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The Cabin in the Woods
This film was more or less the opposite of Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead. Hot Fuzz is an action-comedy satirizing cop action movies where the plot's influenced by the characters' awareness of action movie tropes. It's incredibly sharp and pointed and packed wall to wall with visual and cinematographic references to a lot of different action movies, as well as in-text dialogue ones. You can tell the director's watched a lot of action movies. It's also an excellent and compelling action movie in and of itself, as well as being fucking hilarious. In making Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright didn't waste any screentime or camera angles; it's just intelligent enough to be good meta and it's just stupid enough to be fun. As far as self-aware send-ups go, it's a damn good self-aware send-up.
The Cabin in the Woods was not Hot Fuzz. The Cabin in the Woods was like an attempt at a horror movie satire by someone who doesn't actually watch a lot of horror movies. Which I wouldn't be surprised if it was. It was bland. It was at turns kind of funny, faintly vexing, boring, and baffling. It wasn't terrible. It wasn't great. It was indecisive, mostly toothless, sometimes exploitative under the guise of irony. Basically, if you got a somewhat clever but overconfident 14-year-old to write a meta horror movie for their NaNoWriMo, you would get The Cabin in the Woods.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure TV Tropes has already pointed out a thousand times over that recognizing a trope isn't the same as subverting it. The movie couldn't commit to a central theme or message or, honestly, tone enough to decide whether it was exploiting the girl they dubbed The Whore, criticizing her exploitation, both, neither, making light of it, and I'm pretty sure it's trying to straddle that weaselly line where it can try to pass itself off as serious but if you're offended, "it was ironic." To quote my much shorter Tumblr review: 2. I got the vexing impression this was the kind of movie where any complaint you voiced about it could be indecisively handwaved as being “intentional.” It didn’t scare me and I didn’t give a shit? That was intentional! Vaguely uncomfortable and exploitative and creepy? Intentional! Nonsensical and internally inconsistent? Intentional!! Stereotypical? Intentional!!!! Predictable? That was all intentional, you Philistine!!! Boring? Incoherent? Shallow? All intentional!!!! Somehow!!!!! Don’t you realize all it takes to make a watchable meta flick is to recognize the existence of meta?
It really didn't make much sense from a logistical standpoint, but maybe that was... intentional. No, seriously, neither the laws of physics nor the laws of decent storytelling were in place here -- but I bet I know what the defense to that would be. Why did the bear traps work that way? Why did the Ancient Ones care about human sexual morality? Why did they mind-alteringly drug them into unrecognizability if free will was a component? I dunno. Intentional.
In all seriousness, the horror-movie-within-a-movie The Cabin in the Woods seemed to be making was also a shitty slasher flick from about 1970 and bears little resemblance to the current horror industry or anything kids of the 2000s, where Saw and The Ring have left brighter handprints than anything else, would recognize as current or relevant. It went after really low-hanging fruit. It picked out tropes you already know from, like, Scream and even Scary Movie, God forbid. I couldn't bring my senses to be offended by the end moral because that implies the writers were willing to commit to a particular end moral.
On second thought, pretty much everything I have to say about it is negative, aside from a few things being funny. I still can't say that I hated it, though. It just didn't inspire that kind of strong emotion. It's lukewarm, faintly annoying, a bit soothingly predictable. It's not worth hating, but I'm not sure it's worth nine dollars, either. I am disappointed, though, I was really hoping this would be the Joss Whedon vehicle that convinced me he was back on his feet at all.
The Cabin in the Woods was not Hot Fuzz. The Cabin in the Woods was like an attempt at a horror movie satire by someone who doesn't actually watch a lot of horror movies. Which I wouldn't be surprised if it was. It was bland. It was at turns kind of funny, faintly vexing, boring, and baffling. It wasn't terrible. It wasn't great. It was indecisive, mostly toothless, sometimes exploitative under the guise of irony. Basically, if you got a somewhat clever but overconfident 14-year-old to write a meta horror movie for their NaNoWriMo, you would get The Cabin in the Woods.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure TV Tropes has already pointed out a thousand times over that recognizing a trope isn't the same as subverting it. The movie couldn't commit to a central theme or message or, honestly, tone enough to decide whether it was exploiting the girl they dubbed The Whore, criticizing her exploitation, both, neither, making light of it, and I'm pretty sure it's trying to straddle that weaselly line where it can try to pass itself off as serious but if you're offended, "it was ironic." To quote my much shorter Tumblr review: 2. I got the vexing impression this was the kind of movie where any complaint you voiced about it could be indecisively handwaved as being “intentional.” It didn’t scare me and I didn’t give a shit? That was intentional! Vaguely uncomfortable and exploitative and creepy? Intentional! Nonsensical and internally inconsistent? Intentional!! Stereotypical? Intentional!!!! Predictable? That was all intentional, you Philistine!!! Boring? Incoherent? Shallow? All intentional!!!! Somehow!!!!! Don’t you realize all it takes to make a watchable meta flick is to recognize the existence of meta?
It really didn't make much sense from a logistical standpoint, but maybe that was... intentional. No, seriously, neither the laws of physics nor the laws of decent storytelling were in place here -- but I bet I know what the defense to that would be. Why did the bear traps work that way? Why did the Ancient Ones care about human sexual morality? Why did they mind-alteringly drug them into unrecognizability if free will was a component? I dunno. Intentional.
In all seriousness, the horror-movie-within-a-movie The Cabin in the Woods seemed to be making was also a shitty slasher flick from about 1970 and bears little resemblance to the current horror industry or anything kids of the 2000s, where Saw and The Ring have left brighter handprints than anything else, would recognize as current or relevant. It went after really low-hanging fruit. It picked out tropes you already know from, like, Scream and even Scary Movie, God forbid. I couldn't bring my senses to be offended by the end moral because that implies the writers were willing to commit to a particular end moral.
On second thought, pretty much everything I have to say about it is negative, aside from a few things being funny. I still can't say that I hated it, though. It just didn't inspire that kind of strong emotion. It's lukewarm, faintly annoying, a bit soothingly predictable. It's not worth hating, but I'm not sure it's worth nine dollars, either. I am disappointed, though, I was really hoping this would be the Joss Whedon vehicle that convinced me he was back on his feet at all.
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