Summer Wrap-up (Spider-Man and Batman)

A dramatic re-enactment of this post

It's been two and a half months since my last update. Lots of stuff has happened in my life during the summer (a trip to Malta and being approved for college, for example), but I've only seen two movies in the cinema. I didn't write reviews because the first one I saw was so bad I couldn't make myself review it, and then I felt like I couldn't review the second until I'd reviewed the first.

To catch up and get started with the autumn season, here's my thoughts on them:

The Amazing Spider-Man:

A wretched pile of shit, and the worst kind of superhero movie. The Amazing Spider-Man is a tale of Peter Parker as you've never seen him before: a bland non-character with no defining traits, whose role in the story and overall personality are whatever the writer feels like making them at any given moment. His stalker-crush Gwen Stacy falls in love with him for no adequate reason, other than because [insert your own Twilight comparison here].

The Lizard looks like crap and has motives almost as vaguely explored as Peter's. The story is bloated with way too many subplots, some of which never get any kind of resolution since this is assured to get a sequel due to the presence of Spider-Man in the title. Awkward pacing and dialogue, lame performances and so-so action scenes finish the unholy combination of elements which make up a movie that manages to only be the second-worst film I've seen this year because I happened to see This Means War.

Also, Peter Parker skateboards. Seriously, fuck this movie. Seeing Spider-Man raped like this, I can finally understand people who get really personally upset about Michael Bay's Transformers.

The Dark Knight Rises:

A worthy, if a bit shoddy, end to the trilogy, with surprisingly large ties to the Batman comics which the previous two movies seemed to be afraid of associating themselves with. The villains work damn well, the directing and dialogue are awesome, and the music is fantastic. The film drags a lot, though: it feels like it's two scripts mashed into one.

There are some minor plot holes that I only realised afterwards, and Batman still sounds really funny. The final twist about Bane is really unnecessary, and seems to only exist to please comic nerds. It was a really poor choice to undermine the climax of the film with that move. I really liked the ending, even if it was a bit cheesy and predictable.

Batman Begins ends up being my favourite of this series, because I really liked the Gotham in it, and it felt the most like a Batman movie.

The Avengers was my favourite superhero film of the summer, but it's such a different movie than The Dark Knight Rises that I don't think you can really compare them on any objective level. Apples and oranges.

Snow White and the Huntsman (rant)

I'm a bit late on this one, but I guess it's better late than never. As far as I know, the general word on the street about this movie is that it's "not as bad as it seems". I respectfully disagree.

Well, not so respectfully. By the way, this review is going to be considerably more spoilery than what I usually write, so if you possibly believe your "enjoyment" will be hampered by knowing plot details, turn back now. Know, though, that I have little positive to say about the movie.

Snow White and the Huntsman is damn bad. Really bad. Laughably bad. It's a two-hour fantasy spectacle with next to nothing fantastical or spectacular about it, with some of the worst casting I've ever seen in my life. I don't think I've ever before complained about casting as a part of a movie. Sure, I've done it about individual characters, but never as a whole. I don't think there's a single character in this film who's cast well.

Where do I start? The name of the film is completely misleading. Did you know that the Prince Charming character still exists in this retelling? There's actually a love triangle. The huntsman (who is never given another name in the film, in some sort of attempt at "deep and meaningful"), played by Chris Hemsworth, is really arbitrary to the movie. His relationship with Snow White is barely developed at all, and in the end he just leaves when she's crowned Queen.

Snow White (Kristen Stewart) herself is one of the blandest, least interesting heroines I've seen in a movie in a long time. Her character is so inconsistent it's almost impossible to name any sort of qualities about her personality. They try to paint her as the Super-Good Holy Mega-Pure Maiden of Destiny, but she doesn't really come off as especially pure in spirit at all. She acts like any person who's being first imprisoned and then pursued. Later, before the laughably bad action finale, she suddenly becomes this fierce military leader just because, with no kind of explanation other than "it's her destiny to win". If you're trying to go for the Pure Maiden Who Can Ride the Unicorn and Is Flocked Around By Animals archetype, you are not allowed to make that character a military leader who rides a horse into battle and swings a sword to kill people. Read The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren sometime. In it, the characters discuss this dilemma.

The Queen (Charlize Theron) is one of the few enjoyable things about the movie, in the same sense that Bruce Payne is the most enjoyable thing about Dungeons and Dragons (playing the respectful role of That Blue-Lipped Guy): she is unintentionally hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing almost every time she was on-screen. The completely original character of the Queen's brother Finn is also really funny, which is partly because the character isn't the least bit threatening and partly because he sports the funniest haircut I've ever seen. That hairdo is so silly that there are no pictures of it online. I guess the actor demanded to be kept out of the marketing.

