Movies: A Cabin in the Woods

You want to visit this cabin.

Cabin in the Woods is a very difficult movie to review, so I am gonna say right off the bat:  If you like the horror genre even a little bit, go and see it, you will like it.  I would also recommend this movie to people who are tired of the horror genre, as this movie flips the genre on it's head and is a very fresh take on the generic horror formula.  Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard deftly take the cliches of horror movies and make them fresh.

*Spoilers Start Here*

On the surface, this movie is about a group of college students, led by Chris Hemsworth, that go to the titular cabin in the woods and get attacked by a group of hillbilly zombies. However, two main characters that come as a complete surprise are two white collar office types played by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins.  They are monitoring the actions of the college kids doing everything they can in order to make them die.  Why they are doing this is explained throughout the course of the movie.

This movie is quite a bit funnier than I was expecting.  It's not much of a stretch to say that the movie is much more funny than it is scary.  A lot of the laughs come from the office workers as they react to the situations that are happening to the kids in the cabin.

The office has a bunch of tricks up their sleeves to make the kids fail, such as mind altering gasses.  The character that wants everyone to stick together gets blasted with the gas and changes his mind.  "We should split up, we can cover more ground that way."  Scenes like this not only are really funny but shine a bright light on the tropes of horror movies that have been plaguing that genre for decades.

All in all, I loved this movie.  It was entertaining and just plain fun to watch.  If you like horror movies, do yourself a favor and see this movie.  If you don't, you should probably watch it as well.