*** out of ****
Directed by: Drew Goddard
Starring: Kristin Connolly, Fran Kranz, Chris Hemsworth, Jesse Williams and Anna Hutchison
Running time: 95 minutes
The Cabin in the Woods takes up double-duty honours as an engaging and inventive frighthouse flick and a howlingly funny send-up of rehashed horror archetypes.
It is terrific fun for those who are big fans of horror fare (at least, films released before the darker days of sadistic torture porn offerings that mixed up shocking the censors for giving genuine scares) and those who tend to avoid scary movies. Both audiences will find much to laugh at, whether it is at obscure genre references or by mocking the stock characters and situations that co-writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard cunningly borrow and rework.
Since many of the film’s more intriguing pleasures come from the surprises that Whedon and Goddard throw at the audience, here is the crux of the plot in deceptively simple terms. Five college kids decide to spend a tranquil weekend at a cabin in an abandoned backwoods region.
Among these tempestuous teens are arrogant med-schooler Curt (Chris Hemsworth), his scantily clad girlfriend Jules (Anna Hutchison), Jules’s couth sister Dana (Kristin Connolly, a standout) and the eye candy, Holden (Jesse Williams, not as much) that Jules has brought along to offer Dana a romantic time.
Joining in for this vacation is quippy stoner Marty (Fran Kranz), who clues in to the horror lurking in the woods much quicker than the others.
The setting is just like an ordinary lakeside cabin that one would find in an average horror film: the doors creak, the fireplace crackles, the décor is homely, and the basement is full of bizarre paraphernalia from the family who once lived there.
However, Whedon and Goddard’s sly send-up of the genre is far from the scope of your mundane horror outing. They toy with the general climate of the setting, which bears a striking similarity to the cabin from Evil Dead, and then unleash their own subversive and wildly original story developments.
The writers poke fun at audience voyeurism and illogical decision-making skills, made when the inane characters decide to pursue and extinguish the demonic forces around them. While the scares are predictable, the lurking forces in these dark woods and the motives behind them are purely inspired.
To spoil things further would be criminal since the conceptual device that motivates the action in the cabin is both delightfully satisfying and preposterously convoluted. The more one lets Whedon and Goddard lift the carpet from underneath them, the more one can revel in the film's giddy absurdity.
The rapturous climax of Woods serves as one of the most hellishly enjoyable sequences this reviewer can remember. However, it is stifled by a deadening final scene, where a big star (who is no stranger to cameo appearances) walks in and laboriously explains everything that the film had already hinted at.
The convoluted concept is simultaneously thrilling and unconvincing. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see a film so eager to fool around with the genre conventions, both frightening and tiresome, to help take the deconstruction to a new level. It’s glorious fun to watch Whedon and Goddard unfurl the layers to Cabin's madness, even if some of the explanation to this glory is maddeningly hackneyed.
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