After Snow White escapes into the forest, the bad guys hire the Huntsman to track her. He immediately chooses to save her instead and they run from one horribad action scene to another. The movie tries to justify the Huntsman's presence by saying that he is the only man who has ever went to the Black Forest and returned. Yet, when he guides the villains into the forest, he basically just says: "Wait here, I'll go get her." And then he follows her tracks and finds her nearby. The Queen's men didn't need him at all, it seems, because it's later established they have a tracker of their own. The titular characters then escape through the forest and find this hidden village. The Queen's minions show up there within hours. They followed the heroes' tracks through the forest? I thought only the Huntsman was able to navigate through! Why do you lie to me, movie?

To skip ahead a bit, there's the part with the apple about half an hour before the end. It's established that Snow White is the only one who can kill the Queen, and the Queen can gain eternal youth by killing Snow White. So she poisons the girl and then proceeds to incredibly slowly drain her soul or whatever. The other good guys show up, and the Queen flees. Why? They can't kill her! The only person in the world who can kill her is comatose in the ground! JUST KILL HER FRIENDS AND THEN TAKE YOUR TIME IN FULFILLING YOUR PLANS! AAAARGHBAGFHG!

So here's the very short list of good things: I kinda like the concept of women committing self-mutilation to stay under the Queen's "fairness radar". That was clever, and actually carried dark ideas that could have been explored more if the movie wasn't preoccupied with trying to be super-hip for the young-uns or whatnot. Secondly, the visuals for the fairy forest are initially really cool, and I like the design of most of the stuff. Though that changes quickly with some of the worst CGI magpies I've ever seen. They look like something out of a 90s educational feature with a special effects budget of fuck all. Thirdly, the Queen's glass-shard minion would have been really cool if basically all of its screen-time hadn't been in the trailers already (and if it wasn't basically stolen from Medi-Evil).

It's just a really bland and dumb movie. I only got this upset about it in retrospect, when I realised it had initially fooled me into thinking it was average. Don't go see Snow White and the Huntsman. It has horrible performances (both bland and overblown in nature), incredibly large plot holes, very weak drama and suspense, and insults the intelligence of its audience.

Also, there's eight dwarves. Why?

Prometheus

Welcome back to Sci-fi (and horror, I guess), Ridley Scott! We missed you very much!

Prometheus is a prequel to 1979's Alien, though only in the sense that it's set in the same universe. Don't expect facehuggers and chestbursters, or for Ellen Ripley to show up. The film is intimately tied with the Alien mythos, but still works as a standalone story. The best thing is that it completely and utterly exiles the two Alien vs. Predator films from continuity by giving Wayland Industries an origin that's completely inconsistent with the one told in them. Yaaaay.

In the late 21st century, an archeologist couple find cave paintings from Scotland and compare them with carvings and pictures from half a dozen other parts of the world. All seem to depict the same constellation in the sky, along with Ancient Astronaut fuel. Wayland Industries funds a trillion-dollar expedition to an Earth-like moon revolving around a planet found near one of these depicted stars, with the belief that humanity's creators ("Architects") can be found there. After a few years of stasis, the crew wakes up and sets to explore this world, but the scientists discover that the company may have ulterior motives for funding the trip...

The film has a really interesting cast of characters, aside from a couple of extras with no lines, who are kind of distracting because they don't show up for most of the movie and when they do, you've most likely forgotten them. The main characters are really memorable, though. You've got the archeologist couple (played by Logan Marshall-Green and Noomi Rapace), who are kind of naïve and optimistic, which is why the most horrible things happen to them. Charlize Theron plays the cold-hearted Wayland representative, while Michael Fassbender does a stunning job as David, the Synthetic crew-member.

Prometheus is a horror movie, but thankfully doesn't have many jump scares. It's the atmosphere of desolation and uncertain doom that hangs over the setting that makes it eerie. What made Alien so scary in the first place was how, well, alien the threat was. Over time, we've learned exactly how Xenomorphs work, which is why they work better for action than horror nowadays. Prometheus throws a curve ball by featuring original monsters that work by their own rules. I really hope that other directors take a hint and start relying more on this kind of horror instead of cheap scares.

