The Cabin In The Woods review

The embargo has lifted on Joss Whedon's The Cabin In The Woods, and it's somewhat surprising to see labels such as “game-changer” being applied to a certainly imaginative but, to my mind, not especially groundbreaking horror-thriller, since it's the same old game, albeit in a brand new shiny box. I say horror-thriller because I don't really think this is really a horror film at all, and once it plays its hand, which I'm not going to discuss, it switches to another (fantasy) genre altogether. I'm also particularly sceptical of the way it has been billed as playing with genre staples – the jock, the floosie, the stoner, the crazy man at the gas station who tells everyone to turn back – when these are staples that are played with in most genre movies these days. And even those movies are presenting them with a big dose of irony, so I would love to find out who these people are that this movie is presumably aimed at – those people who watch horror movies without knowing the rules? Do they even exist?

Is it just me? Has anyone else ever seen a horror film in which a bunch of teenagers go to a cabin in the woods for any other reason than to subvert the kind of films in which a bunch of teenagers go to a cabin in the woods? Because this is how Cabin In The Woods starts, with a completely off-kilter preamble that is very unlike the standard teenagers-go-into-the-woods movie. Admittedly, it's not how The Evil Dead (1981) starts, or how Cabin Fever (2002) starts, and there's a reason for that – because it's already been done! As a device, however, it's very intriguing, and the film had me interested for roughly 50 per cent of its running time. As viewers of Dr Who will know, however, it's the second 50 per cent that counts, and this is like one of those Steven Moffat two-parters that starts with a bang and trails to such convoluted bedlam that you forget to watch the second episode.

I was also indisposed to Cabin In The Woods having previously enjoyed John Dies At The End, another meta, wacky, batshit genre film, albeit one that always walks the border of being incomprehensible and shares, unfortunately, a vaguely similar degree of plot points with Whedon's film. But where John Dies aimed for game-changer status by not caring about the niceties of beginning, end and middle, Cabin In The Woods is weighed down by logic, which creates more and more problems for the film as it goes on. Every plot point seems to be commented on and used to drive our ever diverted attention back towards The Big Reveal, which is explained by a Big Reveal royalty figure from a series of other movies in which the rules of genre filmmaking are also bent and satirised.

There is fun to be had, and the film will be a success I'm sure, but am I alone in seeing films such as this, and Wes Craven's Scream series (I only liked the fourth one, which rather fantastically commented on its own progressively degraded franchise), and thinking, Where are these situations and characters actually coming from? Movies we've actually seen? Or a collective false memory of the movies we think we've seen? It seems to me that every 10, 15, 20 years or so these movies come along like those TV clip shows called I Heart 1976, in which celebrity talking heads remind us of fads and novelties from bygone days, with the suggestion being that if you were alive at the time you somehow knew about and were complicit in all this. In that respect, The Cabin In The Woods is this generation's cabin in the woods movie, not so much a clever movie but a cleverly marketed movie that poses as a self-styled “hate letter” to badly made horror movies without really addressing the fact that the people still watching badly made horror films won't understand it at all.