The Cabin in the Woods ends the way I imagine the idea for it was conceived: with two people smoking a joint. If only everything in between had been as fun as the night Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon thought up the image of a unicorn killing a man with its horn surely was.
I don't know how much of the plot I can reveal before spoiling it, but one of the problems is that I'm not really sure if it actually presents anything to spoil beyond varying degrees of absurdity. Cabin is a "horror" film that follows a ritual conducted by a faceless group of people, acting on behalf of the world, sacrificing five teenagers to "the ancients" via horror film conventions. With the help of the Chem Department and stupidity-inducing drugs, five teenagers are turned into stereotypes meant to send up the horror genre, so five intelligent college students become a jock, a nerd, a slut, an idiot, and a virgin on their way to a secluded cabin, which essentially becomes the staging ground for their deaths. This is all puppeteered by two guys (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, who almost save the movie from itself) sitting behind an endless control panel, adjusting everything from lighting and temperature to the release of pheromones in the form of mist in the forest.
At once high-concept and incredibly simple, the premise is pretty clever, but flawed. There's enough in it for a drunken dorm-room riff, maybe even a comedy sketch, but stretched out to feature length, it just collapses in on itself. At first it had me lodging all the right complaints... Really? The rundown abandoned gas station with the creepy redneck attendant? Bor-ring, only to realize that that was exactly the point. And I would have been glad to remain the butt of the joke, because unfortunately with the gradual revelation of its mock, meta premise also come the limitations of it. Goddard grossly mismanages the amount of screen time given to each set of characters, spending much of it half-developing doomed teenagers in an artificial scenario as opposed to their puppeteers, with whom the real threat lies. Once it's revealed that this scenario is engineered with the predetermined outcome that these teenagers die, there is no real opportunity for suspense. It's like an M. Night Shyamalan film was condensed into the first act, only we're asked to go through the motions of another hour after the twist ending, with thrills that are as artificial as the cabin itself.
Divided somewhere between homage and derision, Goddard and Whedon attempt to lampoon a genre while trying to add a legitimate entry to its canon, an impossible endeavor with such a flawed premise. Though the death scenes aren't very graphic, this, in a sense, devolves into comedic torture porn, where we're just waiting to see what clever way each character might die, only none of them are all that clever. And that pretty much sums up the film: not clever enough to justify the cockiness inherent in its concept. It's fun to watch Goddard point out cliches, but it gets tiresome once we realize that he doesn't really have anything to say about them beyond re-enacting them with a ridiculous framework and an over-the-top final act, which though it does afford some truly inspired moments and absurd killer unicorns, it's just not enough.
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