Participants: Phil, Bryan, Jon, Drew, Sean, Bobby, Joe, Shane
Initiator: Phil
“… And I feel fine.”
The Cabin in the Woods is a pretty tough movie to talk
about to anyone who hasn't seen it, as it’s definitely a movie you want to go into knowing as little as
possible. The initial setup of the movie
is a spoiler if you ask me. That said,
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon manage to create a schlocky horror movie that
keeps us engaged with a clever premise and a surprising payoff while adding no
needless fluff to the events which transpire.
Right from the outset, this movie could have gone two
distinct directions. Rather than hiding
the big reveal for act 3, Goddard and Whedon actually start us in a sterile quasi-government
facility, offering no explanation of what we are about to see or how this
organization will affect the titular cabin.
Actually having the control organization a part of the movie from the
word go was a fantastic choice in my opinion.
The actual story of the five campers was a boring retread by
design. Goddard and Whedon clearly
wanted the campers’ story to feel like the bad horror movies we remember from
the 80’s, right down to the cheesy, over-the-top acting.
This decision puts the viewer in a decidedly different
mindset. Think about what this movie
would have been like without knowing about the controllers until an hour
in. Would you have even bothered? Odds are you would have gotten extremely bored
by “another crappy horror movie.”
However, the ever present controllers force you to almost ignore the
hacky store of the campers, instead forcing you to spend the bulk of the movie
trying to figure out just what the hell was going on. This really makes the movie dance the line of
several genres. I know it’s classified
as a horror, but calling it a suspense thriller is almost as appropriate.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait long to get to the big
reveal that was skillfully teased throughout.
Would it have been crazy and entertaining to see everything about the controllers
revealed in just the last act? Probably. But would you have stuck with Thor & Co
for an hour? Probably not. There would have been too much to explain at
the end, and the method Goddard and Whedon used of explaining what was
happening as we went made for a far more enjoyable experience. Cabin also did a great job of explaining just enough while maintaining a torrid
pace to its conclusion. Do we ever learn
why this organization has an obscene amount of hellish creatures? Sure don’t.
Do we ever learn what these “ancient” creatures are? Barely.
Shit, I can’t even call the controllers by name because we never even
learn the organization’s name. While the
level of explanation was great, it did take away from the large reveal at the
end. The very end was probably the
weakest part of the movie as a result.
What The Cabin in the Woods ends up giving us is a “plausible”
explanation for why bad things happen to good people in all the horror movies
we’ve seen in the past, right down to the “horror” which befalls them and the
abysmal decision-making that comes with being pursued by any sort of horrors. Initially, the conclusion annoyed me as we didn't learn enough about Dana & Marty to know what they would do in this extreme situation, but
keeping it in the frame of mind that we were dealing with a stoner and
a girl who had been huffing whatever drugs were getting pumped into that
forest, it was at least believable in this movie’s universe.
Final note: There were some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments
in this movie. Richard Jenkins and
Bradley Whitford practically steal the movie.
The phone conversation with Mordecai and Whitford’s end were some of the
funniest moments in any movie in recent memory.
Summary:
+ Great
setup and premise
+ Wasted no
time
+ Way
funnier than it had any right to be
+ “Totally
plausible” way to explain why every horror movie ever would happen
- Ending
ends up suffering
Final Grade: A-
