Cabin In The Woods Has A Few Leaks In It

Rating: 9/10 (30 January 2013)

By today's standards, it has become kind of obvious that Hollywood is running short on original ideas, and part of the problem is that the industry is based on a predilection of ignoring and pretty much stone-walling struggling new writers with fresh ideas. If you look at the number of horror movies coming out these days, the majority of them are nothing bur remakes, sequels or new spins and incarnations of existing horror movies. You could say that there is only really around twelve to fifteen horror movie archetypes, but every once in a while, a movie comes around like "Cabin In The Woods" that takes its archetype and either re-invents it or twists it on its side. Set up with the general format of "The Evil Dead" or cabin-in-the-woods story, the movie centers around five college kids who vanish from society for a wasted weekend of debauchery, drugs and all the god awful anti-social stigma frowned upon in a normal rational society, but from behind the scenes they are being watched by what seems to be an advanced social experiment. Not a lot of details are wasted on the re-animated undead redneck slasher zombie family attacking the kids, although their invention hearkens back to every slasher/gore movie from "Friday The 13th" to "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." The main drive is centered on the two voyeurs and their company controlling the events. Immediately, one starts wondering what their agenda is. You start thinking they might be some sort of hidden camera series or a sociological experiment, but then the murders turn out to be real, and they start engineering details to keep the kids from escaping or leaving the confines of the plot. Once their main drive in seeing the kids murdered off is revealed though, a whole barrage of questions arise that make the movie that much more unbelievable. At the top is how in the world could one agency or corporation capture and contain so many potential paranormal and psychotic threats, and there are a lot of them. The majority of them can pretty much be separated or reduced down to their base core: ghosts, demons, undead, cryptids, psychos, mutants and alien entities. I mean, there is so many of them, it would take an entire website to describe and identify them all. Another thing, how does a simple thick glass prison (shades of the "Thirteen Ghosts" remake) contain the majority of them; what could possibly have been used as a deterrent to imprison the supernatural beings? Another unanswered question, why even have one switch in such an obvious accessible spot where just one irate employee or, in this case, one of the kids having sneaked into the facility could let everything loose at once. What is so laughable is that we see several of seemingly human psychos released who just walk through the carnage without getting attacked by the more powerful inhuman entities. (If Michael Myers or even Jack The Ripper crossed paths with Dracula or the living dead, psycho or not, they would be toast.) Is it just because they're wearing a costume? That is the true appeal and climax of the movie: seeing variations of every major and obscure horror character of other seventy years of cinema all at once in the movie from the Wolfman and zombies down to Pennywise the Clown and the Fifty-Foot Woman in one all-holds barred blood bath. That is why I liked this movie, and why it should appeal to aficionados of horror movies, even those purists who only care for haunted house movies or the deadheads who prefer slasher flicks. The only bad thing about "Cabin In The Woods" would be I don't see a sequel possibly coming out of this carnage, except maybe a prequel showing just how this agency captured and contained all these entities.