Cabin and the death of parody

Rating: 4/10 (17 April 2012)

The reason Cabin in the Woods fails is that it isn't any longer possible to parody a genre which has been sending itself up for years. Cabin doesn't believe, like Scary Movie, that merely quoting another film is terribly funny, but it isn't able, either, to successfully apply satire to horror tropes, since audiences already fully appreciate their absurdity. So what we're left with has all the entertainment-value of a long-winded analysis of a joke. In the process of deconstructing the modern horror, Cabin loses all structural integrity and its only resolution can be a bathetic self-destruction. There are snappy one-liners and a few original ideas but mostly Cabin just preaches to the converted.