As a horror movie fan, I wanted to like this film. I really did. But if you want to know what’s it’s like to be a horror movie fan, here’s an extended metaphor for you. Imagine that you have a collection of rare diamonds. Now imagine that your dog keeps getting into your diamond collection and eating some. You’re not sure when it happens, so you have to spend a lot of time doing the only thing you can—going through dog poop with painstaking care. Some days—most days—you never find anything but dog poop. But once in a while you find a diamond in there, and it’s the feeling you get from finding one that keeps you sifting through dogshit all the time.
The point of all this is to introduce a publicity quote from Lord of the Rings trilogy director Peter Jackson: “Horror fans have been waiting years for a movie like Cabin Fever.” After that, my wanting to like Cabin Fever became the too-familiar feeling of desperate hopefulness that maybe, just maybe, this would be the film that would rescue the once-proud horror genre from the ravages inflicted by endless slasher pics, Scream knockoffs and Scary Movie parodies.
Alas, it was not to be.
Jackson should have known better. After all, he got his start by making films like Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive—both of which are now considered classics mainly because it’s so unlikely that their inspired levels of depraved, disgusting, all-out gore will ever be reached again. Then again, Jackson’s first feature-length film was called Bad Taste. Whatever the case, Jackson is dead wrong, because Cabin Fever is simply awful. It’s one of those would-be cult classics that proves the first rule of cult classics—you can’t set out to make one.
The negligible plot involves five college kids on a post-finals getaway to one of those secluded cabins-in-the-woods that only exist in tourist brochures and horror films. There’s the Beer-guzzling Doofus, the Horny Couple, the virginal Girl Next Door, and the Nice Guy. They share some dialogue that’s occasionally funny in a teen-comedy way, but the only points of interest here are that the Nice Guy is played by Rider Strong (he was Ben Savage’s buddy Shawn in TV’s Boy Meets World), and the Girl Next Door is played by Cheryl Ladd’s daughter.
The kids’ idyllic vacation is ruined when a very obviously ill man begs them for help, just before he pukes blood all over their vehicle and stumbles away. One by one, the kids begin to show signs of a virulent flesh-eating disease. From there, it’s a one-way descent into ostracism, paranoia, and wretched acting. (The film’s single effective shot depicts one character slowly following the others into the shed where they’ve decided to quarantine her.)
There’s something reminiscent of The Thing in that, and it’s no accident. In fact, the entire film is a kind of hodgepodge homage to every scary film the director, one Eli Roth, has ever seen. He must have liked Deliverance, because the kids run into a bunch of weirdo rednecks. He definitely went for people-trapped-in-cabin classics like Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And he probably liked Hitchcock, too, because he cameos as a vapid stoner named Grim. Judging from the film, it mustn’t have been much of a stretch for him.
But Roth’s biggest influence is the so-called “old school” horror flick—which to Cabin Fever’s target audience members means the ’80s horror movies they couldn’t see during the ’80s because they didn’t exist yet. While Roth’s unrepentant emphasis on sex and blood is perversely admirable (and much needed in an era when demographic pandering is rapidly turning all entertainment into watered-down baby formula), Cabin Fever is really just yesterday’s dog poop recycled into today’s “retro” dinner. The problem with this kind of pop-culture nostalgia is that it makes everyone—including those of us who did exist then—forget that most of those old-school horror films were dog poop in the first place.
Nevertheless, if Roth had been able to synthesize all his influences into something at all frightening—or coherent—the film might have worked. Failing that, it might even have worked as a straight-up slice of pointless grue not unlike the campfire story one character tells near the beginning. Unfortunately, Roth is thoroughly incompetent on all levels but the purely technical, so we have to settle for the bits of out-of-context strangeness he throws in at random intervals. (For whatever reason, the most memorable of these is a girlish-looking, hand-biting kid named Dennis.)
For a far, far better example of how to make a horror film about an infectious disease, check out Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Avoid this one even if you’re trapped in a remote cabin and have nothing better to do. As for me, that’s the last time I take Peter Jackson’s advice about horror movies.
(0.5/4)