I think MC Escher would have lent his design talent towards this film. It had many twists, turns, ups, downs, all in a jumbled mess of near incoherence in addition to a plethora of nonsensical phantasmagoria. And that is precisely what makes this movie a small treasure of sorts.
Joss Whedon, writer of Toy Story and director of the upcoming Avengers, penned this bizarro tale. The story is quite epic in scale and in my opinion, could have truly shined so much more as a TV series. There were just too many good ideas on display here to be conflated in under two hours. I really believe this could have been the next Lost if allotted the proper amount of time and energy.
Despite the fun time at the movies feel that The Cabin In The Woods certainly provides, it comes up short as a solid work of art. Most people know that comedy and horror find an interesting and rather advantageous balance in the best of the horror genre. In Cabin, the horror seems to underwhelm and the comedy seems to overwhelm, which is to say, I believe the right balance was not struck. I really admire what Whedon and others tried to do here, it was high camp obviously inspired by Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, parts 2 and 3. I will be in the minority here but I found the first Evil Dead to be the most effective and overall the best of the three because it emphasized the horror and not the comedy. Don't get me wrong, I love the comic bits when they feel right but not when they feel forced and take you out of the experience. The pothead (comic relief character) was good but not great with delivery and that, i think, could have been easily fixed with better direction.
A movie to see in the theater with friends for sure, I have no doubt that most will have a good time but critics and fans alike need to quit calling movies smart just because they seem to be clever and original. The Cabin In The Woods has a long way to go to reach the heights of say - The Shining.
Recommended Viewing: Evil Dead - Cube - Drag Me To Hell
Bob Scale: Objective: 7.0 - Subjective: 7.5
MetaCritic: 73
Rotten Tomatoes: 92
IMDB: 7.6
No comments:
Post a Comment