Cabin Fever Movie Review:


Do you remember those old “anti-drug” commercials with the frying pan and a raw egg? Well I have to compare the makers of “Cabin Fever” with that egg. Their brains were the raw egg when they first started making “Cabin Fever” but slowly the film cooked their minds. “Cabin Fever” is probably one of the most demented and frustrating films to come out this year.

Five friends have rented a cabin and journeyed into the backwoods for one of those “camping-party-romps”. The cabin is plain and delightful and the friends start to explore more about each other. Things begin to go horribly wrong when beautiful and innocent Karen (Jordan Ladd) is discovered to have a mysterious and deadly virus. The friends slowly see that their survival may depend upon giving up on each other. Survival can be inhumane but their surviving may depend upon even looking past that.

“Cabin Fever” definitely had the potential to be a harrowing and great psychological film. All the elements were laid out but instead what occurs is like nothing I have seen on screen before. These guys are probably the stupidest, ruthless and inhumane group of kids ever to grace the silver screen. Their actions and what they do to each other is so over-the-top and awful that it made me laugh. This film is laugh-out-loud bad.

There are some solid and perverse laughs encased in this film but for the most part it is just there to gross you out with heavy gore. I have liked some really infamously bad and bizarre gore-fests, like 1985’s “Re-Animator”, but this film just doesn’t have the logic or intelligence that it needs. The kids in the “Friday the 13th” films had more sense.

I enjoyed the performances from Rider Strong, Cerina Vincent and Jordan Ladd but Ladd especially. Ladd’s performance was the only one in the film that was believable. When she got the disease we all felt it. These three performances stood out in one of the most awful films of the year. Hope they go on to bigger and better things.

What was the film trying to accomplish with Twin Peaks-styled characters inhabiting the wooded area? Sure they are kooky and sort of funny but they seemed to be way out of context.

Maybe I just didn’t get it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

With a surefire indie hit like “28 Days Later” and a monster-gore-fest film “Jeepers Creepers 2” in theatres now, just skip “Cabin Fever”.

1 out of 5

Dean Kish

So Says the Soothsayer

A film review by
BlackEye

Cabinet Fever

This black comedy is a teen metaphor for the current White House administration. Very little intelligence, with a lot of macho posturing. Lot’s of blood and very little sex, although there is one scene when the perfect-breasted babe does a reverse move on the male and does him from behind like Lynn Cheney when she puts the steely dan to the rump of the Vice-president. Kinky. At it’s core though, is a Grand Guignol cautionary tale of what will happen to future generations if that wart-faced, wicked Blair witch of the west, Gale Norton continues as Secretary of the Interior much longer. Super fun is bespoiled when the Super Fund funds meant for toxic cleanup in the U.S.A. go to rebuild Haliburton’s Iraq instead. The five suburban teens also gives us a glimpse of the outcome of the Bush educational policy. These kids are going to college? The horror!

It’s also story of docile, irrational, short-sighted, loud-mouthed mental midgets aided by inbred spawn from south of the Mason-Dixon (red states), the residue of “clean coal” energy policies created in secret by dickless bald little men from Wyoming, and toxic waste left to simmer in it’s own sauces to create flesh eating bacteria and make a sewer of America’s beauty. The “other white meat” is placed in jeopardy by this mysterious malady as Jesse Helm’s main constituents and financial supporters, the hogs and their lobbyists, are diseased as well.

The animal connection is further complicated when the dogs gone wild begin eating the sins of the female victims and do a better job with their tongues than the boyfriend dawgs did with theirs. OK, so there one reality check in this “feature.” The town even has its very own rabid, mullet-headed Dennis the Menace (whose real last name is Helms, I kid you not) who sees humans as pancakes. Beware the jaws that bite and the claws that catch…

More madness reigns and rains. Although a cadre of Ashcroft-trained militia try to resolve “the problem” in their own special way, they end up shooting the messenger, kind of like how Rudy’s rogues cured Amadou Dialo. The police problem in a rural hamlet is not as complicated as that of NYC or LA and is easily handled with some 5 cent lemonade. Party on Deputy Winston.

The acting, directing, and production qualities are strictly B-picture, straight to video grade. Second rate. Just like the current Administration. Another theme that is addressed throughout this forest of fear is that “icky” people are ignored and pushed aside by society. That attitude is consistent with the Administration’s policies as well. Not only is there no “big tent,” there is nothing but bewilderness.

Unfortunately, this film is a laugh riot while the real horror emanates from Washington, D.C. This wonderful end of summer dump romp when seen with The Order makes a great indigestion inducing double feature with the entrees of flesh eating and sin eating in one scrumptious meal. Just don’t go near the water. Bon Appetite!

Copyright 2003
By T R Black

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