Point-By-Point: Cabin in the Woods 7/10

I know this was critically acclaimed and my dear co-author on this blog called this is "favorite movie [not film] of 2012", but I have to say: I just didn't think it lived up to the hype. It was good, shiny and well-done; it just didn't didn't have the "wow" factor I was expecting.

The Good: 
Unicorns and mermen and neato fantasy baddies of all kinds! Really, I would watch an entire movie just based around exploring all the holding cages in the elevator cube scene. This would be a far prettier, trippier movie.

I also really liked most of the characters. Joss Whedon does a very good job of making douchey archetype characters at least marginally charming, and he had fun with a lot of the stereotypes in this. Not many of them were given much to work with, but they're fun while they last. Fran Kranz (who was really the adhesive who held Dollhouse together and who deserves more chewy roles) and Richard "Master of the Deadpan" Jenkins are wonderful.

I love movies without happy endings.

Mise en scene FTW!

The Bad:
It's very rare that I say this about a horror movie, but I actually wanted this to be longer. The whole thing just felt really perfunctory and edited-down. I feel like that was, perhaps, a dig at the cookie-cutter nature of horror movies. but even the denouement felt like there was something missing, something that got left on the cutting room floor, which ended up looking less like self-aware snark and more like a let-down.

Movies that take glee in causing pain give me a terrible taste in my mouth. It's a philosophical thing. I hated Kick-Ass and Dodgeball for the same reason. I realize that in this case, that's kind of the point of the movie -- turning torture and death into a corporate game too banal to even be looked on as sadistic; it's just hard to find it fun from an audience perspective. All the wink-wink, nudge-nudge generally makes me feel dirty and a little sick.

I wanted to see the Old Ones! The Lovecraft nerd in me was piqued!

I'm sure there's some super-deep meaning behind making the only non-white person in the movie the ONE person with a sense of morality/disgust... but honestly, I don't care enough to really tease that out.

The Ugly:

You're welcome.

Points Pondered: 

• Characters alternately talk about getting calls frum "upstairs" and "downstairs". The Old Ones are "downstairs", it's assumed, but I'd like to see this company's org structure! 
• Further, I feel like this movie was intended as some kind of veiled Office Space-esque take-down of corporate wickedness and consumer society: rich, bored fat-cats gambling on the fact that they have an endless supply of kids lining up to kill themselves for their product. Only the counterculture nerd sees through it. Is this a valid reading?
• If the whole idea is that you need a Scholar, Athlete, Slut, Fool and Virgin, what's up with the classroom of Japanese schoolgirls? 
• Who's Kevin?