CUB: Nothing New Here Folks

One problem with modern society at the moment seems to be an obsession with nostalgia, which is being milked by marketing companies. This has bled into the hipster movement and has lead to the larger debate of analogue vs digital as digital technologies develop. It is now bleeding into every aspect of pop culture, and it is one which can be seen in film. The large burst of remakes and reboots of classic franchises are capitalising on this movement, and it is a much bigger problem when it comes to the horror genre. Whilst horror films are usually very proud of highlighting their roots and celebrating their past, it’s becoming a film-making style that is happening too often and starting to become extremely stale.

The amount of times that a filmmaker tries to replicate or mentions being influenced by the films of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson is becoming increasingly monotonous and leads to a large influx on dull films. Films which go for the Scream style of self-awareness whilst indulging in Raimi-esque ultra violence are tired at this point, with most films simply revelling in past styles rather than attempting to do anything new or evolve from these techniques. The reason for saying all of this is this is the context for my big problems with Cub, the new horror export from Belgium, which promises to do something original but ends up being a predictable dull mess which simply recreates past films that the director has seen, without any sense of originality or fun.

Just An Ordinary Cub Scout Field Trip

The premise and set-up for Cub is quite interesting for a horror film, which has the potential for a brutal and twisted story. Unfortunately, though, it falls into the tropes that it’s trying to homage. Set in Belgium, a group of cub scouts, the “Pathfinders”, head into some abandoned woods on their annual Survival Camp trip, which has been given the theme of Werewolves, which naturally scare the children. Our protagonist, the incredibly bland Sam (Maurice Luijten) who has vague history of abuse, starts to take the stories seriously and finds a feral boy (Gill Eeckelaert) that he quickly befriends, whilst the feral boy starts to cause havoc at the camp site.

The adults of the campsite are leader Peter (Stef Aerts), an abusive and reckless person who commands his fellow scout masters and children with threats of violence and the use of his attack dog Zoltan (a reference to the Hound of Dracula film). Other scout masters include Chris (Titus De Voodgt) the level-headed nice leader, and chef Jasmijn (Evelien Bosmans), the flirtacious free-spirited female of the group. What starts off as a Let the Right One In rip-off (a lonely child befriends another lonely child who happens to have supernatural tendencies) quickly falls apart, as the origin of the feral boy is revealed and the outcome delves the film into boring predictable fashion, which answers zero questions and left me incredibly unsatisfied.

Immediately, I knew there may be problems with the film when it opened up on a flashforward, showing us the ending of the film, which included immediately showing us the film’s antagonist. This means that the main protagonist survives at the end, and it does not inject any additional information which would make me want to see how the film reaches this point. It’s a cheap filmmaking trick in order to drive the story towards an end goal. Throughout the film, if the audience feels the film is boring or meandering, the film has already set up for us that there is an endgame featuring some form of gory pandemonium, so they know that the film will reach an elevated point. But at the same time, it removes any form of tension or guessing about the outcome of our established characters, because we kind of get the gist of what will go down once all the dominoes start to fall (and for this film, it takes quite a while even though it only lasts 80ish minutes).

Who, What, When, Where and How?

The frustrating element of Cub is that it includes so much setup and questions which the film doesn’t pay off or answer at all, feeling like a horror story that a 10-year-old wrote where he just recites the story of a better film he saw. An example of this is the protagonist Sam, a silent and lonely kid who is set up as an abused child that has suffered some past traumas, which is only aggregated by the scout leaders’ poor treatment of him. Once he meets the feral boy, their friendship is short-lived. There is also no given basis as to why Sam would befriend him in the first place, when he shows no attempt to give this friendship to any of his other scout friends who rarely pick on him. Other elements that are brought up but not followed up on include a policeman who is killed off to seemingly no ramifications, and also two hoodlums who have a history linked to the forest that are introduced early on, seem to get a setup to enter the larger story, but are then forgotten by the film very quickly.

The film seems to forget things constantly, which makes it very frustrating. It also is very inconsistent in its style and intent, starting off with a creepy atmospheric child-stalking film, but ending in a boring The Burning clone. Not to spoil things, but the film reveals later on that the feral boy is being psychologically controlled by a domineering large man, who fits the stereotype for every boring hack and slash film of the past 40 years. Once he’s introduced, he goes around boringly killing off our characters in no original fashion, completely demolishing any interesting setup or concepts that were introduced early on.

Nice guy scoutmaster Chris is referenced a couple of times to have martial arts skills which he shows briefly, only to have it play no part in the second half of the film. It’s an example of introducing a character aspect which doesn’t create depth for the character or play any part in his actions later on, but is instead just another seemingly pointless piece of exposition which is dispersed throughout the film but doesn’t connect due to poor script-writing and pace issues.

At a brisk 80-ish minutes, the first hour is for setup (which after the first half an hour, starts to feel extremely meandering and increasingly dull) and the last 20 minutes wraps everything up super quickly, going down a predictable route of killing off the characters with no justification or explanation behind anything that is going on.

The film leaves us with so many questions, that a good screenplay should’ve at least given some direction or explanation on: Who is the feral boy? Who is the old man? Why are they killing the scouts? Why is the scout-master so abusive? What happened to Sam? How does Sam feel about anything that happened throughout the film? Why are they planting elaborate traps around the forest when most killings are done up close and personal? It’s not ambigious if you don’t at least give the audience enough to chew on. The film instead shows us a menu with a hundred items and offers us no food.

The Verdict

It seems like I’m constantly complaining and on the line of nitpicking, but that’s the ultimate feeling that the film gave me. Cub is a film loaded with promise that instead falls into cliché and is riddled with pointless homages and kills which all give an empty feeling. Horror fans may enjoy some of the kills and somewhat focus on the children; but at the end of the day, the child angle is completely forgotten in favour for a boring forest-set slasher film which focuses on the adults, like hundreds of other films. The boy scout angle doesn’t make for an interesting approach, as it’s purely used for exposition reasons to get the group into the forest and that’s it. No scout angles are exploited to add some original elements within the story, and as a fan of horror it’s frustrating to see another film which is just another clone with a different hat.

Cub has some decent setup, but fails to live up on any of it, ultimately spoiling its final surprise by sticking it at the beginning. My recommendation if you want to check out a great horror dealing with children is the brutal Who Can Kill a Child?, by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, an original horror film which deals with adults vs children in a much more interesting way.

(top image source: Kinology)