Review of Cabin in the Woods

When a genre film fucks with it's genre, my eyebrows raise. When it does so with such giddy invention, I get all excited and rambunctious. And that's what happened for me at my viewing of Cabin in the Woods. Watching from the beginning, people might have seen a giant question mark in the thought bubble over my head. And they may have seen more question marks pile up going into the film's first 45 minutes. But those turned into exclamation points as I began to realize what was going on. This film is actually very similar to The Hunger Games, in that an omniscient puppeteer is controlling everything that happens to the main characters. But there's a lot less feeling of compromise. The film teases the audience by presenting two completely different stories, like a mash up. One is the typical set up of a bunch of horny teens going on a joyride to some fateful destination. The other story is about some guys in an office/lab. As I got a sense of how the two worlds were related, my mind was tickled and delighted. And at the end of the film, when I was walking out of the theater, I realized I hadn't been able to anticipate any of the major twists, from the dry erase board listed with villains, to Sigourney Weaver's appearance. My friend Drew was sitting right there with me gasping at all the same moments as I, and the whole of the audience felt kinetically engaged as well. I haven't been to a really fun cinema experience like this in a long time, and I won't forget it any time soon.