Directed by Eli Roth. 94 minutes.
Starring Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, Joey Kern, Cerina Vincent, James DeBello, Arie Verveen, and Giuseppe Andrews. Released by Lions Gate Films.
There is a great series of shots of a lake at the beginning of Cabin Fever that lead you to believe that you have wandered into some sort of horror classic. Don’t be fooled. What follows is about as pedestrian as genre films get, though, for some reason, this particular one is not only getting strong word of mouth from festival goers but also good reviews. Though I thought at first that, perhaps, I had missed the boat, I realized that this was more a case of the lake being dried up. Eli Roth’s direction here paints a picture for me of a person who has spent a lot of time fooling around with cameras and equipment, but very little actually sitting in a movie theater. Not only does the film suffer from various problems pertaining to character and storyline, but also it does not flow smoothly.
The premise here is simple. So simple, in fact, that I thought to myself as the creative title sequence in which flies buzz on the soundtrack to the eerily white screen as titles appears that Roth would be making up for his lack of narrative creativity with some creepy moments or, at the least, campy homages. No such luck. What we have here is your basic horny college students (three guys and two girls) heading out to spend a weekend in a cabin in the woods. Before they reach the forest, they butt heads with the locals, which include a seemingly racist shopkeeper (the explanation of his bigoted remarks is explained later in a rather flat punchline), a strange little boy that unexplainably bites people, and the boy’s father. Into the woods we go. No sooner than four of the five members of the group taken part in various sex acts, a stranger wanders into their camp, bleeding profusely from various orifices and asking for help. Help comes in the form of a few baseball bats and fire from our friends in the cabin. Soon after the encounter, the five all begin showing symptoms that the diseased stranger carried.
One of the basic problems here is that none of the characters are particularly likeable and, worse, remotely interesting. As a matter of fact, they are all pretty damn generic. There is the nice girl, the bad girl, the nice guy, the jerk, and the drunken buffoon. The one thing they all have in common is that they often describe things they don’t like as “gay.” For example, I didn’t like Cabin Fever… I thought it was gay. After one of the characters is infected, the other four become even less likeable when they shut their diseased friend up in a small shack behind the cabin. In the midst of all of this, we meet Deputy Winston, certainly the most inexplicable of all of the movie’s characters, who shows up at the cabin to find out what is going on, only to give a seemingly endless rant about how much he parties. I believe he uses the word party more than Forrest Gump repeats his own name. Any reason for this particular scene or any of the other scenes in which Winston appears is completely beyond my grasp.
Before venturing into the film, I had been warned by others of its apparently graphic violence. Though the film does see its share of blood spilled, the disturbing aspect of the film is more the violence of the writer and director’s personalities than the actual bloodletting. Truth be told, the special effects in the film are unrealistic enough to render them inoffensive, though their reasons for existing in each particular scene are what made me uneasy. For example, is it really necessary to see a young woman, still alive, gasping for breath after dogs have eaten off her face not once, but twice (the second time in a flashback) during the film. Also, was the scene in which another woman shaves her legs, only to cause them to gush blood really necessary either? The film occasionally seems to be attempting to be funny, yet these scenes display sadism that makes me question creative motives. A shame really cause Cabin Fever could have been fun. Or, better yet, it could have handled its material in a more serious manner, like the far superior 28 Days Later from earlier this summer, and packed a wallop. What could have been the Ebola virus ends up as a case of the sniffles.