Cabin In The Woods

For once, I am actually interested in seeing a horror movie. Mainly due to the fact that it seems to be a rather vicious Genre Deconstruction of horror movies.

Horror movies are fucking awesome. Horror conventions are fucking awesome. People who look down their noses at the genre and/or try to be subversive above all else are, a decent percentage of the time, being dicks.

I'm kidding(mostly), but part of the problem I had was this movie that it purports to be that brutal deconstruction mentioned before, when really, the characters by-and-large are forced to fall for the same old shit. You can't have it both ways.

In fact(and this is my third edit), I feel tempted to go into more detail now.

The creators don't seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to again, purport to be that deconstruction, but then turn around and seem to shy away from avoiding genre cliches.

The Developing Doom Characters point of the plot has a lampshade hung on it; "If you're going to treat this as an obvious set-up, I'm going to have no fun at all", a girl says. But Whedon and Goddard don't shy away from this. All they do is say, "Hey, look at this stupid thing. Isn't it stupid? Now that we've said that, we have a free pass to do it." And the trend continues when it's revealed that the villains literally have the ability to spread mist that makes the heroes stupid. It seems like a cheap way to be allowed to keep using old stereotypes. Given the reveal of the scheme at the end, I'd be inclined to forgive them—but then the director behind the evil plot says "We take what we can get", or something along those lines in regards to the final girl. It's treated as a joke, but it creates a different set of problems; why are the antagonists trying to make the characters play into their archetypes if they do that?

Another problem is that even when the most horrific things happen(not that the movie is particularly graphic), the constant attempts at being subversive more or less ruin any attempt to be scary. The ending and its implications are horrifying, but it's foreshadowed early on, and when the moment finally comes, it's used for shits and giggles—it's someone behind the scenes having the last laugh.

In retrospect, I think it would have been better to pick one perspective, whether it's that of the office drones, watching the events play out on their monitors, or the cabin-goers as they realize weird shit is happening.

edited 12th Apr '12 10:31:38 PM by Prowler

I'm interested in seeing this, even if Joss himself is a bit out of touch after so many years of empty praise.

I just hope he doesn't get too caught up in Shocking Swerves. He was beginning to remind me of Aaron Sorkin and Vince Russo's love child.

I would say that sort of stamp isn't here; there's one twist that I'd argue is the opposite of his usual sort of twist.

There weren't any Shocking Swerves at all, in my opinion. The movie is pretty open about what it is.

I thought it was a pretty darn good horror comedy. Wasn't particularly scary most of the time, but the playing around with horror movie conventions was a lot of fun. Especially liked when all hell let loose near the end and they threw every single horror movie monster they could think of at the characters all at once.

It's funny. I laughed. I can't ask for more than that.

The people I went with, though, were those guys that everyone in the theater wants to throw their popcorn at. The one next to me literally put his arm in front of my face to offer the girl to my left some popcorn and DID NOT MOVE IT AWAY. Since they weren't my friends I couldn't yell at them and since they weren't strangers I couldn't be a dick either. I wanted to take their fucking phones and chuck them across the theater. (That probably would have gotten me kicked out of the club, though...)

</rant> ANYWAY, the actual movie. The best way I can think to describe it is as a "funny, ridiculous, engineered horror movie that at points accepts its own cliches a little too freely." I'd watch it again.

Saw it this afternoon, liked it a lot. I do think that the way the characters begin the film as fleshed-out characters that don't fully adhere to character archetypes (i.e Chris Hemsworth's "jock" is actually intelligent and articulate, Jesse Williams' "geek" is physically impressive) except for the stoner (who is after all introduced smoking a gigantic bong), and then all the characters begin to adhere more tightly to their archetypes (i.e. Chris Hemsworth becomes dumber and more headstrong whereas Jesse Williams' physique is de-emphasised and he wears glasses) except for the stoner (who after all figures everything out and is immune to the scientists' attempts to get him to conform) was rather clever.

edited 14th Apr '12 10:32:45 AM by pagad

I saw this movie 3 times in two days, and I'll probably see it again soon. I like to think of it as a monster movie where the monster uses tropes to kill it victims. I wasn't scared by it all, but a lot of people in the theater last night were scared shitless during certain parts. I'm going to be recommending this movie to every person I see while its in theaters. Its probably going to be in my top ten all time favorite movies list.

