The Cabin in the Woods

Whatever you think you know about this movie, be it from trailers or synopses ... you don't.

The whole thing is a giant middle finger to both the state of modern horror films, and we - the audience - who say we want something new, but shun anything that is new.

It's also pretty legitimately scary at parts ... and dear god is it hilarious. If you know Joss Whedon's dialogue, you'll have an inkling of what to expect comedy-wise. There's a hilarious "speakerphone" bit that had everyone in the theater laughing like crazy.

I'm trying to give as little away as possible here, which is why this review is so vague.

In short, I fucking loved it - it reminded me a lot of Evil Dead II, in a very good way.

My only complaint - not enough Amy Acker.

Also, this and Dollhouse have made me an enormous Fran Kranz fan. He's hilarious, and can be quite touching at times (though that might be me thinking about Dollhouse more than this).

All in all, 5 merman-summoning conch shells out of 5.

VAGUE SPOILERS BELOW - I personally recommend that you don't read the following if you haven't seen the movie yet, but it's not a HUGE spoiler.

AGAIN

VAGUE SPOILERS

BELOW

The movie could easily fit in the Buffyverse, if you assume that Acker's character is Illyria in disguise as Fred using a different name, and that Tom Lenk's character is Andrew working with Illyria, again under a different name. And if the organization manipulating things is either Wolfram & Hart or the Initiative, or a merging of the two.

END SPOILERS

Also, I'd like to chime in and say that Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is definitely my favorite of the film series, followed by M:I-3, then the first one.

Fuck M:I-2, though.