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A stoner, a jock, a slut, a nerd, and a Final Girl go on vacation in -- a cabin in the woods!  They find a trapdoor leading to the cabin's cellar, which is filled with strange artifacts.  One of these is a diary and, by reading it, the group unwittingly summons some zombies.  Pretty standard stuff, right?  Well, turns out there's a reason for it (and a reason for stuff like stringy-haired Japanese ghost girls, too).

You see, a bunch of elder gods have been kept slumbering for countless ages by putting on shows for them.  The elder god underneath the cabin, for instance, likes to see a group of five teens who fit the above stereotypes slaughtered by monsters.  To keep him happy, a group (Government?  Cult?  It's never explained.) has set up the cabin and a vast, underground complex where they store various monsters.  Every year, they arrange for the scenario to play out.  Unfortunately for them, the employee in charge of making the stoner's weed extra potent (so as to make it easier for a slower monster, if summoned, to catch him and any of the others who smoke it) accidentally mixed it wrong.  Instead of being super-stoned, the guy becomes super-aware, maybe aware enough to ruin the whole show.  That's bad, because the rituals in other sites have already failed, so ALL of the elder gods have tuned into the one at the cabin, and they'll be p**sed if any one of those darn teenagers gets out alive.

All the above is really just an excuse to set up something else, though.  Can you guess the REAL point of this movie?  Maybe something to do with all those monsters in cages in that underground complex?  A werewolf, a killer robot, a bat creature, a giant snake, zombies, a merman, a soul-sucking ghost, organ-stealing animate scarecrows, a Cenobite, and plenty of other monsters would sure make for an AWESOME climax if they got turned loose.

I can't believe Joss Whedon, of all people, was the one to FINALLY get the self-aware horror movie 100% right, but he and co-writer/director Drew Goddard did it.  This movie hits all the right beats, at all the right times, and knows exactly how seriously to take itself.  Even the redneck zombies' slash-and-stalk of the teens, which is really just a big red-herring, is handled perfectly.  I'd have been pretty satisfied if that was actually the whole movie, in fact.  But then, Whedon and Goddard come up with a way to give us every damned horror movie monster in the book -- and do all of them justice, too, even though individuals only get brief screen time.

Good movie for the Halloween season.

I didn't like it much on my first viewing. Matter of fact I was extremly underwhelmed. When it hit theaters in the U.S. the ratings went through the roof on IMDb, so I went into this with higher expectations than usual, and was kind of left disappointed. The whole movie felt awkward and silly, wasn't scary at all (I guess it wasn't suppose to be?) and reminded me of a reworked and beefed up version of Waxwork.
It did grow on me after repeated viewings, but I don't think it is as amazing as most people make it out to be.

Apparently lots of folks dig this movie. Not me. I couldn't finish watching it because I found it sooooo boring, but to each his own.

an awesome, awesome movie - I like it more each time I watch it

Really enjoyed it, and it is one of the few horror moives I've been able to get Kristi to sit through and actually watch all of (after this one I got her addicted to Tucker & Dale Vs Evil).

I liked this one just fine.  It does explain why all horror movies have the same stereotyped characters.

Love it! The ultimate "meta" horror movie, and it's funny and scary, too!

An absolute hoot!