or, The Boy Who’s Tired of His Peers and Their Bullshit Attitudes
*note: Cub is another article that previously appeared on the Horror Bound website. Don’t worry though – I’m only plagiarizing myself, and at no point did I sell my work to them. I wrote on a volunteer basis, and retain all rights to my own work.
Do you have a problem with child killers? What about Child Killers? How about both of those in one convenient package? If you found yourself answering ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, you’ll probably want to take a pass on Jonas Govaerts’ Cub. Otherwise, you are in for a real treat, Belgian-style. And on that note, I hope you have your reading glasses handy, cuz this one is gonna be subtitled!
Cub centers around young Sam, a 12-year-old boy on his way to a camping retreat with his Scout troop (I don’t actually know what type of Scout, so I use that term generically. Does Belgium do Cub Scouts?). Sam is quite different from his peers – a fact they have no desire to ever let him forget. Sam is bullied relentlessly by the other boys – especially Peter, the leader of the pack.
[digression: it took me several tries at that sentence before I was able to write that sentence without some asinine allusion to the Shangri-Las song Leader of the Pack there. I couldn’t seem to stop my fingers from adding “vroom, vroom.” I know, I know, you don’t get it, and you don’t care. End digression.]
The troop leaders try to keep the other boys from messing with Sam too hard, but they kind of suck at it.
Eventually, their bullying results in the whole troop becoming lost in the woods. To pass the time, the troop leaders tell all the kids about a local legend involving a werewolf roaming the forest. But don’t you worry your sweet little faces, there aren’t really any werewolves. This isn’t that type of movie. They’re just fucking with the kids. But Sam was never buying that mess anyway. He is INTO IT. I mean, another social outcast just roaming around wild and free, doing what he wants? Sam is fascinated!
In the mother of all twists (JK), Sam wanders away from the camp to have some alone time. He is a bit of an explorer, so I think he just wants to see what’s what. During his wandering, he sees a young boy in a super creepy tree bark mask, who he suspects is the root of the werewolf lore. Who is this weird, feral child? Where did he come from? Why does he keep making those weird grunting noises?
He is kinda weird, right? Not just me?
Oh, and did I mention the woods are full-to-overflowing with death traps? Because, oh yeah, they are. Did this tree-faced boy put them there? I mean, he doesn’t seem all that put out when the troop members begin to fall victim to them and die horribly. Sam tried to warn his troop that this boy was out there, but nobody wanted to listen to the boy who was dumb enough to believe a campfire tale.
While Cub is at its heart a modified summer camp-slasher, it has got a whole lot more going for it than just some people getting brutally murdered out in nature. It also has intricate uncounted woodland death-traps, one tree…nest(?), two very creepy relationships, one red herring werewolf story, and more brutality than you can shake a stick at (Get it? Cuz it is set in the woods – where sticks live. Yeah, you get it).
I should probably throw this out there as well: there is some violence against animals that can be a little tough to handle but, you know, just hide behind your little tree bark mask for a moment, and it’ll be over before you know it. Overall, I think this is a really fresh take on an otherwise pretty damned stale genre (I don’t even care – good slashers are becoming fewer and fewer and fewer *continues whispering into the void* and farther between every day).
*Note: I have watched this movie several more times since I wrote this in *checks notes* 2020, and it still holds up. It is part of my regular rotation and it continues to be both full of heart, and a hell of a lot of fun.
