Personally I’m a fan of horror films, the best of them are very clever and intriguing, the worst of them extremely bad but as long as one gets a good fright then it all seems worthwhile.
Its fear but knowing that your never really in any danger, that adrenaline rush, the skin crawling or (in the very best examples) the ones that get in under your skin, films like the Exorcist, The Others or The Ring (Japanese version) to name a few.
In this genre Cabin Fever doesn’t really deserve a place. It’s a shocker, it gory and its sickening. The scares are few and far between and all the characters are unlovable, vain, arrogant and selfish. Not one of them endeared themselves to me and so it happens that I didn’t really care whether they caught the disease or not.
The premise is this. A group of horny teenagers rent out a cabin in the woods (sound familiar already). Horny teenagers should know by now that when you have a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, whose nearest residents are all mentally deficient gun totting hill billies, nice things aren’t going to happen. But it can make a good film if done properly. In this case though, rather than being haunted by ghosts or zombies, it is a skin wasting virus that is the bad guy.
You kind of begin in wonder at this stage how all these kids made friends with other in the first place, they are disloyal and annoying. I began to think that someone must have sent them all to a cabin in the middle of nowhere for a good reason.
The action picks up when the kids kill an old man dying from the disease, who has it, who doesn’t, who cares?
The director Eli Roth was clearly trying to pay homage to old gory shockers like the Texas chainsaw massacre, the concept was meant to be new and original, the directing pioneering. This looked to my untrained eye like a low budget, gore infested home movie that probably could have been shot better with a camcorder (i.e. Blair witching it!) The red point of view from a killer dog is clearly ripped off from Sam Raimi’s hugely more enjoyable Evil Dead series and the evil old hillbillies reminded me of a much more entertaining film I saw recently, Wrong turn.
Cabin Fever reminded me a little of Wrong turn, the fever replacing the mountain men, picking of the characters one by one. Wrong turn was genuinely frightening though, Cabin Fever is just genuinely sickening.
If you do end up liking the characters in this film there are a few laughs, the one redeeming character being Deputy Winston, the worst sheriff in the world.
Deputy Winston likes to ‘party man’ and loves women, he is one of the horny teenagers in a police man’s outfit and he did get some laughs in the cinema though going through the scourge on your eyes that is the film, its hardly worth it.
The horror genre has been alive and well in recent years, some very scary masterpieces have come from around the world. You get numb to the scary movie after a while, its not like when you got to sneakily watch them as a child and they scared the living bejesus out of you. The modern cinema audience (brought up on a wealth of movie violence) is harder to frighten, harder to creep out.
Some directors manage this with wit and flair, some don’t. Unfortunately Cabin fever belongs to the latter.
If you like violent films you might like this but it really is not as frightening as it tries to be. I think if the characters had been more likeable then I might have cared more for their plight, rooted for them more but as yet another one dies in a horrifically bloody mess I just thought, ‘yawn, where’d I put my popcorn.’
It surprises me that at the Sundance Film festival a very competitive bidding war ensured this film made it into the mainstream. I’m thinking the bidders must have been gun totting hillbillies.
Or horny teenagers, of course.
Director: Eli Roth Running time: 93mins Cast: Rider Strong................Paul Jordan Ladd.................Karen Joey Kern...................Jeff Cerina Vincent..............Marcy James DeBello...............Bert Arie Verveen................Henry Giuseppe Andrews............Deputy Winston
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Unmemorable
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very helpful![Cabin Fever [2003]](http://picnic.ciao.com/uk/65503912.jpg)
