Since the opening scene of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon has defined himself by his revolutionary thoughts that challenge and undermine genre conventions. In the aforementioned scene, a typical 'guy takes helpless girl on a date to an abandoned building (in this case the school), then turns out to be evil and kills her' situation seems to be taking place. However, it is then revealed that the girl is actually a badass vampire, and she turns around and kills the guy, making him the helpless one, and her the powerful one. This scene did something that hadn't been done before, and challenged the notion of the 'helpless, damsel in distress' stereotype that was pervasive in fiction at the time; the scene then paved the way for a wave of new, much less mysogynistic texts.
Cabin in the Woods attempts to do something similar by undermining the cliched genre of the horror movie. However, while his thoughts in Buffy were new and revolutionary, the comments that he makes in Cabin in the Woods are far from new or unique; he mocks the exact same conventions that have been mocked many, many times by now. From "the virgin dies last, or is the only survivor", to "the first girl to have sex is the first to die, and she usually does so topless", the cliches that Whedon mocks are ones that are already widely recognized as being flawed. In fact, an entire 4-part (soon to be 5-part) parody series entitled "Scary Movie" has been designed specifically to poke fun at these exact same conventions, and has seen quite a bit of success.
So, although Whedon does successfully manage to question genre conventions, he is hardly doing anything new: he's simply asking the same questions that have been asked by a large number of people for a long period of time. He also is hardly witty about a lot of his parody: although the idea of the 'corporation' that uses drugs and technology to set up the perfect horror movie is a really good concept that brings the metatheatricality to the forefront and provides a lot of humor, the film's "ritual" element is a little too blunt and uninteresting to add any value. The 'ancient engravings' of the horror movie archetypes, and Sigourney Weaver's textbook-like explanation of the cliches that they represent are a bit too anvilicious (in other words: so in-your-face, it's like they dropped an anvil on your head saying "hey, look at us! We're parodying horror movie archetypes!").
Don't get me wrong- I had a good time, and enjoyed watching the movie for the most part. The elevators releasing untold evils was pretty awesome, the whole meta-theatricality of the 'organization', and the dialogue (which is by now known as Whedon's specialty) was witty and impressive. Overall, the film was enjoyable. My main issue is simply the fact that Joss Whedon acts like he's saying something new or interesting, when he's really just repeating the same argument that's been made for years, and in the case of the 'ritual', he's doing so in an overly straightforward, dull way. Between the previews and the involvement of Joss Whedon, I simply expected something more groundbreaking.
The end of the film, however, was very nice, and very typical "Whedon". The sudden nature of the ending, combined with the lack of any semblance of closure leaves the audience with a very "unfinished" feeling that is fresh, unique and enjoyable in a time where most movies feel the need to have unambiguous, fulfilling endings. The way the movie ends brings up memories of the last episode of "Angel" in the mood it creates, and for that I was very pleased.
