Posted by: Bradley Redder
Well, I have to admit that that was not the reaction I was expecting from you. I chose The Cabin in the Woods after seeing it last week because I was sure you'd overpraise the Hell out of it and spark some lively discussion. Instead it looks like you had the same initial reaction I did walking out the first time, but fortunately a second viewing hardened me to its superficial charms and revealed how nonsensical it comes across as once you know exactly where it's heading.
Needless to say I was less impressed as I walked out a second time, and reading your review I do find a bit of that overpraise I was talking about. Given how much I actually did find myself laughing (even the second time) it may seem a little unfair to ask if you were really that impressed by its humor. But, uh, were you? Didn't you start to find it a little exhausting after a while. When it was focused, it could be very funny, when it was directly or, even better, indirectly poking fun at horror conventions and audience expectation, it was brilliant at times, like right before Chris Hemsworth is going to jump the canyon to get help we know he will never get, but he still gives the obligatory No Quit speech: "I'll come back with helicopters and big fuckin' guns; if I'm wounded I'll crawl... Whatever happens, I will come back." It was sublime. But then there were so many moments, like the one directly after, when I could feel Goddard and Whedon trying so hard to be funny, shamelessly pointing out their own cleverness and ruining the joke because of it... Hemsworth jumps and it looks like he'll make it, but instead he hits the invisible wall that we all knew he was going to hit, because we already saw the same thing happen earlier in the movie.
In your review you mention that "There are moments so out of place, so completely unfitting of the rest of the film, that it seems like they were added because the writers had written themselves in a corner." I'm curious to know which moments you're talking about. I would almost say the last twenty minutes fit that criticism, but at the same time I feel like that was what Goddard and Whedon really wanted to get to in the first place, and it's a shame that it fails, because the idea is kind of amazing... a hundred different ghosts, monsters, zombies, etc. loosed upon the corridors of an underground military base (or whatever that place actually was). It's just executed poorly. It goes on either far too long, or not nearly long enough. It was so mindlessly presented that I felt like I got it after the first wave of monsters, but more came, and then more, but not enough to get to the point at which it's so relentlessly absurd that I could do nothing but stand up and applaud. No. Instead I just realized how bored I was, looking at shot after shot of cartoonishly blood-covered walls. And that was before the who-gives-a-shit expository scene with Sigourney Weaver. Ugh.
Am I wrong?
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