Do Not Watch If You Are Stupid

Rating: 9/10 (15 June 2012)

**THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A LOT OF SPOILERS, AND QUICKLY.** A quick note to address the oft-repeated criticism throughout these reviews: Don't watch movies smarter than you.
"I don't understand why they showed those Japanese Girls! This movie was stupid!" "Why were they controlling those teens? I don't get it!" "Why did they all need to die slowly and horribly? It's so stupid!" Sorry, a movie doesn't suck because you weren't smart enough to get it. If you think the acting was amateurish, or the plot was full of holes, or the director made a mess of things, or the lighting sucked, or any criticism of the actual MOVIE, then good on you. You're a discriminating consumer who knows what (s)he wants. On the other hand, if you didn't "get" the movie and didn't understand what was going on, that's more a comment about you than this movie. This wasn't The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, people. It was a completely comprehensible movie that required only a few watts of brainpower to follow.
On to the review: The Cabin in the Woods gets 9 stars because I don't like horror movies. Yes, it is. Stop saying it isn't. This movie is the definition of horror movies. Isolated locale, terrified victims being killed in gruesome ways, blood and gore, zombies and sharp, stabby things, nubile teens and monsters - yep, it's a horror movie. Joss Whedon style.
What's Whedon style? The curveball, ho-hum office banter beginning that only makes sense later. "I'm still on speakerphone." Lots of in-jokes for horror fans. A kick-ass hot girl who doesn't know the meaning of the words, "Just show us your boobs and die, like you're supposed to in a horror movie." And a story that is working on multiple levels simultaneously.
Example? When the bird hits the force field as the camper crosses the threshold, it's saying something. You know immediately the teens are trapped. You know this isn't just about some lunatic with a chainsaw or an ancient curse. Joss's fans just got a wink, letting them know something Whedon this way comes. And you just KNOW one of those teens is gonna follow the birdie. One quick zap, and it's chock full of exposition, foreboding, 'hint, hint' and humor, and a quick hello from an artist to his fans.
The Cabin in the Woods works because there are enough layers to please almost everyone - plenty of slice and dice for the gore fans, impish humor of the camp fans, unnameable horrors for the Lovecraft fans, hot girls and cheesecake for the 14 year olds who sneaked in - and they never bog the movie down. It moves along, escalating nicely, the progression logical in hindsight and plenty creepy for the nonce.
The story is about the answer many viewers of horror movies never receive to their oft-asked question: "Yes, but WHY?" The answer: Because if it doesn't go down exactly like horror movies should, the world will end. A few die so many may live. Not especially original, but this is Hollywood and this is horror: nothing is original anymore.
The cast is great, with Kristen Connolly a perfect Whedon girl: sweet, sexy, tough, intelligent, "Excuse me? WHO did you just call an ingénue?!" She fights even when she's losing badly and manages to keep winning the ultimate prize: survival. Whedon alum Fran Kranz as the philosophically conspiracy-minded stoner hits all the right comic relief notes, acting as the audience's avatar many times. Anna Hutchinson, Chris Hemsworth, and Jesse Williams fill out the soon-to-be-dead list of normal, organic roles nicely. There isn't a "No one would tolerate this asshole for five seconds in real life" in the bunch. They're normal, mundane, run-of-the-mill. They're us, which adds a little sympathetic chill to their deaths.
The villains in the movie aren't the monsters, or the teens, or vice (or something similarly corny). In truth, the villains are us, the people in the chairs, watching the spectacle. We are represented by the puppet masters in their enclave, manipulating the environment to turn the screws and up the heat. They've lost whatever it is that would fill a body with outrage over the things they're doing - even to save the world - and it's all just a day at the office to them.
It is to these people Whedon and Goddard are their cruelest. The REAL horror and splatter and viscera starts at the end, the payoff to all the buildup we've been watching, an orgy of monsters rampaging through the enclave, giving the bad guys their comeuppance. It's the catharsis we've been craving, the once-removed self-flagellation for having been spectators to this horrible tableau, purifying the wicked in blood and death, restoring balance - for the scant amount of time remaining for there to be a world where balance matters.
And here's the kicker: you don't even have to "get" all that to enjoy this movie. You can simply root for the good guys to survive and the bad guys to get theirs; you'll get satisfaction with both. That's the fun of Joss Whedon; he's never up his own ass with his cleverness. There's always enough to enjoy even if you don't want to join his hipper-than-hippos club.
But you do have to be minimally intelligent. Despite what one hater (who clearly just wants to rebel against 'whatever') thinks, this is not Scary Movie. It's Evil Dead on meth and peyote.