I was just as excited as any other horror fan out there about the release of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever. It had been doing the rounds on the internet for God knows how long. Everyone was hyping it up. There were interviews, cool new pictures released and the king himself Sir Peter Jackson also praised it so highly that he stopped shooting on ‘Lord of the Rings: Return of the King’ just so he could screen it to the cast and crew. But I think as always with high praise and great anticipation almost always comes disappointment and the realisation that it was probably better in your head before you had even got a chance to see it.
But in its defense its probably my fault for getting all excited about Cabin Fever in the first place. And maybe because my expectations were a little higher than normal I think I didn’t embrace it as much as I could of. A flesh-eating virus and a bunch of teenagers out in a lonely cabin is the setup.
Cabin Fever uses a very often missed 70’s horror style thats makes its mark throughout. It introduces token teenage charicatures (which were played equally well by all involved), bizarre and practically deranged characters, buckets of blood and strange and unsettling sequences. In fact the strange and unsettling sequences (although being the most memorable) do seem to be the most uncomprehensible. A number of sequences left me bemused as to why they were even left in.
The final 15 minutes of the film were probably the strangest. There seemed like a number of unanswered questions, one being why did Deputy Winston dump Paul’s (Rider Strong) body when all the others were burnt? And why the hell did Jeff return to the cabin? But this is horror, so I can live with it. But there are two major quarrels that I have with Cabin Fever. The first has to be the unbelievable change of character that Rider Strong seems to experience. He literally becomes a cold hearted killer in just a few scene changes. And the second issue is with the ending.
There are deaths galore, a windscreen trapped deer (at least I think thats what it was), slo-mo kung-fu, and a 6 foot rabbit. It just seems that so many ideas have just been tacked onto the end at the last minute. The end took away a lot of what the film had built up to that point. It tried to tie up all the loose ends in one big rush job of cheap gags. The ending to me spoilt a lot of the originality that was on show here.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Absolutely offbeat and played 100% tongue-in-cheek Cabin Fever attempts reviving and reinventing past influence. Its nice to see someone is still willing to believe in the popularity of the classic horror tale and not rely on shoddy effects, and lame scares to attack its audience. Cabin Fever is fresh and is probably the more decent, twisted, bloody and vulgar movie experience you would of been on in quite a while. And while horror fanatics will love the in-jokes and references splattered throughout a word of warning – go in expecting a movie as fantastic as the Evil Dead or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you may walk out on a low.
