Cabin in the Woods [April 23rd 2012 in The Courier]

There are that types of film that are so formulaic, if you just stuck to the basic structure and added whichever actors were popular at the time, you’d have guaranteed success. Those are romantic comedy and horror (although in the latter, you have to pull those actors limb from limb). Parodies on this formula have, for the most part, been better for horrors. You’ve had the Scream series, a postmodern love letter to the “horror rules”, the Scary Movie series and the fantastic Tucker and Dale vs Evil. The next addition to the postmodern dissection of horror movies is The Cabin in the Woods from two men who know a lot about the genre. Drew Goddard wrote the terrific monster movie Cloverfield and Joss Whedon wrote most of the well-loved Buffy The Vampire Slayer series, whilst both being huge fans of the genre itself.

The Cabin in the Woods takes two perspectives. The main one is that of a group of five kids getting ready for a vacation to the arse end of nowhere for a week of sex, drugs and skinny dipping. One’s your typical sexy girl, another’s a stoner (the scene stealing Fran Kranz), a jock (de-Thored Chris Hemsworth), a nerd and finally the innocent girl. But you know something’s not right with the formula when the jock is actually a sociology major and the innocent girl had an illicit affair with her college professor. Then we meet two white collar workers, Sitterson (the superb as always Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford) tasked with doing “something”. Revealing their actual end goal is a huge spoiler but let’s just say the interactions between the two in their “office” are some of the funniest scenes in the film.

Of course, it all hits the fan when the kids end up fiddling about with things in the basement and they get assaulted by grotesque evils on all sides. This continues in not-so-standard horror movie fashion until one of the most surreal climax sequences that would give the elevator scene from The Shining a run for its money in terms of blood used.

The poster for the film sees your standard horror movie cabin being twisted and distorted like a floating Rubik’s cube and is a pretty good metaphor for the film as a whole. Your expectations will be twisted around and thrown against a window. The Cabin in the Woods cleverly plays with the smugness of horror movie fans. It follows the formula of a horror movie, allowing those accustomed to the “Rules” to settle, but then suddenly flips it on its head and then the ride never ends.

VERDICT: Although the material used that of slasher horror films, is not as relevant as it was with Scream, when the 90s was booming with the things, the satirical take on the genre is still a fast, entertaining ride that is surprisingly funny (well not really, because Joss Whedon wrote it) and just generally a fantastic ride from beginning to end.

4/5