Frighteningly good

Dir: Drew Goddard

With: Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Chris Hemsworth

Running time: 94 minutes

CALL it the Deliverance effect. Ever since Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox stepped into their hiking boots and those canoes, Hollywood and the great outdoors have gone together like deer and hunters.

If it isn't banjo players out to ruin a stranger's day it's hungry bears, marauding psychopaths, carelessly mislaid traps, or plain old-fashioned outdoors-induced madness. The message: stay at home, city slickers, if you want to live.

Drew Goddard's horror-comedy, The Cabin in the Woods, takes all those old ideas and gives them a kick in the weatherproofed cargo pants. Funny, bold, inventive and crackling with energy, it's one of the year's most exhilarating movies. This is a film that sets out to entertain you, or die trying.

It has one fault, though, and it is a big one. The last act is all over the shop, as though the megawatts of energy that went into the first two -thirds of the film have blown the fuse box. But given the quality of what goes before you may feel in the mood to forgive. Not an all-out triumph, then, for Goddard on his directorial debut, but a lot more fun than staying at home. Especially if the alternative is camping.

Goddard was a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Lost. His co-writer, Joss Whedon, created Buffy and Angel. Both have the modern television writers' love of swift set-ups, muscular plots, economical characterisation, and flashes of outrageousness. They are writers of a certain generation who in turn write for a certain generation, a generation that has grown up watching TV, that knows its tricks and conventions back to front, and loves it anyway.

Among those conventions: you cannot have a bunch of rich college students go off for a weekend in the woods and simply have a nice, relaxing time. That would be just silly, and against all known laws of the movie-television universe.

So it is with Cabin. Here, five chums – a blonde athletic type and his equally blonde girlfriend, two good-looking singletons, and a stoner, set off for the titular holiday venue. Of the five, Chris Hemsworth, seen recently in Thor, is the best kent face, and the Australian does an admirable job of keeping a straight fizzog throughout.

Ditto the rest of the cast, particularly Anna Hutchinson as his girlfriend and Fran Kranz, playing the stoner. If you've ever thought that what modern movies are crying out for is a new Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, complete with half broken voice and a jellyfish backbone, you'll be delighted by Mr Kranz.

As the young folks venture into the wild they thrill to the great outdoors. The scenery. The empty roads. The eccentric locals. One of the latter duly tells them, in time-honoured fashion, to steer clear of where it is they are heading. Much to our relief and later delectation, they plough on.

Also taking part in this tale are two suited and booted types, played by Richard Jenkins (The Visitor, Burn after Reading) and Bradley Whitford (aka Josh from The West Wing). To disclose any more might spoil the fun that lies ahead. Enough to say that the genial Mr Jenkins is rather different to the academic sort he played in The Visitor.

With the tale set up with lightning speed, Goddard proceeds to have some fun with his young charges. Watch in cosy wonder as the five grow childishly excited about spending the night in a creepy old cabin. Laugh as they play such standard games as drunken truth or dare. Grow ever so slightly concerned when they decide to look around the cabin some more. Everything is there, all the old tricks from quite a few scary movies, but with a few new twists.

Hollywood has made a great living down the years from terrifying teenagers. It has given them nightmares on Elm Street, made Friday the 13th a date to avoid, and turned Halloween into the day from hell. When it was done giving them the heebie-jeebies, it poked post-modern fun at them and the rules of horror movies in Scream and all its sequels.

So far, it has been teenagers who have derived the greatest pleasure from watching other teens in peril. Cabin pitches itself above the average teen scream flick, aiming for more sophisticated frights and laughs from an older crowd.

Where Goddard joins the rest of the fright-night directors is in not being able to make his winning ideas last until the end credits roll. His movie goes too fast, too soon so that by the two-thirds point exhaustion has set in. Perhaps that is one drawback from a television background, that a director's internal clock is always set to one hour and no more. But while the good time from watching others have a bad time lasts, Cabin is quite the trip.