Youth will be served — as victims — in three movies in the theaters this week (four if you include the re-release of Titanic in 3D): The Hunger Games, Bully, and The Cabin in the Woods, the last being the most ingenious, entertaining, and sadistic. Generations of parodies have diluted horror movie conventions to inanity, but Drew Goddard's ingenious contrivance (Joss Whedon co-wrote) takes you through the familiar paces and then opens a trapdoor. A bunch of stereotypical college types — bimbo, jock, doper, smart girl, smart guy — arrange to party in the title hovel. The expected happens, but with a twist. The twists won't surprise anyone familiar with paranoid scenarios like TheTruman Show, or the works of H.P. Lovecraft; more disturbing is the filmmakers' sheer glee in both subverting and vindicating the genre, demonstrating how horror films function as distractions from the horrors of real life.
