Oh dear! Cabin in the Woods is so bad I hardly know where to begin. The film combines elements of other films such as Night of the Living Dead (the zombies), Saw 2 (cameras hidden in the house). Unfortunately, the execution of this film is nowhere near as good as other films in the same genre.
The biggest issue for me was that the whole film was completely predictable. The use of cheap jump tricks throughout - there wasn't one occasion when I was shocked/scared throughout the entire 95 minutes of the film. This film has clearly just gone for shock value to try and get cheap scares rather than focusing on a well constructed and creepy story.
The dialogue was painfully bad for the majority of the film (particularly the first 15 minutes) which consisted of mostly inane and meaningless conversations between 3 of the protagonists.
Speaking of the protagonists we have 5 walking clichéd 1 dimensional cardboard cut outs Dana (the goody goody virgin) Curt (the jock) Jules (the whore) Holden (the intellectual) and Marty (the stoner/fool). That's about as much as I can say about them as we learn nothing else about them through the rest of the film. This didn't bother me that much as they were all uninteresting characters anyway.
Once our 5 protagonists arrive at the Cabin, we learn that 4 out of the 5 have been marked for death. Jules (the whore) must die first as she is corrupted and the others die by whatever method they have selected for their death. The only one that has the option to live or die is the Virgin, but the director wants the Virgin to live and for the other 4 protagonists to die as part of a ritual sacrifice in order to appease the Gods beneath. The director (in a brief appearance by Sigourney Weaver) tells us that the reason that the protagonists are selected for death is because they are young. I found this to be a bit preposterous and lacking in sense, but I suppose it was at least somewhat original.
As I said in my summary, the most frightening aspect about this film is its current IMDb rating of 7.5. It is a mystery to me why so many people liked this film so much - it has every horror cliché in the book, zero scares, dreadful dialogue. The film seemed to get worse as it went along and the final 15 minutes were just embarrassing. What a waste of 95 minutes!!
The biggest issue for me was that the whole film was completely predictable. The use of cheap jump tricks throughout - there wasn't one occasion when I was shocked/scared throughout the entire 95 minutes of the film. This film has clearly just gone for shock value to try and get cheap scares rather than focusing on a well constructed and creepy story.
The dialogue was painfully bad for the majority of the film (particularly the first 15 minutes) which consisted of mostly inane and meaningless conversations between 3 of the protagonists.
Speaking of the protagonists we have 5 walking clichéd 1 dimensional cardboard cut outs Dana (the goody goody virgin) Curt (the jock) Jules (the whore) Holden (the intellectual) and Marty (the stoner/fool). That's about as much as I can say about them as we learn nothing else about them through the rest of the film. This didn't bother me that much as they were all uninteresting characters anyway.
Once our 5 protagonists arrive at the Cabin, we learn that 4 out of the 5 have been marked for death. Jules (the whore) must die first as she is corrupted and the others die by whatever method they have selected for their death. The only one that has the option to live or die is the Virgin, but the director wants the Virgin to live and for the other 4 protagonists to die as part of a ritual sacrifice in order to appease the Gods beneath. The director (in a brief appearance by Sigourney Weaver) tells us that the reason that the protagonists are selected for death is because they are young. I found this to be a bit preposterous and lacking in sense, but I suppose it was at least somewhat original.
As I said in my summary, the most frightening aspect about this film is its current IMDb rating of 7.5. It is a mystery to me why so many people liked this film so much - it has every horror cliché in the book, zero scares, dreadful dialogue. The film seemed to get worse as it went along and the final 15 minutes were just embarrassing. What a waste of 95 minutes!!