Brilliant dialogue, excellent direction and some incredible story elements make The Cabin in the Woods one of the best horror films in decades. Packed with some pretty good action scenes, there’s also plenty of entertainment value. The Cabin in the Woods is a nearly unique blend of the supernatural, technology, violence and humor.

Deep in the woods is a secluded cabin. The cabin is wired, big time, and part of a technological nightmare world full of weird creatures, pheromones and geeks with white shirts and black ties. Rather like Best Buy on a Saturday afternoon. Enter five college students taking a weekend off their studies, only to find serious danger at a cabin owned by one of their cousins. What happens next is classic slasher film, literally. All hell breaks loose. The students are attacked and brutalized and must fight or flee. That’s where the film takes a demented turn, but you’ll have to go see it for that.

I strongly suggest that you do. The Cabin in the Woods is startlingly good! The writing is superb, the acting surprisingly excellent and the plot, though simple, incredibly engaging. I couldn’t wait to see what Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, the writers, would come up with next. It’s seldom that I’ve seen a film that almost completely surprised me, but Cabin sure did.

Whedon and Goddard managed to turn film clichés into original, if often disturbing, scenes, particularly the ones in the tech center. Speaking of the tech center, Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford as Sitterson and Hadley, the leaders, gave masterful performances. And the teenagers much the same: Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Conolly and Fran Kranz were managed to make fairly extreme characters likeable and believable. Anna Hutchison too was quite good, if less extreme.

I have to give real credit to director Drew Goddard for putting it all together. Cabin in the Woods flows beautifully, it’s logical in a sick twisted way and sells the plot nicely. All in all it’s one of my favorite films this year and one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen.

Rating 4.5 starts out of 5.