You Found the Wrong Cabin

Okay.  This post is going to be non-stop spoilers.  If you have not seen The Cabin In the Woods and plan to?  You should skip reading this.  The actual focus is a terrible review of the film.

Read more after the jump…

Rex Reed penned a review that is…well…bizarre.  I mean, he gets some basic stuff right, but he makes stuff up whole cloth as well.

A testament to the wonders of writing under the guidance of crystal meth, this nightmare spoof of everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Scream franchise totally defies logic, and pretty much eludes description.

But then he goes on to describe it.  And at first, he seems to be describing something similar to what I watched:

Five college kids take a motor van to a country weekend cabin. Stopping at a crumbling shack on a deserted road to buy gas, they encounter a cretin with rotting teeth and one eye who insults the women and spits tobacco juice at the men like a cross between Yosemite Sam and the winner of a talent show for troglodytes. Just behind the bloodstained glass window stands a barrel of meat hooks.

And then the review goes off the rails crazy:

One by one, the visitors learn the meaning of “gotcha.” Zombies rise from the swamp and eat the sexy chick’s flesh. Vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood. Only the smart girl who reads “Soviet Economic Structures” and the reefer-smoking doofus, so stoned he has to struggle to make complete sentences, manage to survive the monsters crashing through the ceiling, windows and floors.

No zombie flesh eating…there are no vampires who attack the jock.  But that is not where I really wonder about Rex Read’s ability to comprehend things.  No, that is here:

What they fail to notice is the hidden cameras.

Except well..they do notice the cameras.

It’s all part of an elaborate video game that allows paying customers to watch real people slaughtered according to the horror of choice. The five kids in the cabin are innocent pawns to test the mechanics of the game, the way fiends in a horror movie test the sounds of screaming babies as they feed them to the jaws of mutated crocodiles.

This is where there is a rapid and fundamental misunderstanding of the plot at hand.  He described something that kind of resembles the film… and he keeps going down that rabbit hole:

The game, like the movie, is a meaningless absurdity. If it sells, people with a passion for gore can experience real terror while the players are shredded, one by one. What the game testers didn’t count on was luring a pair of victims smart enough to outwit them. The game ends only if the virgin survives. Somehow miraculously managing to figure it all out, the stoner and the brainy girl (who is also a virgin) crawl into a grave and get to the other side of the “ritual.”

See, it is not a game.  It is not for “people”.  No, it is ritual human sacrifice refined through the centuries by a shadowy organization who have distilled it down to a simple program.  The viewers in the scenario are ancient gods (think H.P. Lovecraft) who are being appeased by the sacrifices.   Oh yeah…the brainy girl is not actually a virgin.  The film spells this out when she finds out she was the virgin… and The Director explains that they work with what they have.

The dismissive air of stuff like:

Maybe that’s why 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. I doubt if these people even know who Sigourney Weaver is.

certainly does not help sell his argument.  The entirely article is short sighted, full of factual errors and general condescention.  It pretty much fails on any level of  reasonable criticism.