Listen up, all you Joss Whedon and/or slasher film fans: the fertile minds behind such series as Buffy, Angel, and Firefly have begotten a new flick, baptised The Cabin in the Woods, and if you ask me it’s a masterwork short on neither cheese nor gore.
Ostensibly, the plot rests on a setup which horror movie writers have been flogging since the days when your parents used to go on dates at the drive-in: a handful of holidaying young interlopers unwittingly find themselves on some serial killer’s/Nazi zombies’/cannibalistic mountain men’s territory or hit list, with said monster(s) wasting no time in knocking them off during the night one by one (beginning with any and all sexually active characters, of course!).
However, there’s more to this particular film than meets the eye, and in the interest of not spoiling it for you I’ll merely mention the presence of a frame narrative that’ll blow your mind. Prospective viewers should keep an eye out for random screenings of it at art-house cinemas like Carlton’s Cinema Nova or St Kilda’s The Astor Theatre.
Five stars.
