Heads up, I’m not a movie reviewer per se. But you already knew that, so proceed.

So I almost watched Cabin in the Woods today. As a rule, I don’t watch horror movies because of night terrors, insomnia, recurring zombie apocalypse nightmares, anxiety issues, etc… But everything I’d seen about this movie said, “NOT a horror movie,” so I decided to give it a go.

Maybe twenty minutes in, we’d had the weird cut scenes with the lab folks and the college kids had assembled, headed out, almost gotten lost, met the disturbing jackass of a gas station attendant, and finally arrived at the creepy isolated cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

And I thought to myself, “there is no way this is not a slasher film.”

So, like you do, I turned to google to see if these kids were or were not about to be brutalized, possibly dismembered, and picked off one by one by some evil/supernatural force. I asked twitter first, but no one seemed willing to drop any spoilers for me.

SPOILERS ahead

So the answer is, well yeah, but not for the reasons you’d think.

Apparently a lot of people hated this movie. And some liked it. It has Joss Whedon’s name and the Mutant Enemy stamp on it, so I want to love it. But my honest assessment is that it tries to do too much in one short movie.

First, the character rundown:

•the boyfriend
•the girlfriend
•the gf’s bff
•the random new guy
•the stoner guy
•the lab people
•the unleashed killers
•the true evil

What the hell happens:

•the kids go to the cabin
•the lab techs are clearly manipulating what happens to the kids
•some random killers are unleashed (also they are apparently zombies, so I’m glad I didn’t watch…)
•the couple wanders off to have sex
•oh shit! the kids are really dying
•chaos ensues
•oh shit again! they realize they are trapped
•and oh shit some more! stoner guy survived and comes back for the bff girl
•they confront the lab people
•”but its not what you think!!! we don’t want to kill you, but it’s for the good of the world!”

-See, apparently, there is the true evil that lives under/in the earth, and it wants to fuck shit up. But it can be appeased by a regular sacrifice. It needs these specific people to die in a *sort of* specific order. Mostly it doesn’t matter, but the “whore” has to die first. The other chick, the “virgin” dies last. Or doesn’t have to die. Or just has to think she might die. It seemed kind of ambiguous. (And also slut shaming. For the sake of satire I’ll give that a pass, because the common slasher trope is always that the chick who went to have sex is the first to die.) But things are not going as planned this time around, because people as a rule tend to, you know, try to escape being murdered in these slasher film scenarios.-

•bff girl almost kills stoner guy to save the world
•some kind of hell breaks loose in the lab
•bff girl and stoner guy sit down and smoke a fat one while they wait for the world to end
•shit gets fucked up

Reiteration of assessment:

It tries to do too much in one movie. The idea here is a good one, and I think it highlights the fact that all of the common slasher films and urban legends seem to follow the exact same pattern. Even so…

Also, even though it isn’t really a slasher movie, you still have to watch all of the stuff that would normally be in a slasher movie. So to say it is not a horror movie is only “technically” true. If I were giving a score, this would cost it points.

And to hell with all that zombie bs. I can’t even watch The Walking Dead without serious nightmares. I could barely watch Buffy without nightmares.