Hero of the Month – June 2009

This Month’s Hero: The Cube Franchise

This dude is in trouble.

     Well, I’ve been storing up some Heroes for a while and rather than waiting for the next month, I’m going to pleasure you by going back in time and posting Heroes from past months. Unorthodox I know, but that’s just who I am this week. As soon as this has sat for a while (read: gets pushed off the front page) I’ll move it to it’s proper month. If I can figure out how to change the date of posting. Anyway, Enjoy!

     Anyone who knows me knows I am a total sucker for really bad sci-fi horror movies with super ridiculous premises. The Cube franchise is a trilogy of Canadian horror movies that exemplifies this genre perfectly. The plot for each movie is simple. People are placed into a giant cube structure that is filled with smaller cubes about the size of a college dorm room. Each cube has a door on each side, leading into six other cube rooms. The people must navigate through the cubes to try and find a way out. However, every so often, they stumble into a cube that has a booby trap that kills the people inside. Awesome. Furthermore, the cubes periodically shift position in relation to one another so finding a way out is virtually impossible. The people generally have no idea what is happening or why they are there. They don’t know each other and, because of the stress of the situation, they start being suspicious of each other in the first five minutes. If that isn’t a formula for disaster, I don’t know what is. There were three movies: Cube, Cube 2: Hypercube and the prequel Cube Zero. Although they came out in the order listed, I’m going to go though them in their proposed chronological order. (Most information gotten from the hyperlinked Wikipedia pages. That and personal remembrances.)

That tagline is 100% true.

In Cube Zero (2004) the movie follows the people trapped in the cube and the people monitoring them from the outside. Yes, that’s right, there are actually people watching the hellish conditions in the cube on video monitors. The people doing the monitoring work for a company who tells them that these people volunteered to be in the cube. Unfortunately, the people in the cube have had their minds erased and can’t remember volunteering. One of the monitors smells something fishy and hilarity ensues. And by hilarity, I obviously mean various gruesome deaths.

Notable Traps:
Nozzles that spray victims with a highly corrosive material, causing them to melt.
Liquid nitrogen showers that cause the victim to freeze and shatter.
Wires that entangle the victim and then tighten, cutting the victim to pieces.
Speakers that pulverize the victim with sound waves.

     Also, it is revealed that even if you survive, the cube does a thermal sweep when it resets, obliterating everything, living or dead. Kinda sucks. If you get out, the company lobotomizes you and puts you back in.

The foreign poster is so much cooler.

     In the original Cube (1997) we follow people on the inside of the cube only. One of the people in the cube helped design it and reveals that there are 17,576 rooms. They come up with various theories as to how to figure out which cubes are booby trapped (each cube has a sort of visible serial number) but most of these theories prove to be wrong. They actually make it to a cube on the outside of structure, but have little success escaping. This one even contains an autistic savant, which many fans theorize is a lobotomized character from Cube Zero placed back into the cube. The savant proves to be useful in figuring out the multiples of prime numbers that they believe will get them out of the cube.

Notable Traps:
A mesh of wires that track across the room and cut the victim to pieces.
A flame thrower that reduces the victim to ash.
A sound activated spear trap that skewers the victim if noise is made within the cube.
People getting caught between cubes when they shift are cut in half.

     Interesting note, all of the characters in the movie are named after famous prisons. Totally sweet.

Another foreign poster.

     Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) is a little more science-fictiony. All of the people within the cube are in some way involved with its development, or trying to bring the development to public light. This cube can manipulate time and space, which makes for some pretty spectacular deaths. Since time is manipulated, people that have died can reappear and one of the guys goes crazy and starts murdering people and collecting their watches only to see them reappear in other rooms so he can murder them again. He has a pretty good collection by the end of the movie. After a certain period of time, the cube begins collapsing onto itself to bring all the parallel universes to singularity. If people aren’t out by then, they are destroyed by all the universes coming into one.

Notable Traps:
A tesseract of blades that respond to motion and slice victims to bits.
Rooms where time proceeds rapidly and kills victims by old age.
Rooms collapsing into each other and destroying anything inside.

     This franchise breaks out of the usual horror staple of people being killed by other people (or haunting spirits) for no conceivable reason. It’s fun to see people being destroyed by lifeless technology. The creators obviously meant it to be some sort of deep social commentary. Take that military-industrial complex. If you didn’t understand the deeper meaning of these movies, don’t worry. No one else did either. My roommate Shanknasty just asked if it was supposed to be a prison. The truth is, it’s not really clear what purpose the cube serves. Since all of the characters in Cube are named after prisons, I suppose they might be Beta-testing a new prison. That would really cut down on prison costs, considering they don’t get food or cable.

     I really don’t know where they would go with another sequel, but I hope someone figures it out. I could use another Cube movie in my life.

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Listen: No Doubt, “End it on This”
Quote: “Who do you think the establishment is? It’s just guys like me. Their desks are bigger, but their jobs aren’t. They don’t conspire, they buy boats.” – Quentin

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