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 Cabin Fever Review by Ray Garton
Cabin Fever is about a group of attractive young people who get together and go to a cabin in the woods for lots of sex and partying. The first couple times I sat down to watch the movie, I promptly fell asleep. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so many horror movies about a group of attractive young people who get together and go to a cabin in the woods for lots of sex and partying that I just couldn’t stay awake for another one. I’d like to take this opportunity to call for a moratorium on all horror movies about a group of attractive young people who get together and go to a cabin in the woods for lots of sex and partying. Haven’t we had enough already? How many more times do we have to return to this particular well? Is there anything new that can be done with this? I say no, so stop trying. From now on, anyone who makes a movie about a group of attractive young people who get together and go to a cabin in the woods for lots of sex and partying should be severely fined. I finally put the DVD in early in the day, with the sun high, while I was wide awake, determined to see the whole movie. Sleep was better. Every group of attractive young people in these movies includes at least one goofball who drinks a lot and behaves like a moron. In this group, it’s Bert. Bert has brought along a rifle to shoot squirrels. But when he shoots what he thinks is a squirrel, he’s shocked to find that it’s a very sick man crawling around in the bushes, a hermit with blood all over his face, apparently suffering from some kind of disease. After shooting him, Bert leaves him there and goes back to the cabin and doesn’t mention it to the others. That evening, the hermit shows up at the cabin door. Remember, this guy is sick and in need of help. Our group of attractive young people manage to set him on fire and he runs screaming in flames into the woods. When we next see him, he’s lying dead and charred in the water supply, so the disease spreads to our campers. Cabin Fever has what Roger Ebert calls an "idiot plot" – that means the entire plot will fall apart unless everyone in the movie behaves like idiots. There’s idiot behavior to spare here. There’s also a lot of running around and slamming of doors. The characters are always locking the doors against each other, or the loopy locals, or a crazed dog. This disease, which is never identified, causes copious amounts of blood to appear, the skin to rot, then the victim vomits blood. It’s an inconsistent disease because symptoms seem to show up sooner on some people than others. But the disease is just the McGuffin here, the device that sets everything else into motion. There’s plenty of motion, but there’s not a lot holding it all together. At the general store, there’s a little boy named Dennis who looks, at first, like a little girl, and who sits on the bench out front and inexplicably shouts, "Pancakes! Pancakes!" and bites people. When Bert drives the SUV – which only starts when the plot needs it to start, like all vehicles in movies of this ilk – to the store to get help, he gets bitten by Dennis and he pisses off the local hicks, who follow him back into the woods with rifles, ready to shoot to kill. Writer-director Eli Roth has obviously seen a lot of horror movies, I’m just not sure he’s seen any good horror movies. He can’t seem to decide if he’s making a horror movie or a bloody comedy – I’m not certain all the laughs are intentional. Roth gets some good performances out of his young cast. They do the best with what they have to work with, but the movie simply doesn’t hold together. Roth has no sense of pacing. There is no build up, and there’s really nothing to build up to – the movie just sort of goes along for awhile, then stops. Eli tries to populate the movie with quirky characters. The old man who runs the store is a colorful coot, an apparent racist until we get to the end of the movie. But Deputy Winston, a Sheriff’s Deputy who can think of nothing but partying, brings the movie to a screeching halt every time he steps in front of the camera. Cabin Fever has the feel of a movie directed by a big fan of horror movies whose ambition outruns his talent. It’s more frustrating than entertaining, more irritating than satisfying. If you really must see a movie about a group of attractive young people who get together and go to a cabin in the woods for lots of sex and partying – and at this point, does anybody still want to see these movies? – go watch Evil Dead or Evil Dead 2, or even the original Friday the 13th. At least they were original when they were initially released. There’s nothing original about Cabin Fever – it’s a couple hours of your life you’ll want back, trust me. When Cabin Fever was released to theaters, trailers included a blurb from Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He was quoted as saying something along these lines: "Horror fans have been waiting for a movie like this for a long time." Either he saw an entirely different movie than I, or those years of work on the Rings movies have exhausted him and he’s just not thinking clearly. Trust me, nobody was waiting for this movie, except maybe Eli Roth’s parents.
[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]
Cabin Fever
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2002
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