Did I just watch a movie made out of a Charlton horror comic?

Rating: 4/10 (2 July 2013)

In the 1970s there was a low-budget comic book publisher called Charlton which put out a line of horror comics that borrowed ideas from all over the place and sometimes ran them together. Occasionally instead of 3 stories in an issue, you'd get a book-length story that took a cast of characters through various sorts of trials and catacombs all the way to the dark dimension of the ancient Cthulhu-type gods of the H. P. Lovecraft mythology, and they'd all get sucked into a big pit by something with giant tentacles. The end.
For a 25c comic book in 1975, OK, you can get away with that sort of crap. For a full-length feature film in the 21st century, people expect better.
Actually what you get here is something like the 3 stories in the Charlton comic all run together -- the beginning of the film is a straight kids-in-the-cabin setup, the second part more heavily involves the people behind the scenes apparently manipulating the setup (and that's not a spoiler, it's clear early on that this is going on), and the third part is the supposedly big surprise ending which I won't reveal.
Part 1, or I should say Story 1, is the most formulaic bit but also the most interesting. An old diary and some acceptably scary creatures in the woods start picking people off, in typical horror movie fashion. Which works well enough. Too bad we'll never see this story resolved. Story 2 is not very believable but would have been acceptable had it not been revealed so early on and turned out to be all a show arranged for evil filthy rich people who liked seeing people get killed, which is what appears to be going on, or at any rate would be the only thing that would make sense. But that is not the case here. Unfortunately. The big secret, Story 3, comes way out someplace beyond left field, and doesn't make a whit of sense, and neither does the scene of its revelation, and that makes the concluding portion of this movie stink to high heaven. This 2nd "big surprise" is too much; it just wasn't necessary and just plain doesn't work, which is probably why most people who say they do hate the movie.
AVENGERS and other Whedon projects have also attempted to try and let over-the-topness replace coherence but that just doesn't work. AVENGERS didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense and neither does this. Its just random and all over the place; the product of a writer who does not write from life but reworks content he's already seen in other movies. Ugh.
I will say this for the film, tho. There is one fantastic crowd-pleasing scene after Story 1 has been dumped and just before Story 2 is turned into Story 3 which in its over-the-topness will wow anyone watching. It's a wonderful "hooooly s--t!" moment But it only lasts a minute or so before you think, OK, enough already. I get it. Move on.
Honestly tho I'd rather have done without the whole LOGAN'S RUN-type "Story 2" as well as the lousy ending, which negates any meaning that Story 1 might have had, and just seen Story 1 worked out more creatively. I got the feeling that the "watchers" were simply the writers/director of the film injecting themselves into this so they could mess with the story. Which is exactly what those writers/director(s) did with this movie. It's so heavily messed with that it ends in a complete train wreck, not in any sort of satisfying way. And it is not a spoof; it's fairly nasty sometimes and absolutely never funny -- I don't know where that idea is supposed to come from.
CABIN IN THE WOODS is not really creative, it's inbred and backwards. And therefore is not really recommended unless you just want to see that one amazing over-the-top scene, or really really loved book-length issues of Charlton horror comics a lot, even when they were really derivative, random, incoherent, and just plain bad.