Cabin in the Woods Review (2012)

It's been a while since I've seen this movie and even longer since it came out (if you couldn't tell from the picture above), but I thought I might as well review this.

My friend Chris Frank got me interested in this movie and the reviews were pretty solid.  We could see it as a matinee and we didn't have a whole lot going on so I thought, what the hell.  Despite liking horror movies in general I was burned several times by seeing a movie in the theatre I didn't know a ton about.  I was half way expecting this... and I was wrong.

At first it looks like it might be an Evil Dead rip off, with some odd sequences with people talking in a base or an office.  Eventually the events start to unravel and you see how huge the story actually is.  A group of college students go up to The Cabin in the Woods (tm) that one of their cousins' owns.  They end up fighting for their lives against a resurrected family of hillbilly zombies.

Now the other half of this story is that they are being watched by a group of what we guess are government scientists.  This is all part of an experiment and that their decisions are influenced by a combination of people working for the government setting them up and having drugs unknowingly administered to them to alter their personalities.  One of the best themes in the movie is that one of the students is immune to the drugs (the reason why is awesome) and critiques their decision making and notes their personality changes.

The situation devolves and the students start getting killed by these zombies they accidentally resurrected.  Eventually they unravel part of the mystery and descend into the government facility below the cabin (after some futile escape attempts). 

SPOILERS AHEAD

Okay... with that out of the way, I wanted to let those who wish to know what the whole story is.  I won't give away the ending, but the bigger story is done a disservice if you think that the whole movie is only about zombie hillbillies.  Apparently they have every horrific and supernatural being that you can think of below the cabin in the facility.  It's all part of a plan to appease some old school Lovecraftian gods.  They have to use creatures from our deepest darkest nightmares to appease these gods.  Everything from a giant cobra, to a killer clown, to scarecrows, to a cenobite rip off... I mean anything and everything you could think of from horror that's not copyrighted is down there.  And they all get out and go on a killing spree all at once.  It's one of the best horror/action sequences I've ever seen.  This alone is worth the price of admission.

SPOILERS DONE

The movie has a lot of tongue and cheek moments.  It does not take itself seriously, but the horrific parts it plays more or less straight forward. Only when things go nuts at the end of the movie do they stop playing the horror aspects too seriously.  This a good one for horror fans and I feel it could branch out to those interested in other genres do to it's semi comedic nature.  There's a lot of gore and killing and when you think the movie's done... it's not. 

8.5 out of 10 unicorn stabbings...