You're Next is good fun for horror fans, but it is not as smart or ground-breaking as the hype or the well-edited trailer suggests. All the ingredients are there - tight and knowing direction, some beautiful black humour, homages abound (Carpenter, Bunuel, Haneke, etc), a strong Final Girl, great gore gags - and the film has energy, but ultimately it does little that is new or unexpected. There is entertainment to be had from the subversion of the old cabin-in-the-woods-full-of-dumb-teenagers formula, as supposedly wealthy and educated adults in a sprawling country pile fall into the same Idiot Plot traps in a good mix of 80s slashers and contemporary home-invasions. Mercifully the bane of modern horror - digital blood and splatter - is conspicuously absent, with frequent and very effective physical gore effects helping to keep some sense of real grounding to events. Adam Wingard and his film may prove to be this generation's equivalent of Raimi and the original The Evil Dead; for seasoned horror fans, it proves to be a strongly-made and entertaining update on familiar territory.
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