurts more than one good one.”

    Another Three Stooges moment that I always laugh at is in Pop Goes the Easel when they’re in drag.  Moe is SOOOOO mad when Curly introduces him as his mother and not as a sister like Larry.

  • Nathan45

    Ken, Cabin in the Woods is good.  Surprisingly just about everything given away in the trailer is given away in the first 10 minutes of the movie.  My biggest gripe is that it never really tries to be scary.  But still a must see, particularly in a crowded theater