Four stars. Rating: R, for strong, gory horror violence, profanity, drug use, sexuality and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.13.12
Folks will chortle — quite enthusiastically — about this one for awhile.
Although looking every inch like a standard exercise in snuffing attractive young performers in the usual macabre ways, The Cabin in the Woods is less a conventional horror flick and more an effort to return imagination, suspense and genuine surprise to a genre recently infested with distasteful (and often misogynistic) torture-porn.
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| When a basement trap door suddenly slams open, who could resist descending those darkened stairs? Well, anybody with a reasonable sense of self-preservation, which apparently doesn't include, from left, Marty (Fran Kranz), Curt (Chris Hemsworth) and Jules (Anna Hutchison). |
But make no mistake: The Cabin in the Woods may be intellectually exhilarating, but it’s no less gory. Indeed, the first 10 minutes of the third act are as gleefully deranged as the infamous lawnmower climax to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. (Movie buffs who associate Jackson solely with The Lord of the Rings, and aren’t familiar with his early-career 1992 shocker, are advised to tread carefully.)
Its clever premise and unexpected plot twists notwithstanding, The Cabin in the Woods also gets considerable juice from the nervous gallows humor that laces the dialogue, which bears the unmistakable Whedon stamp. He and Goddard met when the latter became a writer on TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel; they became best buds and — following Goddard’s big-screen scripting success with 2008’s Cloverfield — looked for something to do together.
They came up with an homage-laden concept with a difference; they co-wrote the script, and Goddard made his directorial debut during a three-month shoot in the spring of 2009. A 2010 release was planned, but then MGM — the studio to which the project was attached — fell into bankruptcy, and The Cabin in the Woods wound up in a nightmarish limbo far nastier than anything found within its storyline.
Two years later, MGM’s financial difficulties finally set right, The Cabin in the Woods has been unleashed to mess with our minds. Good thing, that.
The set-up will be recognized by those with a fondness for 1981’s The Evil Dead: Five rambunctious college friends flee civilization for a debauched weekend in an isolated backwoods cabin. Their route takes them through a mountainside tunnel; a raptor, lazily following the vehicle from outside the tunnel, suddenly slams into an invisible force-field ... a marvelous bit of well-staged disconnect on par with the spotlight that falls from “nowhere” and nearly brains Jim Carrey, at the beginning of The Truman Show.
Hmm.
