Wooden

The Cabin in the Woods gave me a case of dueling prejudices. On the one hand, I am given to pre-judging work by Joss Whedon as something I'll probably like quite a bit. His hits (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dr. Horrible and so on) far outweigh his misses (Dollhouse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book).

On the other hand, it's a horror movie and I am given -- with ample precedent -- to pre-judging horror movies as anti-creative trash. On the gripping hand, though, Whedon himself described how he and co-writer and director Drew Goddard saw the movie as a "loving hate letter" to horror movies, giving some hope for something better.

Should have stayed with the second hand. I'll do my best not to spoil Cabin here, although I can't imagine how a movie could proceed more obviously. Five teenagers -- neither their names nor anything else about them matter, since they are fill-in-the-blank archetypes of this kind of movie -- decide to spend a weekend at a spooky cabin in the spooky woods. It's a bad idea. The end. The fact that the preceding description doesn't spoil the movie, even though it explains pretty much everything that happens, demonstrates how paint-by-the-numbers is the Fangoria-bait lineup Whedon wants to critique. Every one of these movies operates in the same pattern, varying it slightly from a spooky cabin to a spooky house to a camping trip, etc. The only variation and the only criteria their fans seem to use for distinguishing them comes from the "creativity" of the characters' painful deaths and the amount of fake blood shown.

Whedon and Goddard wanted to say something about that situation and the further devolution of a genre they enjoy into one that so often focuses on the degradation and humiliation of the characters before their deaths, as in the series of Saw swill. And they mostly do this, even though we might wonder why. After all, Kevin Williamson's original Scream meant to do something similar, and Michael Haneke suggested some of the same ideas back in his 1997 movie Funny Games and his 2008 English-language remake of the same name, and nothing much has changed. People still make movies that position the humiliation and outright torture of human beings as a means of entertainment, despite these movies which want us to ask ourselves questions about that idea.

Sure, Whedon and Goddard are smarter than Williamson and neither as cruel or brutal as Haneke, so Cabin is a step above the earlier work. They still use the same shorthand, though. They suggest we question our ability and desire to be entertained by bloody and senseless slaughter, but they do so by showing bloody and senseless slaughter in a way that's supposed to be entertaining.

I just don't think that tactic will ever make much headway towards re-thinking the degraded horror genre, because the people who wonder whether or not we should be entertained by senseless death are already wondering about it without seeing screaming people terrorized onscreen. I imagine too many of the people who should wonder about it won't take the time while they approve or disapprove of Cabin's merits as a horror movie, then move on to the next "new" release.

By April 2013, another dozen or two independent dead teenager movies will have been made and marketed at horror film festivals around the country, usually released straight to DVD -- although a couple might get a cup of coffee in theaters. Genre fans will eat them up. Most everyone else will ignore them or more likely, not even be aware they exist. And whatever conversation Whedon and Goddard may have wanted to spark will remain unsaid, while Cabin is remembered as a pretty run-of-the-mill kid-slicer movie with a couple of mildly interesting tweaks.