Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson
Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Åkerman, Adam DeVine, Thomas Middleditch
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Had it not been on the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule, I might have missed it entirely.
Did I Like It: The movie was going to have a hard time screwing things up, as I am a sucker for most pieces of meta entertainment, and horror or genre meta entertainment even more so.
Where meta horror movies can sometimes not live up to their ambitions—while still winning me over—is in a question of gravity. The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) (the granddaddy of them all), and even Scream (1996) and its various sequels all can pull apart both their various tropes and the meaning of reality itself, but eventually those films become just another entry in their genre. They are eventually compelled to be the type of movie that they were selling in the first place.
Here, though, there is a surprising amount of pathos in the relationship between Max (Farmiga), and both her late mother (Åkerman) and the character she plays in the Camp Bloodbath movies. Max tries to reconcile both the memory of her mother, the image of her in the film, and her own grief to great effect. This is made all the more poignant when one realizes that Joshua John Miller—one of the film’s two credited screenwriters—is the son of Jason Miller and used his experience of watching his father in The Exorcist (1973) to inform that character arc. This makes the entire affair not merely a commentary on form and genre, but also an example of an artist trying to work through some type of feeling through the art. Very few horror films, even fewer meta horror films, and even fewer horror comedies can lay claim to the same ambition.
What’s more, when the film reaches some degree of catharsis on this element, it is content to go right back to being as meta as possible in its final moments. A supremely satisfying array of choices right at the end for a film that could have been content to be merely amusing.