I didn’t know anything about this film before I went to see it,
apart from that it was horror. My companion told me as we went in that it was
also meant to be funny, which I thought to be no bad thing. If I’d known beforehand,
though, that it a new work from Joss Whedon and one of his Buffy writing
partners, I would have hesitated. That said, Drew Goddard’s writing on
Cloverfield hadn’t overly annoyed me, and there were episodes of Firefly
that…I didn’t mind.
And this film had all the fingerprints of Buffy on it. That
same smugness, the attitude of ‘look, here’s a lame cliché, ugh, we’re so above
it – we’re postmodern now, and we show you the conventions of this genre in an ironic
way, you know… though ultimately we just end up totally relying on them anyway’.
I really can’t stand it – it made me dislike Buffy, dislike Angel,
dislike Runaways and worry about The Avengers. And it made me
dislike the bulk of this film – until the last 20 minutes, where all hell
breaks loose and the rest is gratuitous silliness and fun with lots of
references to other horror films – my favourite being Hellraiser.
The rest of the film, though, was very reminiscent of Buffy,
only with more ‘ironic’ blood and boobs and tired stoner jokes. Watch for the
last twenty minutes of fun, by all means, but if you have the same attitude to
Whedon and co as I do, steer clear.
