Just when you thought it was safe to leave your grave...

Rating: 8/10 (19 August 2012)

A Joss Whedon co-script credit state-of-the-genre teen horror/comedy, with just a hint of conspiracy theory, delivers on the laughs and a few thrills, but not the chills – unless you're of such a nervous disposition that you shouldn't be watching horror in the first place. A very acceptable alternative to the occasional pretension and over seriousness of even such self-conscious ventures as Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity and Insidious. The title gives the game away – this is horror as cliché, parodying itself, but thankfully at a much higher than Not-Just-Another-Teen-Movie level, scaling the same heights of postmodern genre-bending meta-horror as Scream and Jason X, in this case, a pleasant buzz and head-high blend of The Truman show, Bruce Campbell ... and Scooby Doo.
***MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS*** Keeping Earth's ancient evil giant gods happy has gone super hi-tech (with modern high priests not unlike movie moguls and control-freak directors using the stock-in-trade devices of the horror genre as its tools, including in this case the ghosts, ghouls and monsters ). It's a secret global industry, with rules/rituals not dissimilar to the postmodern horror guideline laid down in Scream, the number of victims, the order in which they die, the role of the virgin, etc., etc.. The gods are getting angry and they must be appeased. Various appeasement projects around the world fail and it's up to the US to save the day (which for some reason I'm sure intentionally reminded me of the Fox network's view of the global economic crisis). For a moment it looks as if they've pulled it off, but they suddenly realise in the middle of something like a wrap-party that it's going wrong and they are in serious trouble... the "sacrifice" industry appears to have become too tech-sophisticated for its own good, and finally appears to have succumbed to that scariest of all scenarios, human error. No wonder the hi-tech priests talk about simpler times when all they had to do was throw virgin's into volcanoes...
At this point we are in a strange dilemma, do we want the "bad" guys to win and safeguard humanity, or do we want the dumb youngsters (so dumb they almost make dumb-as-they-come inbred redneck zombies look clever) to survive and secure the horrific destruction of mankind?
All this happens in the first half of the film, and while the execution of the idea is interesting and entertaining, the telescoping of the normal 90 or 120 min horror narrative into this much shorter time, coupled with the fact that every clichéd move is intentionally telegraphed, tends to rob it of any jump-out-of-your-seat moments that were potentially there. But that's hardly what the movie is about, and in the second half it really comes into its own in a roller-coaster of subtle, not-so-subtle and over-the-head-with-a-baseball-bat referencing of too many genre favourites to mention. After I've watched it a few times more for the laughs, I might watch it once more to see just how many I can identify, they come too fast and furious to get in just one or two sittings, but if you don't get at least a dozen the first time, you are something of a tourist in this territory.
OK, so there are as many plot holes as there are clichés and if you don't buy into it or want something genuinely frightening (why?) it will come across as horror 101. But with some friends, some beer and pizza, it's hard to go wrong with this.