After three years of sitting on the shelf, "The Cabin in the Woods" finally hits theaters on Friday. Spoiler alert No. 1: the horror film is more than just a cabin-in-the-woods thriller. Spoiler alert No. 2: don't read the negative-nelly reviews posted by the Village Voice and the New York Observer, lest you want to be spoiled.
Warning: Here come the "Cabin in the Woods" spoilers.
"At the end of 'The Cabin in the Woods,' the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate -- an actual hand, mind you -- yet that is not a spoiler, not really," writes Mark Olsen of the Voice in the first sentence of his review, apparently unaware that giving away the ending of a movie counts as a spoiler.
Venerable curmudgeon Rex Reed doesn't go as far as Olsen for the Observer, but does offer a spoiler-y plot summary that manages to ruin some of the film's twist ... while also being wrong:
The rooms are all being monitored on a wall of video screens in some kind of remote science lab where an army of scientists like the security teams in Russian attack movies shift the course of the game with switches, including one labeled “Zombie Redneck Torture Family,” conjuring fresh hordes of killers from childhood nightmares to rise from their graves and gnaw, stab and mutilate the screaming victims. 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 "elaborate video game" that Reed references? It doesn't exist. Good job otherwise, Rex!
"It just takes away the fun," co-star Richard Jenkins told HuffPost Entertainment about spoilers. "Even now, I read stuff that's giving away much too much."
That may be true, but director Drew Goddard told HuffPost that "Woods" isn't all about its shocker concept.
"I didn't design 'Cabin' to be about any one twist," he said before SXSW -- and before the film's twist starting getting spilled online. "It's not a movie where I tell you one thing and it'll ruin the movie. I always say 'Cabin' is more about escalation than it is about twists. It's more about, 'You're not going to believe where we go,' rather than, 'Oh, you're not going to see it coming.'"
Unless you read the reviews written by Mark Olsen and Rex Reed.
"The Cabin in the Woods" is in theaters on Friday.
[via NYO and Village Voice]