The design for the movie is great, with fantastic sets, props and costumes. It's obvious the creative team has spent a lot of time thinking about how everything works on the spaceship and the alien structures the crew explores. Not all of it is crammed in as exposition, mind you. The film raises way more questions than it answers, and it deliberately mysterious regarding things such as whether David has real emotions and many things about the aliens.

Prometheus isn't perfect, though. There's one action scene near the end which feels like it's taken from a completely different movie, the dialogue has some really awkward moments (most of them with Theron's character), and the film maybe goes a bit too fast near the end and doesn't stop to catch its breath before the climax. Also, pointless 3D that adds nothing. Oh, and the trailer spoils a huge detail about the film. If you've managed to either avoid the trailer or forget it, don't watch it!

Nevertheless, I really recommend it. This is the perfect way to pitch an original sci-fi movie to Hollywood today: have it be tangentially related to a really famous film for marketing purposes, but have the main plot be completely standalone. I've heard talks about Prometheus 2 being a possibility, and I'm kinda torn about that. In my opinion, the Alien saga can end here, but if they can think of a really good plot for another picture... why not?

(Mini-review) A Dangerous Method

Characters in reverse order of importance.

Hey kids! Do you like David Cronenberg? (The correct answer is yes.) Do you like Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen? (Also yes.) Do you like Keira Knightley? (Ehh...) Do you think psychology is interesting? (Hell no.) Whatever answers you gave, maybe you ought to go see A Dangerous Method.

It's a movie about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein (Fassbender, Mortensen and Knightley, respectively), whose personalities clash all over early 20th century Europe. Friendships turn to rivalry, sharing of thoughts becomes theft of ideas, and love is tainted by envy and guilt. Deep discussions about sexuality, the nature of science, Wagner, and ethics are had.

The actors are fantastic. I never knew Keira Knightley had this much range, and Fassbender is quickly climbing his way up among my favourite contemporary actors. Mortensen is almost unrecogniseable from Lord of the Rings, but damn he does a good Freud. He's like this passive-aggressive douchebag father figure, and I found it very easy to relate whenever Jung ranted about how obnoxious the man is.

The film's weak part is the editing and story structure. There's way too few characters, in my opinion. We don't really see the psychologists interact with that many patients, so in the end they talk about psychotherapy way more than they actually practice psychotherapy. The transitions from scene to scene are way too sudden, and sometimes it'd hard to keep track where the characters are, currently, and how long it's been since the last scene.

What else... it's got beautiful scenery and really good Wagner-inspired music. Not much else to say than that. It's an artsy movie, and yet, I think it may be David Cronenberg's most mainstream production since The Fly. By the way, Cronenberg, I'm sorely disappointed by the lack of psychedelic mindfuck dream sequences in this film. Even Dead Ringers had one. Don't be afraid to be you!

My Top Ten Guilty Pleasure Films

My first top ten list on this blog! Are you excited? I sure am. I'm sick with Angina, and at points have a hard time sitting upright. At least I have a lot of time to make up for not seeing any films in two weeks.

I've seen a lot of different takes on the concept of a "guilty pleasure", so I'm going to clarify what I mean by it before we go into the list: my guilty pleasures are things that I unironically enjoy, but I'm intellectually aware that they're shit. Stuff that I can't deny loving, but which makes me feel like a tasteless bozo for liking at all. In comparison, Dungeons and Dragons (2000) is my favourite bad film of all time, but I enjoy it for its shittiness, and therefore have no reason to feel guilty about it. So camp classics won't appear on this list.

But without further ado, let's get this party started. It's time for the ten worst pieces of shit that I like for no adequate reason...

"Special Edition" does not, in fact
mean that this box contains the
good cut of the movie.

#10 -The Theatrical Cut of Kingdom of Heaven:


That is to say, the version you've most probably seen. The Director's Cut is three hours and ten minutes, and contains whole subplots that were cut by executives from the film. However, we're not here to talk about that awesome movie. We're here to talk about silly, stupid Theatrical Kingdom of Heaven, disowned by Ridley Scott himself.

I'm a sucker for historical action movies. I'm an avid history geek myself (though I tend to focus too much on the awesome parts instead of the boring parts, which is why I'm far from a perfect history student). Gladiator was my favourite movie ever when I was twelve (yeah, I cried at the ending). Then came along Kingdom of Heaven. It's a movie about how Legolas becomes a crusader and somehow becomes a master swordsman after one lesson. Then the princess of Jerusalem falls in love with him and they boink each other out of wedlock, and a bunch of stuff happens and he's like: "Dudes! Religion is the cause of all this suffering! You should all be secular humanists like I am! This is totally befitting to a story about the 12th century!"

