<P> "the difficult challenge of putting across a satirical film with a serious body count . Cabin touches on everything from The Evil Dead and Friday The 13th to the mechanized mutilations of the Saw series while digging deeper into the Lovecraftian roots of horror in an attempt to reveal what makes the genre work...It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers . And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?" </P> <P> In a more mixed review Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, calling herself "a wised - up viewer," gave the film a "B −" grade and said, "The movie's biggest surprise may be that the story we think we know from modern scary cinema--that horror is a fun, cosmic game, not much else--here turns out to be pretty much the whole enchilada ." She shrugged off the talents of Whitford and Jenkins: "These two experienced actors provide the film's adult - level entertainment ." </P> <P> Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times believed that the film "is an inside joke" and also said, "The laughs (in the film) come easily, the screams not so much ." David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter remarked, "It's just too bad the movie is never much more than a hollow exercise in self - reflexive cleverness that's not nearly as ingenious as it seems to think ." </P> <P> A.O. Scott of The New York Times said, "Novelty and genre traditionalism often fight to a draw . Too much overt cleverness has a way of spoiling dumb, reliable thrills . And despite the evident ingenuity and strenuous labor that went into it, The Cabin in the Woods does not quite work ." Scott added, </P>

The cabin in the woods cast and crew 2012