Cabin in the Woods (Spoilers)
I doubt anyone hear watches horror movies, but I had to talk about this movie because it is probably the best horror movie done in the "Sam Raimi style of horror" that I haven't seen in a long time.
Cabin in the Woods was phenomenal in how well it blended the horror/comedy genre together to make a cohesive movie that you can laugh at and observe as an actual horror movie. This movie was written and produced by Joss Whedon (director of the Avengers) so kudos for breaking away from the sci-fi genre as well as for making an amazing horror movie. The only other director that has made this kind of horror/comedy genre is Sam Raimi with his Evil Dead Series and his other horror movie "Drag me to Hell". If any of you are familiar with the Evil Dead Series Sam Raimi does a great job in expressing the horror meant to be in the plot while incorporating comedy into the characters attempting to make light of a dire situation. In other words, the protagonist feigns optimism in a situation that you expect them to scream in fright. Joss Whedon pulls off the exact same effect with his primary protagonists, and it his amazing results.
So for any that had over hear me talking about the movie I was right in the aspect that it is similar to the Truman Show. Behind the scenes, people are literally incorporating horror movie monsters into a scenario where a bunch of college students go to a cabin in the woods for the weekend. You take out the the people behind the scenes you literally have the generic plot behind the movie "Evil Dead". I laughed out loud in the theater when I saw the cabin's exterior and interior because it was nearly identical in design to the one in Evil Dead.
The audience is introduced to five different characters: the jock, the "nerd", the slut, the pothead, and the "virgin" - btw Thor plays the jock. This is important to the plot of the film more than you would think because initially it looks like the regular setup of a generic horror slasher flick, but the setup becomes much more significant in the end. So these behind the scene operators set up the cabin to have various intricate antiques in the basement and they chemically coerce the 5 students into the basement by exposing them to gases that either make them stupid and/or horny. The monster in the film is determined by which antique they "activate". Once activated the horror is released by the people behind the scenes onto the unsuspecting students.
A lot of the comedic aspects of the film come from the people behind the scenes. The setup has two primary guys in control of the switches that control the doors, chemical releases, and the monsters unleashed. Their office looks like smaller control center of NASA where they monitor all the events on the big screen. They treat the whole scenario like a office place; some of the hijinks that occur were very entertaining:
- They have an office betting pool on which horror is activated.
- All the guys gather around the screen when the slut and the jock are coerced into having sex.
- They have an office party, with beer and alcohol, when their assignment is complete.
One of my favorite jokes in the movie is when one of the main operators jokes that he will never be able to see someone get murdered by the mermaid monster because they never seem to activate the conch that summons it.
Anyways, the kids summon zombie family of sadists, and the student start getting chased as per generic horror movie plot. It gets funnier with how the pothead practically figures everything out, and how some of the people die. The most notable death was Thor - he died by attempting to jump a gorge with a motorcycle and crashed into the invisible wall the operators activated to prevent them from escaping. It was pure comedy.
What ends up happening is that the pothead begins to figure things out when he finds an elevator in a shallow grave that he hotwires it to go down. What they end up discovering is that this shadow organization is housing thousands of monsters in glass case rooms in a giant facility underground. Many of these monsters are parodies of other movie monsters and villains which included some of the following:
- Werewolf
- Ghost
- Pinhead from "Hellraiser"
- Anaconda
- The Strangers
- Zombies
- Slither
- The Mermaid episode from the X-files
- The Grudge (their Japan based facility)
At this point the only two survivors are the pothead and the "virgin", as to which they get cornered in a room with a button that releases all the monsters, which they proceed to press. The monsters go on a rampage killing all the employs in the underground facility while the two try to escape.
They wander throughout the facility and end up in a room, which revealed the biggest bombshell in the movie in that Sigourney Weaver was the director of the facility. Sigourney reveals that this whole thing was set up for ritual sacrifices. She drops some H.P. Lovecraft horror and says that 4-5 sacrifices are needed to suppress the uprising of the "Ancient gods" that will otherwise destroy the world. They need 4 sacrifices are necessary and are categorized as "The Whore, The Athlete, The Scholar, The Fool," with the "Virgin" being optional. A fight ensues some is about to betray another, and Sigourney gets thrown off of the ledge that leads to the ancient one. The two survivors realize that without the final sacrifice "THe Fool = The pothead" that the whole world ends at sunrise, and they share a rolled joint while the ancient one bursts out of the ground and the movie ends.
