…because film is largely
subjective
by Frederick William Springer
III
Cabin
in the Woods
Release Date: 13 April 2012 Runtime: 95 Minutes Review Date: 5 June 2012 Rating: 1 (of 6)
The most concise
review: Do you remember The Happening? Yea, well, I'd rather sit through a second
screening of that than one of Cabin in
the Woods.
The parts that
were supposed to be scary weren't scary (and, for the premise of the movie to
work, they really ought to have been).
The parts that were supposed to be funny just about always fell
flat. Anything else I'd like to say
would be considered in the realm of SPOILERS so STOP READING now if you're
still inclined to see it for yourself.
The characters
weren't developed enough to really care about any of them, which is sort of
ironic because one of the voyeurs makes a point of saying he feels for the
surviving girl soon to meet her doom.
Really? Why? What did she encounter or experience that
those slaughtered did not? In fact, of
the group, she had it easiest--she wasn't stabbed by knives or daggers, she
wasn't caught in a bear trap, she sustained no notable injuries. And let's not forget, she was the reason they
were all being killed in the first place.
The revelation
that past deities now live beneath the earth's surface and they remain
complacent only as long as periodical human sacrifices take place to appease
them seems very much unbelievable. If
you were a mighty, powerful God that once ruled the Earth, would you
acceptingly move beneath it? Can you
imagine any person with a position of power doing so? Hell, even a person with no power at all, someone
like myself, wouldn't agree to that.
Then there's the
fact that this situation is playing out almost simultaneously all over the
globe. Statistically speaking, how
likely would it be that every single experience elsewhere would meet in failure
and everything then hinge on the American scenario? We know this has been going on for thousands
of years, so it's not like this is something new and the proctors don't know
what they're doing. For all the other
locations to bomb doesn't seem realistic within the confines of this movie.
This smells very
much of writer Joss Whedon with the Hellmouth on one hand and a government
conspiracy on the other. The thing is, Buffy was an entertaining bouquet of
fragrant, blooming flowers--till season 4 anyway, but I digress-- whereas this
is a stinking, rotting corpse.
The writers did
have a chance to give an unusual twist to their story at the end (though, it
would have hardly redeemed them), but opted to let it fall by the wayside. Much is made of the importance of "the
virgin" being the last to be killed, if killed at all--"virgin"
here meaning more innocent and pure, if it really means anything at all, as we
know the character isn't a virgin sexually.
Yet the girl tries to kill the character regarded to as "the
fool," though he has risked his own life to save her and even does so again
after her transgression. The more
satisfying twist would have been for him not to save her after she tried to
kill him and for her to consequently die, only to find out that the assumptions
were incorrect--she was the fool and he is actually the virgin, order restored
to the world, and the door open to many crappy sequels. In how many horror movies does the guy wind
up being the virgin? It would have been
a nice play against stereotype.
On an end note, it's
also good to remember that CGI usually doesn't make a story good. In this case, it makes a bad story worse. Fortunately, I wasn't too upset about this
heaping pile of shit ripping me off--I only paid $1.50 at the bargain theater
to see it. If you pay anything more for Cabin in the Woods, you're paying way
too much.
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