The complete and utter raping of medieval history to make a political statement is excused in the director's cut by having actual interesting character arcs and giving it all increased weight by showing more of what the characters are going through. The theatrical cut removed a lot of scenes that were important to understanding who Legolas is and what drives him, but it didn't take away those where Legolas is like: "I don't see a difference between the Muslim prayer and our prayer."

And yeah, I eat this shit up. It's such a completely goofy no-brainer story with great costumes and sets and Jeremy Irons and Ed Norton and huge action scenes. Also, two actors from Game of Thrones are in it (Jaime Lannister is the Sheriff who tries to arrest Balian early on in the movie, and Jorah Mormont is King Richard the Lionheart).



#9, #8 and #7: The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy:

I think these movies get way more shit than they deserve. Still, I've got to admit... not terribly good. They're confused about which demographic they want to sell themselves to (especially Episode 1), have piss-poor cinematography outside of action scenes (especially Episode 3) and horrible story-choking subplots (especially Episode 2). A lot of the hate toward them is from entitled nerds who won't accept anything less than the golden image they've constructed in their mind of the nostalgic Star Wars of ages past.


I was nine years old when Episode 1 came out, and I saw it in the cinema with my big brother. It's my first memory of going to the movies. Can't help but have a fondness for that. Yeah, I'm just as guilty of nostalgia as the people I just spoke of. Though I've at least grown out of blindly defending the prequels.

They aren't bad movies, but they do have a lot of flaws I'm way more willing to tolerate than I should be.



#6: Alien Resurrection:

My father insists that this is the best Alien movie ever. I...  disagree. It's a complete mess, because the scriptwriter wanted to make it a satire of the whole franchise, the director was aiming for a really sick Cronenberg-style body horror film (the human-alien hybrid at the end was a hermaphrodite with visible genitalia of both genders until they were edited out in post-production), and the executives once again stepped on the whole project and demanded that it be a straightforward action flick.

The only real saving grace is that they managed to get Sigourney Weaver into the film. Also, Ron Perlman at his dullest. Yay! After the aliens break free, it's a sci-fi dungeon crawl: the heroes go one room forward, they fight some aliens, one of them dies, repeat ad infinitum. Maybe it's because I watched it so many times as a kid, but I like it. This was the first time that all the clichés of the franchise clicked into place and created the formula that writers have still been unable to escape. Here's to hoping Prometheus will give me no cause for guilt.



#5: National Treasure (2): The Book of Mysteries:

I feel no guilt for liking the first National Treasure movie. It's a cool little adventure hunt with Nicolas Cage... admittedly not at his most enjoyable. It had the "we have to steal the Declaration of Independence" thing that they could advertise without spoiling half the movie, because that was only the first step toward the treasure. I really like that, because I hate trailers giving away too much. The ending was kind of bleh, but it would have been fine if they'd left it at that. It did have Sean Bean, though, in one of his extremely rare roles where he doesn't die.

Book of Mysteries is a model example of what I like to call "a lazy, goddamn sequel". The (really bad) love subplot? Brought back to square one in between movies. All that money they made? It got stolen away by the taxman! All that fame they got? The villain is slandering them! Seriously, every aspect of the script is written to make sure that it starts with no real kind of continuity to the last movie, aside from a couple of offhand mentions, because the writer didn't want to make an excuse for why a bunch of happily married billionaires are going on a treasure hunt.

Even within itself, the sequel makes no sense. Does the villain really need Nicolas Cage's treasure-hunting wits so much that he's willing to launch a huge mudslinging campaign against one of his ancestors and telling him that the only way to disprove the accusations is to find the treasure? Do Nicolas Cage and his dad really care so much for their ancestor's good name that they're willing to go to all these lengths to clean it? It's idiotic, but I kinda prefer it to Temple of Doom.

Unlike Temple of Doom, it has Nicolas Cage acting like a drunk Brit. No George Lucas movie will ever top that.



#4: Alien 3:

Yes, more Alien. This was David Fincher's first movie. Boy, has he come a long way. Though interestingly enough, you can see some of his later trademarks this early, such as the effective use of weather for mood purposes. The production of the film was a complete mess, with directors and scripts being exchanged every other day. In one version of the film, Ripley was going to crash-land on a forest planet populated by Space Monks instead of crash-landing in a junk planet populated by Space Prisoners.