You know, I thought this movie's premise seemed familiar, but I just now realized from where.

Okay, I've never actually seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, but I have seen the Obscurus Lupa Presents review. Anyway, in that movie it turns out that there's some vast conspiracy that secretly runs the whole world from the shadows, and the family of cannibalistic murderers is working for them. We're not told exactly what the conspiracy's goal is, just that they want the film's victims to "know the meaning of horror".

Doesn't it sound like The Cabin In The Woods is an unofficial spinoff based on those guys?

edited 15th Apr '12 9:41:11 PM by RavenWilder

Yeah, that came to mind when I first heard about the conspiracy thing, though I assumed it would be handled a lot better (that is to say, it wouldn't be completely random and nonsensical).

Same with Cube Zero and it's "watch the bored office drones as they watch and fuck with the captives" plot.

Guys, I gotta go with the Spoony One on this movie: http://www.twitch.tv/spoonyone/b/315342218

a) Who the fuck is he talking to?

b) Does he expect people to be impressed that he watched They Live!?

"'Spoony, stop acting like you're right and everyone else is wrong'. I AM RIGHT!"

I suddenly remembered why this guy annoys the Hell out of me.

It's his livestream. And it IS possible to be pompous AND right. Seriously, name ONE thing Whedon did in that movie that Wes Craven didn't do better in either Scream or New Nightmare.

Sometimes I wonder at all the comparisons with In the Mouth of Madness.

I mean, I dug that film, but lately it's the gold standard of horror?

This is a bit pedantic, but that's a disingenuous comparison. Whedon didn't direct CitW, Craven didn't write Scream - so what they did and didn't do can't really be compared.

Well, there isn't that many other films that did Lovecraft well. Cabin is not one of them, btw.

He wrote New Nightmare, which was pretty much this done much better.

edited 18th Apr '12 2:09:57 PM by maxwellelvis

Speaking of Cabin's Lovecraftian elements, I felt that the ending would have been better served with a giant tentacle or somesuch instead of a generic giant humanoid hand.

"State of Decay" has ruined me on giant demon hands.

I don't agree with the comparisons between Scream and The Cabin in the Woods floating around out there. The former is a love letter. The latter is more brutal with its deconstruction, and it directly parallels the state of the genre a year or two before it was shot, along with being a parallel to horror filmmaking in itself.

Scream isn't much of a deconstruction; it just gives a nod to aspects of many slashers.

T Cit W touches on quite a few of the same aspects as New Nightmare, yeah, and they're definitely closely related, but their aims don't feel the same.

edited 18th Apr '12 2:27:32 PM by Prowler

How is this movie brutal? All it does is take one joke, a joke that REAL slasher movies have been making since fucking 1984, and runs it into the ground! Yes, we get it, the victims in slasher films ARE very stock, thank you for telling us something we already know, Joss!

Um, no. That's barely scratching the surface. The play on horror archetypes is a fraction of what the movie does. It was about everything shit in the genre; you have people relying on the Japanese to pull them through, which is totally analogous to where the horror genre was when the movie was being made. Studios were pimping out remakes of foreign films, it stops working, and then they have to figure out some way to deal with the repercussions, or some other bandwagon to jump on. In the movie, Japan fails the team in the US. They have to rely on their own set of cliches to pull them through, and appease the forgotten gods, who basically parallel the audience; they'd rather destroy the world/genre then be denied what they want.

The first kill is mean-spirited, nasty, and graphic, and then Hadley is shown disturbed(or maybe unimpressed). You can look at is as Whedon putting his own reaction to the "gorn" craze on-screen, since he said he hated the genre's de-evolution into it.

You can look at the movie as deconstructing meta-horror in itself; the characters realizing what's going on is ultimately what fucks everything up.

So, I think the movie works on more levels than "look at the dumb characters do dumb things".

edited 18th Apr '12 2:52:41 PM by Prowler

That's so stupid I can't even begin to describe it.

Are you going to come up with an actual rebuttal, or is that the most insightful thing you can say?

Well, besides the fact that both Saw and the Japansploitation were DEAD by the time this came out, that having the Japanese be completely worthless just smacks of ethnocentrism, and that there's still just one joke being told over and over again, if all he does is deconstruct the whole genre, Whedon's not gonna have any room to stand at the end when he wants you to take it seriously.