"The Cabin in the Woods" - 2012 - movie review

WARNING: SOME OF THE THINGS IN THIS REVIEW COULD BE CONSIDERED 'SPOILERS'. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The experience of watching "The Cabin in the Woods" was more than a little similar to those art school lectures of yesteryear I used to sit through where this or that aspiring art historian would try to make a name for themselves by deconstructing Picasso to "prove" that because he wasn't a monogamist he was really a misogynist . As I say the experience was similar and so was my reaction, which was to listen for a few minutes, have a few chuckles then tune the speaker out and try to enjoy the great slideshow that usually accompanied deconstruction.

What I discovered with TCITW was that it's harder to tune out the psychobabble and enjoy the pictures if the pictures are created by the deconstructionist himself.

Basically the "story" goes something like this. A group of up and coming, well educated, fairly well adjusted young people head out of town in the RV for a weekend at a cabin in the woods. As they pull away from their house we see someone is watching them. That someone is in league with of a pair of post modern Fred MacMurray types working in a hi-tech bunker who are taking an unnatural level of interest in our kid's little getaway. After the kids have a run-in with the requisite mean-spirited bubba lording over the local abandoned gas station they settle in at the cabin, the MacMurrays watching their every move via hidden cameras. Before you know it one thing leads to another and the woods are full of zombies.

While the kids are being devoured by the undead the MacMurrays begin discussing the hows and whys of free will, and it's then that the red flag of deconstruction begins moving up the flag pole for me. I begin to think: "Who in their right mind thinks horror movies need deconstructing? They're the most straightforward, formulaic type of exploitation flick ever invented. Anyone who's seen more than 1 has figured that out. What's going to be revealed by taking them apart and examining the pieces that we don't already know?" Apparently the film makers didn't bother to ask themselves those questions because the movie continues.

So I'm beginning to feel a little put-off by the whole affair, but I paid my hard-earned cash to get in so I continue to occupy my seat. Plus I haven't finished my popcorn. As I watch the MacMurrays and their bunker-buddies begin to take over the film, with the actual cabin of the title and all the "horrors" going on there sliding further and further into irrelevance. To demonstrate just how irrelevant fully 3/4 of the advertised "stars" (those would be the actors playing the young people at the cabin) are dead by the beginning of the third act. I can just hear Joss Whedon and Co laughing behind the screen; "Gotcha you blood thirsty pervert! You came here expecting boobies and blood but instead we're gonna give you a lecture on how gullible you are!" (Throw in a Nelson Muntz "Ha Ha" here just for good measure.)

By now I'm not too thrilled that I chose this movie over, well, any other movie but I still haven't finished my half-gallon of Sprite-flavored ice so I continue to watch, searching for any narrative thread within the lecture that I can latch onto to save my evening.

On the screen a series of blunders and unlikely turns of the page have left the men behind the curtain (who are now front and center) facing a crisis: how to deal with a person who's on to them. This is supposed to say something about the skeptics in the horror audience and how they ruin everything with their prescient observations about the absurdity of it all. According to The Cabin in the Woods, film makers deal with doubters by bludgeoning them with yet more absurdity. I believe that's what they're saying because that's where the movie goes, right off the edge.

So let me cut to the chase. More people die and some don't die as quickly and what those delayed-diers witness at the end is suppose to blow them/me away, I think. Anyway it didn't. Because I kept looking for a narrative in the pictures I could hang my hat on I couldn't get past the idea that the super secret organization the MacMurrays work for, an organization that has supposedly been controlling the fate of the human race for centuries, put a lock on their lab door that could be hotwired by a stoner. I'm sure that piece of absurdity was intentional, one more element meant to drive home the thesis that horror movies are manipulative and silly, but again, because there's nothing even remotely provocative about this thesis I didn't care. I kept waiting for that slide that would make the lecture one worth sitting through. But alas, none appeared. Instead even all the expensive CG toward the end of the movie was put to the service of the boring deconstructive agenda and I was left swirling the flotsam at the bottom of my plastic tub waiting for the fade to black.

To summarize; The Cabin in the Woods is just a B-movie with pretensions to a higher calling that, like most B-movies, doesn't work very well on any level. The horror is undercut by the parallel storyline, the deconstructive undertones of the parallel storyline are undercut by those loveable MacMurrays, the big ending is undercut by it's preposterousness and the preposterousness is undercut by the startling arrival on the scene at the 11th hour of Sigourney Weaver.