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Friday, April 13, 2012

For the sake of not having to write the same intro a million different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull process of full film reviews and instead opts to break things down based on what I thought going in, what happened while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.  Thanks for reading!




The Breakdown - The Cabin In The Woods

The Impression:

This film has garnered so much hype for so many different reasons that when I think of it my stomach bulges with nerdish glee. Thank you Lionsgate for finally pulling this down from the shelves and dusting it off. I imagine you’re going to have a fairly massive horror hit on your hands any minute now.



The Reality:

It’s hard to say anything critical about a film like this in the amount of words I usually a lot for these speed-dating type reviews as this is the type of the film that the less you know going in to it the better it’s going to play. I’ll let on to this, take the whole teens get horny in the woods trope that’s been played out on every fucking horror locale in the woods and turn it, and every other horror film you’ve ever seen, right on its head. That’s what this movie does. And if it did so with even an ounce of the filmmaking talent lent to it by Whedon and Goddard, this would be a stellar film, but it feels like both came to the project with their A-game guns fully loaded and the film they’ve wrangled is goddamn great from minute one. Not only does it play with the tropes of horror filmdom in a way that opens the floodgates for intellectual discussions of the film, but they have a great time doing so. It’s gory, it’s hilarious, there’s nudity - it pretty much hammers home all of the standard cornerstones you need for a kids get horny in the woods and then die film, but in a way you’ll never see coming. Honestly, I sat in my seat for the first forty minutes of this fantastic film and had no real idea of what was going to happen. It was uncomfortable almost, as it’s so rare that movies do this anymore and even rarer that I give them the chance. But The Cabin In The Woods keeps you guessing in terms of plot twists and character development until the very, very end.


The Lesson:

Hype does work out sometimes.



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