But anyways. It's a shitty movie where almost nothing happens. The characters spend most of the film talking about nonsense, and when the Alien does start killing inmates, we don't know anything about their personalities and have no real reason to care for them. Well, except for one of the first victims, Ripley's love interest... wait, is that Charles Dance? Holy shit, Charles Dance is in this movie! He used to be so young, once.

But anyways, I can't help but have an affection for this shit. By all logic, I should be bored out of my mind by two hours of admiring good cinematography and cool sets, but I guess I just have a weak spot for Alien.

By the way, isn't it just ironic that by the time they released this film on DVD, David Fincher had gotten so famous he could just refuse to participate in making an extended cut? They only brought him into the movie in the first place because he was a newbie and they'd run out of famous people to ask for.



#3: Alien vs. Predator: Reqiuem:

Now we're starting to reach the bottom of the barrel.  Yeah, another Alien movie, this one infinitely worse than the previous two. The first Alien vs. Predator was merely lame and formulaic. Its sequel is gut-wrenchingly bad. It does the worst possible thing an Alien, Predator or Alien vs. Predator movie could do: it takes place in modern Earth, in a completely mundane location, and has the trappings of a teen slasher movie.

Ridley Scott's Alien isn't really in the top of my favourite films of all time, but it did teach us one really important lesson: If you want your alien horror movie to have any kind of dignity, you have to base it in space, because "alien menace terrorises the countryside" is such a 50s genre that no one will take it seriously. AVP2 disregards the wisdom of RIDLEY FUCKING SCOTT and has the movie be about this teenage boy who has a crush on this girl but there's this bully who throws his keys into the sewer and he has a brother who just got back from the prison and then the girl invites him for a late-night swim and does a striptease and OMIGODALIENS!

Oh, and there's a predator in there too.

I have no freaking idea why I like this film. When I saw it for the first time in the cinema, I somehow managed to convince myself it was good. It gets extra points for somehow tricking me into that conclusion. Even when I watched it for a second time, I was like: "Well... it wasn't that good, but I still liked it..."



#2: The Patriot:

So yeah, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, is Braveheart, except about the United Statesian War of Independence. It's not nearly as bad a movie as AVP2, but it goes higher on my list because I usually loathe patriotic shit like this. Especially when it's a Yank circle-jerk (ironically directed by a German and starring an Aussie). It couldn't be a worse whitewash of history, or a worse libel toward Brits everywhere, if they gave Jason Isaacs horns!

But goddammit, it's one of my favourites. I'm a sucker for stories where an underdog faction wins a war through guerrilla means, and goddammit, The Patriot delivers! Even the dumbass, creepy love subplot between the protagonist and his sister-in-law somehow manages to have some kind of emotional resonance on me, and when Heath Ledger dies (uh... Heath Ledger's character dies), I can only say: "It's on now!"



#1: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children:

Over an hour of buildup to one big fight scene, where nobody else except Cloud gets to contribute, and Sephiroth has been reduced to this kind of dumb brute whose only real purpose is to make his gay crush kneel before him. Characters who died in the game are brought back with little to no explanation, the protagonist is an emo bitch, only one cool location from the source material is featured, and most of the original locations are dull gray and brown.

That's Advent Children for you. Me? I love it. If you hate it, I can totally see why. FF7 isn't even near to being my favourite game in the franchise, and I don't have any kind of special attachment to these characters, so that seeing them in a movie would make it all worth to me. There's some some kind of inexplicable appeal in this film for me. There's nothing more shameful for me than liking shit like this without even being able to explain how.

And then there's Advent Children Complete, which makes the movie a third of an hour longer. Of those twenty minutes, exactly one is anything worthwhile. Most of it is crap about Denzel, that freaking annoying orphan boy who's even more emo than Cloud. And somehow, I've managed to convince myself that the extended version is better than the regular cut.

I should have higher standards than this.

The Avengers

The huge crossover film which the Marvel movie continuity has been building up to, The Avengers is a Joss Whedon blockbuster about Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaming up to fight Thor's evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is poised to take over Earth. However, "teaming up" is easier said that done, and Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to do a lot of managing to keep the team from tearing itself apart before Loki and his allies from another dimension can.

Finally, we get a movie that depicts superhero comics accurately: you need to know the central characters and premises of about half a dozen different stories to understand anything that's going on. Yay!

