Thanks, I Hate It: The Cabin in the Woods

“What if, as the elements of a horror film unfolded, we pointed at them and made excited noises?” sounds more like the backbone of a really lazy episode of MST3K than a credible premise for this thirty million-dollar knowing smirk of a movie. The Cabin in the Woods is a bare frame that thinks it’s a house, a series of winks and nods toward the history of horror cinema and the structural underpinnings of slasher horror that amounts to little more than simultaneous enthusiasm for these symbols and tropes and ignorance of their deeper meanings. Director and co-writer Drew Goddard and producer/co-writer Joss Whedon seem perfectly suited to one another as creators of snappy, paper-thin sandboxes where characters can make witty observations.

The film is structured around the ritual sacrifice of five friends by a mysterious agency located in an underground bunker. The bunker stuff, a kind of black office comedy centered on desk jockeys played by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, is by far the funniest in the movie, though it owes most of that to the aforementioned actors’ chemistry and the satirical bite of an office blandly orchestrating complex supernatural spree killings. Past that the movie fumbles for some kind of larger point about social norms and the silent cost of maintaining them, but without any kind of clear ideas or coherent thought. It peters out at “well if society is built on something bad, we should let it die,” a bold idea in the right hands, a dropped ball here with nothing to make the case for it beyond a monologue by a wasted Sigourney Weaver.

The film’s basic problem is that it’s neither scary nor consistently funny. It mistakes one-liners for comedy, vesting its entire approach to humor in dialogue so quippy and arch that it actively blocks the kind of incidental characterization that leads to real humor. Nor does the movie have any kind of insight into the things at which it’s constantly gesturing, treating all its monsters interchangeably and discarding their backstories and symbolic significance without ever looking at them with more than cursory interest. They exist to manufacture a little atmosphere and then vanish, ultimately divorced from any kind of structure.

And once we get past the more or less enjoyable spectacle of a hundred movies’ worth of monsters going HAM on some suits, what’s left? A lot of gibberish about final girls and rituals in an apocalyptic chamber that looks like it got cut from an early God of War game. Too long, visually unimpressive, and overwritten, The Cabin in the Woods is the exact movie I’d expect whoever invented Funko Pops to make.