The Cabin in the Woods: Critic Reviews

Even when all hell breaks loose, that hell is cushioned by air quotes, with the audience buckled up for benign, heady fun.

There is a scholarly, nerdy, completist sensibility at work here that is impressive until it becomes exhausting.

The Cabin in the Woods is a shrewd, ingenious look at the programmatic elements of the genre, a satire that is also a lenient celebration, and it could wind up being a set text in any MA course in horror.

Though there are plot holes in the elaborately concocted scenarios, The Cabin in the Woods gets points for the twists and turns that come along with its sly wickedness.

A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps.

Let's just say that if you like smartly twisted spins on worn-out horror cliches and if you have a strong stomach for flying body parts, put down the newspaper/laptop and go - we'll talk later.

More than anything else, Cabin feels like the endgame of so-called fanboy culture in the way in which it is first and foremost about itself, interested only in a fundamental adherence to rules of its own devising and fenced off from the world at large.

Not all of the twists work, but most are self-knowing enough to keep you guessing until its (literally) groundbreaking conclusion.

Zest counts for a lot, and resonance carries the day.

You needn't be a fanboy to enjoy the moment when the ride really takes off and the spectacle flowers. A scary imagination will do just fine.

And you thought you were just headed for a weekend getaway.

What the movie finally is, then, is a diversion: a reasonably smart and exceptionally well-constructed one. And nothing more.

Is it scary? Not especially. But there are enough gory surprises around every bend to keep you laughing/screaming/cringing.

This is not a perfect movie; it's so ragged, it's practically constructed of loose ends. But it's exciting because it ventures so far off the map.

Whedon and Goddard bake their cake and eat it too.

The climactic one-two punch of special-effects chaos and meta-movie chin stroking should have the fanboys trembling with delight.

Mind blown, hair on fire. Seeing "The Cabin in the Woods" set a new personal benchmark for fiendishly creative takes on genre entertainment.

If you like nutty energy, wacky ideas, crisp dialogue and scary, bloody, gory, grotesque and twisted movies - man, are you going to have a blast this weekend.

"The Cabin in the Woods" is a fantastic poke in the eye of our horror-movie expectations.

An entire row of what they call "fanboys" at the screening I attended laughed all the way through the movie, although I failed to see anything remotely amusing.

Not since Scream has a horror movie subverted the expectations that accompany the genre to such wicked effect as The Cabin in the Woods.

Movies that mean to deconstruct movies seem to be made solely by and for cinema vampires, those ghost-faced geeks whose pallor is rarely challenged by exposure to the sun.