I was kind of wary about this film because of two things: The trailers mostly focused on a huge metropolitan battle that was cut so that it looked like it was taken right out of Transformers 3, as well as Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing, which I feel is starting to get old. Well, screw marketing, because once again it has done a great job at making a good movie look bad. Not only is that action scene they hyped way better when you don't have to butcher it to keep the invading army from appearing on screen, but they picked the worst jokes in the movie for their adverts. Not only does Downey get a lot of good lines, but everyone does. There's a surprising lot of comedy, and every character gets to crack jokes, not just the clown.

Thor and Captain America both had pacing as their biggest issue. Cap had way too little stuff happen in between his becoming a superhero and the final battle. Thor took its sweet time starting, and then had way too much build-up to a way too small climax. Avengers gets this just right. We already know these characters, there's no need to establish them any more. Let's just start off with the crisis presenting itself, then get the characters together, and then see what we can make happen with them. I'll admit I was getting worried about a quarter way in that the movie is going to suffer from having too many subplots, but thankfully most of them are resolved by the way the final action climax hits home. The movie is two hours and a third, but it accomplishes so much that you'll swear there's no way they fit all that in one hundred and forty minutes.

The performances are really good. I never saw Ed Norton's Hulk for comparison, but Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic Bruce Banner. He has the body language of a person who's trying really hard to keep themselves in check. All the returning cast keep up the high quality up, but to my surprise the standout star of the film was Tom Hiddleston. I was kind of indifferent toward Loki in Thor, because he was way too obviously evil but they tried to play him as this tragic character. Here, he's past being sympathetic, so Hiddleston gets to be a straight-up villain, and it works greatly. He does his slimy villain speeches, he addresses the people he wants to rule, he gets arrogant and he gets furious. It's just a really good basic evil villain, who is still kept fresh with expert writing.

The action is really well-done. All the characters get to shine, and their individual superpowers are used well together and never conveniently discarded to fit a scene better. The big battle scenes flow well, and you can keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. There's this really great sweeping battle shot that I can't really describe to you all: it has to be seen to be believed. I think that Loki's evil army allies are maybe a little bit too... Stormtroopery, though at least unlike Stormtroopers, they don't get taken down by teddy bears (who would be the New York police department in this allegory, I guess).

The 3D was... okay, I guess. There was one scene early on where I had trouble telling what was happening because it was so dark, but other than that I was never bothered. There were a couple of cool 3D shots, mostly having to do with Hawkeye's crazy arrow skills, but I doubt you'll be missing much if you see it in regular 2D.

Overall, it's just a damn good film, with a tightly packed and well-crafted plot, lots of interesting and memorable characters, some good humour, great action and superhero goodness. Dark Knight Rising has to work its ass off to surpass this for the best superhero film of the summer.

The Cabin in the Woods

This is gonna be a tough one to review, because I honestly don't want to spoil anything. I went into this movie without so much as having seen a trailer. I knew from other sources that it's a Joss Whedon film, that twists are a huge part of it, and that it's about a cabin in the woods. Honestly, I think it benefited me to go in blind. If you have seen the trailers, you can probably tell whether you'll like it or not. If you haven't, please don't watch them.

You know, I think I have to confess right here and now that I this is the first Joss Whedon product I've seen. Well, aside from the ones he co-wrote (Titan A.E., Speed, Captain America) or originally wrote but had his script basically rewritten entirely (Alien Resurrection). I have a bunch of friends who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously, though, so... whatever.

So, Cabin in the Woods is about five teenagers (played by Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz and Jesse Williams) who go to the countryside for a camping trip. While there, they awaken something evil, which tries to kill them... but all is not as it seems.

Yeah, that's all you're going to get from me.

As you might have guessed, Cabin is a parody of horror films. It even becomes a satire at points. However, its particular brand of satire never has the characters be meta-aware. Scary movies are never mentioned in the film, and the heroes never say "This is like a crappy horror movie!" only to have the film follow the conventions anyhow. I can see why some people have criticised it for being less clever than it thinks it is, but I really liked the humour here, and the third act is so completely out of control, I'm not sure if it's awesome in a hilarious or badass way.

The actors all do a great job, though Kranz's take on "the stoner" is especially memorable. I think that the other character pool, whose existence is a spoiler, is a little bit too excessive. They could have done it with fewer people there, but it's not really a flaw that hurts the overall product much. The special effects are fantastic. There are a few too many jump scares, in my opinion. If you're going to assault and destroy one overused convention from modern horror, then please kill jump scares.

Anyways, I think it's a fine, fine film. I dunno if I can call it game-changing, visionary or masterful, but I really liked it. Please keep this pace up, Joss Whedon, as The Avengers gets nearer and nearer.