The Cabin in the Woods

As the horror genre goes, there are horror films, and then there's "The Cabin in the Woods". The selling slogan to this film is: "You think you know the story" is extremely accurate. This basically turns the entire genre totally inside out.

Five friends, Dana, Curt, Jules, Marty and Holden (Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz and Jesse Williams) respectively, decide to take a break and go to a remote cabin in the woods for a week-end getaway vacation. After hearing odd noises and voices and go searching in the cellar, bad, really bad things start happening. As they try to leave, they inadvertently start realizing some truths about the cabin, but as they learn these truths, things continue to get more horrific and unexplainable.

Others to round out the cast are Richard Jenkins as Sitterson, Bradley Whitford as Hadley, Brian White as Truman, Amy Acher as Lin, and Sigourney Weaver as ' the Director'.

It was very adequately directed by relative newcomer to theatrical films, Drew Goddard, whose done a ton of TV, but this is basically his theatrical directorial debut. He was effective in that he really knew how to get terror and fear out of these people. This was written by Joss Whedon ("Toy Story" '95, "Alien: Resurrection" '97, "Titan A.E." 2000, "Serenity" '05, "The Avengers" '12) and Goddard ("Cloverfield" '08). Even though the premise to the film was original, because of the total obscurity of it, I believe the cohesiveness was compromised and there were things that were not explained well or not at all which made it frustrating. To tell you the inconsistencies and non explained things could ruin the story for you. Suffice it to say, you will not be able to figure out this plot unless you see it. Even after seeing it, one still might have a tough time figuring it out. It's kind of like figuring out some of M. Night Shyamalan's work in that it really puts the 'W' in weird.

It had great visual and special make-up effects which is great for the large screen, but for story and continuity of it, this lacks. If you are a horror affictionado and like a ton of gratuitous gore, this will probably turn your crank. If you're not, I would just leave this one alone.

Out of 4 stars: 2                       Rated: R                         95min.