Over the last decade or so, the entire movie movie business has been cannibalizing itself. The market is saturated with sequels, remakes, and adaptations of TV shows that no one on the planet was asking for. In fact, there's a movie coming out later this month that's based on a board game...a freaking board game!
Basically, Hollywood has become so risk-averse that they're unwilling to invest any kind of money in something that doesn't have built-in audience familiarity. And, as a result, we're seeing a huge decline in the overall quality of the movie marketplace, the Harry Potter movies notwithstanding.
This trend has been particularly hard on horror movies because, let's face it, there weren't a ton of good horror movies being made to begin with. By and large, horror movies are cheaper to make than other genres with mass appeal. Couple their low cost with a reliable audience of idiotic teenagers and adults who act like idiotic teenagers, and it's easy to see why there's a tidy profit to be made in the horror movie business.
So, as Hollywood has become less willing to invest in anything resembling an original idea, the stream of cheaply made and poorly executed horror movies has expanded exponentially. In most cases, rather than actually taking the time to come up with a scary movie idea, studios are usually content to just throw actors into seemingly random situations and then make things jump out at them. Most of the time it seems like the morons making these movies invest far more energy into devising disgusting ways to kill a character than in making the audience care about whether the character is going to be disemboweled at some point.
I don't want to go off on a tangent here, but isn't it weird that movies in the most successful horror franchise in recent years were made to look like home movies...on purpose?
And, as if all of this wasn't bad enough, studios have compounded the already low quality of their horror movies by subjecting them to the same remaking, rebooting, and sequelizing we see everywhere else. Long story short, it's sad time for horror movies.
At this point, you're probably wondering why I'm spending so much time and effort railing on the state of modern cinema. I mean, it's not like I'm expressing original or unfamiliar concerns here. These problems have been acknowledged and lamented all over the place, and by better writers than myself.
My explanation for this rehash is simple: I don't want to talk about the plot to Cabin in the Woods, but I also don't want to write a five-sentence review of a movie I liked so much. So, I opted to provide some context.
The Cabin in the Woods is both a parody and homage to the horror genre. It attempts to dissect generic horror movie conventions and mock them at the same time. Yet, it is a well-made horror movie in its own right. It begins with the most obvious of horror movie setups -- four college kids going to a cabin for the weekend -- and manages to turn the entire genre on its head.
The movie was written and directed by Drew Goddard, whose previous credits include mostly writing stints on J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon projects -- Lost, Cloverfield, Buffy, etc. Whedon actually contributed to the Cabin in the Woods script and is a producer of the movie as well. Basically, Goddard he's been brought up under the tutelage of the two of the best minds in the business, and their influence is evident in every inch of his directorial debut.
I hate saying this in consecutive reviews, but The Cabin in the Woods might be the best movie to come out so far this year.
This show was fantastic. It really would do any potential viewer a disservice to write a plot summary or review of it. I went in not knowing anything about it and was pleasantly surprised.
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