Director: Henry Selick
Cast: Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Lyric Ross, Angela Bassett
Have I Seen It Before: Never. Still on the lookout for potential Cabin movies, and with Peele’s latest effort pushed from this holiday season to sometime next fall, I went about widening the lens a bit.
Did I Like It: All of the elements are there. Key and Peele have created the most consistently satisfying sketch comedy show of the last twenty years, and that doesn’t even begin to cover Peele’s current metamorphosis into the legitimate heir to both Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling. Throw in Selick, whose The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) remains the gold standard of spook stop motion animation, and the entire affair seems destined for greatness.
And yet, the film is kind of a miss. I’m willing to write most of that off to pacing issues. Key and Peele play off of each other with the easy chemistry they brought to their sketches*, but every other character feels like they are reading their lines alone in a an undisclosed location, likely because they probably were. There’s a way to make dialogue recorded separately sound like it has the life of real conversation, but it is rarely on display here. Here, most lines have the self-aware delivery of someone reciting a monologue.
I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed in the design of things, too. Things are moody and creepy, but the titular characters come across as nothing much more imaginative than light pointy-eared caricatures of their performers.
Ultimately, if the pitch for this movie appeals to you, you might be better off watching any of Selick’s, Peele’s, or Key and Peele’s work. It’s heart is in the right place, just not quite its craft.
*I still marvel a little bit that they got their start on MadTV, a show I found to be an absolute chore to watch after attaining the age of 11. Maybe their years—towards the end of the show’s run—are better? I may never know.
