The Cabin in the Woods
★★★★
Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard take a sharpened axe of love to the face of their most treasured genre of film making. Playing wonderfully on the docile, expected and lazy set up of every slasher film made since Tobe Hooper changed the game in 1974, The Cabin in The Woods drips with blood and is shot through with the sniper smart wit of Whedon and the tight direction of Cloverfield’s Goddard.
The introduction is a curious beast in itself; We are greeted by Hadley (Bradley Whitford) and Sitterson (Richard Jenkins), blue collar workers with an important job to do, bantering about wives and colleagues and bets and beers before a 1970 style freeze framed blood red title is slapped right in our faces. Then we are whisked away to much more familiar territory. A jock, stoner, geek, slut, and a virgin are readying themselves to head off to the woods, some of them for certain sex, some of them for hopeful sex and some of them to just drink beer, smoke some pot and tell some ghost stories.
They take a van, they stop at the petrol station and have the obligatory altercation with a shirtless dungaree clad inbred tobacco chewer and arrive, basically, at the cabin from The Evil Dead. There’s some skinny dipping, some smart dialogue and some truth or dare before words are red from book in latin in the basement of the cabin and it all goes terribly wrong.
What happens in scenes built around the genre’s crystalized paint by numbers set up is pretty much spoilerifically unspeakable, but in using Hadley and Sitterson’s mysterious job, the two young writer directors have created a wonderful look at the expectations we make on the genre of horror and of how it has influenced the aspect of modern cinema. The stoner, Marty (Fran Kranz) is perfect comedy, the slut, Jules (Anna Hutchinson) is great as the ditzy blonde slaying fodder and Jenkins and Whitford are sly and wonderfully funny, all the while our shy virgin, Dana (Kristen Connolley) is doing what all of horror’s shy virgins should; Stock piling all of the quiet strength that will serve her well in the final third.
The film has been locked up, dormant for 4 years, after the studio fought against the wishes of Whedon and Goddard to turn it into 3D but after the mega success that The Avengers was I guess they saw it as a sure thing regardless of how many Ds it was being watched in. Though it’s sadly not particularly scary it does its damage by wowing with smarts in the second half, building nicely upon Wes Craven’s Scream and poking loving fun at more scary movies than you can shake a dismembered arm at. The Cabin in the Woods is a carefully realized, funny and refreshing look at the horror movie paradigm which we all love to hate in all its gory glory.
