Cabin Fever Movie Review:


Synopsis:

An offbeat horror tale about a group of five college friends on vacation at a remote mountain cabin when one contracts a flesh-eating virus. As it spreads among the friends, their true feelings and personalities emerge as they struggle to survive the virus and each other.

Starting with a premise not dissimilar to the Evil Dead, ie dump a pile of kids in a cabin in the woods and mess about with them, but then Cabin Fever sets out firmly to break, or recognise any of the rules of horror movies. From the poster and what I had heard was that this was an attempt to back to a genuinely scary horror movie. To say my expectations were shattered is true.

For the first third of the movie, the wilful disregard for plot, any kind of reality just has you staring at the screen thinking, who on earth let the director make this movie, as it appears to be an utter trainwreck of consistency.

Take for example, when the kids show up at a shop on the way to the cabin to pick up some supplies, sitting on the porch outside is a weird redneck kid, one of the leads sits down next to him, and the kid promptly bites him on the hand. His dad comes out of the shop and prises the kid off him to which he announces that most people know not to sit next to him!

Bizarre, and had most people at the screening howling with laughter, I'll be honest when I say I wasn't sure if this was hoots of derision or enjoyment. Was this a play on Deliverance? A spoof, a parody?

Or take the scene where one of the leads gets sick, instead of trying to help her get well, they carry her out of the cabin and lock her in a toolshed, with no compassion for her at all.

We are not asked to care for the characters in any way at all. None of them are our heroes, unlike say in Evil Dead where we are rooting for Ash, they are just there for bad things to happen to them, that generally we laugh at.

Proceedings just get weirder and weirder, such as characters appearing out of the woods, carrying bags of weed for no apparent reason, you begin to get the feeling that all of this is completely deliberate. I.E. Eli Roth is playing with every known rule of a horror movie and making a weird hybrid horror, comedy, teen movie. Normally when a acharacter is introduced we expect them to drive the story forward, or be a bad guy, or join our band of heroes, not here hell no, all we see him as later on is as a corpse!

Take an other example, a cop shows up outside the cabin to check on the kids as he’s heard of disturbances at the cabin. Sitting outside the cabin is their smashed up truck that is completely covered in blood, now in most movies the cop would be out with the gun and trying to lock somebody up, not in this movie, hell no he’s more interested in talking about partying, funny as hell, and the complete apropos of what could have been expected.

I think the fact that this was placed in the late night romps category sums the movie up up really.It's a romp, not to be taken seriously, more of a play on the genre.

It certainly can't be placed in the horror genre as it was not shocking at all. I fully admit to 'jumping' at the slightest shock on screen but nothing in the movie had that chalk down blackboard moment of true fear, instead going for humour. Because we laugh so much at the absurdity of what is happening on screen it was hard to take the moments of horror seriously at all.

Gary Gray

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