The Scary Show

Before the review proper, I'm going to try out a couple bad, brief jokes, or so-called "meme reviews."

Ahem... first joke: even for claims that marijuana is a gateway drug, this is ridiculous.

Second joke: Joss Whedon must be egotistical to suggest the world will end based on whether his horror movie is any good.

OK, now that I've done my part to save the world by either those jokes killing or dying themselves from natural causes--if not, I'm sure the Japanese, or more popular social-media personalities, will slay it as always--I'll try to write some actual critical thoughts on "The Cabin in the Woods." It's post-"Scream" (1996) horror-genre deconstruction and post-"The Truman Show" (1998) reality-tv spoof. The main reflexive device here is that the teenagers are in a film within the film. Aside from their other plot devices--here it's the initial mystery of the relation of the two plots, in "Scream it's the whodunit, and unrequited love with Truman--the main difference I think between this and something such as "Scream" is that this is more mocking. It's not always clear, perhaps because it's not the case, that there's simultaneously a love for the films that this one is making fun of. It's perhaps more akin to something along the lines of "Blazing Saddles" (1974) in that sense, where one may doubt Mel Brooks likes Westerns at all, as well as in the vein of "The Truman Show." That's fine by me, but it's admittedly a bit mean spirited--like joking about meme reviews by writing a couple bland ones.

The deconstruction may be too incisive to be otherwise, as the picture does well to get at the simplistic conventions of many such trashy scary movies: the character tropes, their stupid behaviors, the oxymoronic sexual moralism combined with gratuitous nudity, the foreboding environs, and the generic monsters. Early on, if not for the escalating meta-ness, one may as well be watching one of the numerous hacky slashers in the tradition of, say, "Friday the 13" (1980)--and that's supposedly one of the best of its ilk. Most potentially insulting, one might consider this a metaphorical slap in the face of fans of such genre fare--the gods placated by formulaic slop made by engineer filmmakers just carrying out the same pattern time and again. If one diverges too much from the blueprint, subverts basic expectations, Adam Smith's invisible hand will be rendered visible CGI to reach out and end the movie, or something....

Once the interior film (the film within the film) collapses and those remaining enter the outer film, making once surrogate, in-film filmmakers and spectators into participants in the horrors, though, it becomes a far more gleeful experience. What happened to Truman if they never stopped trying to prevent him from leaving, and he did anyways. Before that, it's arguably too much of an intellectual exercise in looking down on the genre and overly reliant on the albeit amusing interactions between Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford. Easily one of the two best movies featuring Jenkins and a merman, by the way.... Maybe that should've been my meme review.