I can't really explain the brilliance behind the film, but that's exactly why
YOU SHOULD GO SEE IT!!!!
Cabin in the Woods was phenomenal in how well it blended the horror/comedy genre together to make a cohesive movie that you can laugh at and observe as an actual horror movie. This movie was written and produced by Joss Whedon (director of the Avengers) so kudos for breaking away from the sci-fi genre as well as for making an amazing horror movie. The only other director that has made this kind of horror/comedy genre is Sam Raimi with his Evil Dead Series and his other horror movie "Drag me to Hell". If any of you are familiar with the Evil Dead Series Sam Raimi does a great job in expressing the horror meant to be in the plot while incorporating comedy into the characters attempting to make light of a dire situation. In other words, the protagonist feigns optimism in a situation that you expect them to scream in fright. Joss Whedon pulls off the exact same effect with his primary protagonists, and it his amazing results.
So for any that had over hear me talking about the movie I was right in the aspect that it is similar to the Truman Show. Behind the scenes, people are literally incorporating horror movie monsters into a scenario where a bunch of college students go to a cabin in the woods for the weekend. You take out the the people behind the scenes you literally have the generic plot behind the movie "Evil Dead". I laughed out loud in the theater when I saw the cabin's exterior and interior because it was nearly identical in design to the one in Evil Dead.
The audience is introduced to five different characters: the jock, the "nerd", the slut, the pothead, and the "virgin" - btw Thor plays the jock. This is important to the plot of the film more than you would think because initially it looks like the regular setup of a generic horror slasher flick, but the setup becomes much more significant in the end. So these behind the scene operators set up the cabin to have various intricate antiques in the basement and they chemically coerce the 5 students into the basement by exposing them to gases that either make them stupid and/or horny. The monster in the film is determined by which antique they "activate". Once activated the horror is released by the people behind the scenes onto the unsuspecting students.
A lot of the comedic aspects of the film come from the people behind the scenes. The setup has two primary guys in control of the switches that control the doors, chemical releases, and the monsters unleashed. Their office looks like smaller control center of NASA where they monitor all the events on the big screen. They treat the whole scenario like a office place; some of the hijinks that occur were very entertaining:
- They have an office betting pool on which horror is activated.
- All the guys gather around the screen when the slut and the jock are coerced into having sex.
- They have an office party, with beer and alcohol, when their assignment is complete.
One of my favorite jokes in the movie is when one of the main operators jokes that he will never be able to see someone get murdered by the mermaid monster because they never seem to activate the conch that summons it.
Anyways, the kids summon zombie family of sadists, and the student start getting chased as per generic horror movie plot. It gets funnier with how the pothead practically figures everything out, and how some of the people die. The most notable death was Thor - he died by attempting to jump a gorge with a motorcycle and crashed into the invisible wall the operators activated to prevent them from escaping. It was pure comedy.
What ends up happening is that the pothead begins to figure things out when he finds an elevator in a shallow grave that he hotwires it to go down. What they end up discovering is that this shadow organization is housing thousands of monsters in glass case rooms in a giant facility underground. Many of these monsters are parodies of other movie monsters and villains which included some of the following:
- Werewolf
- Ghost
- Pinhead from "Hellraiser"
- Anaconda
- The Strangers
- Zombies
- Slither
- The Mermaid episode from the X-files
- The Grudge (their Japan based facility)
At this point the only two survivors are the pothead and the "virgin", as to which they get cornered in a room with a button that releases all the monsters, which they proceed to press. The monsters go on a rampage killing all the employs in the underground facility while the two try to escape.
They wander throughout the facility and end up in a room, which revealed the biggest bombshell in the movie in that Sigourney Weaver was the director of the facility. Sigourney reveals that this whole thing was set up for ritual sacrifices. She drops some H.P. Lovecraft horror and says that 4-5 sacrifices are needed to suppress the uprising of the "Ancient gods" that will otherwise destroy the world. They need 4 sacrifices are necessary and are categorized as "The Whore, The Athlete, The Scholar, The Fool," with the "Virgin" being optional. A fight ensues some is about to betray another, and Sigourney gets thrown off of the ledge that leads to the ancient one. The two survivors realize that without the final sacrifice "THe Fool = The pothead" that the whole world ends at sunrise, and they share a rolled joint while the ancient one bursts out of the ground and the movie ends.
I can't really explain the brilliance behind the film, but that's exactly why
YOU SHOULD GO SEE IT!!!!