Author: Bert Ehrmann

Grade B- – The movie The Cabin in the Woods got a lot of positive buzz when it was released earlier this year. People who saw the movie said that it was different, that it played with the typical slasher movie conventions, turned these conventions around and created something new and unique. Being written by Joss Whedon (Firefly, The Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was a huge plus as if anyone has experience with convention-busting it would be Whedon who helped reshape the vampire mythos in Buffy and later Angel.

While I’d say The Cabin in the Woods is a good movie and there is a certain amount of convention-busting going on here, I’d also say that what keeps Cabin from being a better film is that it still relies heavily on those same slasher movie conventions to deliver the scares.

In Cabin, a group of teens visit said cabin in the woods where things aren’t quite what they seem. There, the teens accidentally let lose and ancient evil that begins murdering the teens one by one. But, the twist here is that something is controlling the teens and the evil for their own purposes. And telling anymore would spoil the movie.

What works well in Cabin is everything NOT to do with the teens and their horror situation. The teen part of the story is just like every slasher movie that’s come along in the last 30 years and is dull, dry and boring. However, everything outside of the teens and the situation they’re in, the spoiler territory, is quite interesting and unique.

However interesting it might have been, that and the fact that the ending that seemed to be a version of the ending of Cloverfield (2008), made The Cabin in the Woods a good film rather than a great one.