The Cabin In The Woods

Trying to post more often now...

I saw The Cabin in the Woods last weekend and still, I feel quite amazed by it. I cannot get over its awesomeness.

You know it as the lovechild of Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, two men who are currently my heroes. It was shelved for two years because MGM went down and for a while, we all thought that was the end. Until April 13th came around.

I agree with everyone: you shouldn't know anything about this film when you walk into the theatre, because part of the fun is that you have these jaw-dropping moments every 15 minutes and you believe that now you have it, but you really don't and bang! Jaw drop.

5 kids go to a cabin in the woods. It's a horror film. That's about everything you really need to know.

Let's start with the cast. I loved them, especially Fran Kranz who played Marty, the stoner. The character may seem a bit too much, but somehow, he's just so lovable, loyal and real that you really don't care. And the audience broke into applauds when "The Fight" started and we saw Marty's choice of weapon, you know which one if you've seen the film... I had a bit of a problem with Chris Hemsworth. He was really good as Curt, but somehow I found him a bit irritating because I kept thinking "Where's his hammer?", but that was not his fault, this was made prior to Thor.
The whole cast felt fresh and were obviously very aware of that the filmmakers wanted to achieve, they managed to make the characters very grounded and you didn't get the impression of one-dimensional-only-there-to-die-a-gruesome-death -kind of characters. I don't think there were a single character that you hated, because.... well, I can't tell you, because that's a spoiler. Kind of... Maybe not?

Despite the young cast being so great, it's Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford who steal the show as two men who seem to control the doings of the kids in the cabin.They have amazing comedic timing and chemistry and they don't over-do their performance, they're fun, but also very real. I would love to see these two working together again in the future. They are the Regular Joes. They are us.
Which brings us to the next topic. What really makes TCITW so good is that it's not single-layered. You have the story and you can treat the film as a really fun, a bit nerdy horror film, that you can watch and be done with.

But then you have "The Meta Effect". Very discreetly Goddard and Whedon make a bold statement about today's horror films, -filmmakers and us, the audience who goes into the theatres to watch kids getting killed. It's brilliant.

They have taken all the clichés, blown them up with dynamite and rewrote them. And dear lord, does it feel good. It was interesting to see these characters that you already know from hundreds of horror films finally get a new treatment. It really got me thinking "Why haven't we seen this before? Why hasn't no one bothered to do something different until now? Why are we watching the same films over and over again?"

But even better than taking the clichés and reconstructing them,  is the Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford's characters and their co-workers. They represent the filmmakers today making uninspired as well as uninspiring horror films, they have fallen into a routine, it's just another day at the office when it should be something more! The biggest difference between now and the 1980's is that the movies then were exciting, they felt new. And now they just feel used and old. Of course, we also have take into account that times have changed too. What was terrifying 20 years ago, feels like a kids' movie today. We seem to need film like Hostel to feel shocked, because nothing else will do it for us anymore. And we go and see it. And I really don't know many horror fans who have not seen Hostel or all the Saw films.
But then again, we critize people who made Hostel, because it felt cheap and bad, because it relies on the torture and not on the tension.We also kind of judge people who watch and like Hostel, because it's not a proper horror film, it's torture porn. But the truth is that these films wouldn't get made unless we were there to watch them.

Back to the actual film...
Jenkins and Whitford also represent us, the audience. We frown at them in the film, for taking the situation so lightly and making jokes and taking bets. But wait a minute, don't we do the exact same thing? We take bets on who is going to die first, we want to see the kids die disgusting deaths, we want them to die, that's why we came to the theatre! So we really can't judge them, because we would be judging ourselves and we can't have that.

I thought "the big reveal" in the end was great. I was really glad that they chose kind of a classical ending, in a way that they didn't try to make the twist too modern by making the whole film and the events unnecessary by revealing at the end that they were actually inside a studio making a film or that the kids were actually in a reality tv-show. With this ending they kind of took a bow to the oldies.

All in all, I really liked it. I understand people who didn't like it, it's right on the verge of coming off as silly and a bit stupid. But for me, it was 107 minutes of pure fun. And I am going to see it again tomorrow. People have been asking if you need to be a horror fan to "get" the film. No, you don't have to be, you will understand it, but let me say, you won't have nearly as much fun as the horror geeks in the audience!

-CoffeeCat