Review by Dede Crimmins
I often have a negative, knee jerk
reaction to kids-in-a-cabin horror films. As a horror fan, I have
seen far too many bad ones in that sub-genre, so I feel the need to
proceed with caution. You know the drill: a bunch of horny teens are
in a secluded cabin for the weekend/ spring break, when they start
getting killed one-by-one by demons/ ghosts/ rednecks. However you
can’t completely write off all the kids-in-a-cabin movies, because
so many horror classics come from that field. Evil Dead,
Friday the 13th, and more recently Hatchet
and Cabin Fever have all given us very good reasons not to
stay away from the woods. And I’m sure happy I didn’t totally
write off the kids-in-a-cabin movies, because I would have missed
enjoying Devi Snively’s Trippin’.
Trippin’ is a fun send-up of
the kids-in-a-cabin model. It tilts more heavily toward comedy than
towards horror, but there is still a solid dose of gore for the
horror fan. Snively definitely knows the genre she is using as a
playground well, and has fun playing with our expectations of these
cabin films.
The film starts with a typical stoner
guy, Zed, at a bar, telling the story of how he told the story about
his scar. Zed has an enormous scar on his calf, which just has to
have a great story behind it. After telling his tale the previous
year in exchange for 12 beers, he and his audience decided that it
would make a great movie. Which begins the flashback to the story
of the scar, or at least the version of the story that will make a
good movie.
From there we meet our cast of
characters who will meet their demise on this fateful trip to the
woods. We have Holly (the scantily clad girlfriend of Zed), Mickey
and Joe (the drinking and driving navigator and his hot wife), and
Jizz and Jeremy (the uptight prude and her horny boyfriend). All of
them are piled in a van to head to the cabin for the weekend. Their
trip starts like any other: with Mickey taking pictures of road kill
as they pass by, Joe driving and slamming down beers, and the other
four playing truth or dare in the back of the van. Jizz (which is
apparently short for Giselle, though they never call her that) does
her best to show everyone how privileged and what a killjoy she is
spends the entire trip loudly voicing how much she looks down upon
the rest of the group. They all have a similar attitude toward her,
and voice their corresponding opinions right back at her. Not quite
the bonding, fun-loving trip they were all hoping for. After a
run-in with a potentially homicidal local, their journey takes a turn
for the worse and doesn’t stop getting worse until the very end.
Though this all sounds like typical
kids-in-a-cabin movie so far, Snively actually does a good job of
saving Trippin’ from falling into the crevice of cliché.
The most notable savior is the fact that the characters in Trippin’
aren’t teenagers! Mickey and Joe are married. All of them are
grown-ups, and have jobs. Sure, they like to go into the woods and
get stoned for days at a time, but they aren’t kids. When Jizz
talks to them as if she is the lone adult in a sea of children, your
sympathies lie squarely with the rest of the crew, even when they are
acting irresponsibly.
Which brings us to the discussion of
drugs. With a title like Trippin’ it should be no surprise
that copious amounts of drugs are involved in the film. Marijuana,
Quaaludes, and alcohol (almost exclusively while driving) are all
heavily featured. Because everyone here seems live like a
responsible adult (well… at least during their day-to-day lives),
it is framed by Snively as a bunch of friends letting loose for a
short vacation, rather than a pathetic group of people with addiction
problems. The drugs are simply a fun way to move along the plot,
and a good excuse to have a fantastic animated tripping sequence with
puppets (puppets!).
These drugs do
cause the group to get into all sorts of hijinks, with gore and death
galore! By the end of the film the woods are strewn with entrails
and the cabin is filled with errant carcasses. Here is another way
that Snively keeps Trippin’ from becoming formulaic. As
things start to go sour for our group I kept trying to guess what was
going to happen next. I can usually do a pretty good job of
prognosticating which person will die next, and where the frightened
fleeing couple will happen up on the next severed hand in the woods,
but you can’t quite do that with Trippin’. The plot turns
definitely keep you on your toes throughout the whole climactic
sequence.
The moral of the story is to not avoid
all kids-in-a-cabin movie, no matter how clichéd some of them are.
If you do, you might miss the joy of watching Trippin’!
Trippin' comes out on DVD on April 10th
(Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master's thesis on George Romero and works too much.)
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