Cast: Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, & Cerina Vincent
Directed by: Eli Roth
Written by: Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein
Runtime: 93 min
Rating: R
Trailer

A group of teens, fresh off graduation, head to an isolated cabin to indulge in typical adolescent desires, most notably sex, drugs and alcohol – is there really anything else to do in a horror film? After Bert (James DeBello) stumbles on a helpless and diseased hermit (Arie Verveen) who he proceeds to shoot, Eli Roth’s horror send-up dives headlong into a wildly entertaining and gory film about the horrors of a mysterious blood virus (think AIDS mixed with the flesh-eating disease). Once Karen (Jordan Ladd) is infected by drinking the local water, the group’s unapologetic desire for self preservation gets the better of them as they haul out their friend into a woodshed behind the cabin so as not to spread the disease. This lack of compassion and cruelty to their supposed friend is the most interesting thing in Cabin Fever. The fact that within the first ten minutes of the film, you can’t stand either one of the characters is compliment to Roth’s straying from the pack of generic horror films that are more concerned with creating scares by allowing the audience to empathize with the characters. Here, all we’re left with are characters who are selfish and oblivious to their surroundings, and more concerned with their superficial desires than what the world they inhabit has in store for them. The disease, which can spread quickly and kill off its host efficiently, is never explained and ultimately isn’t really necessary. Its primary function is to turn the friends against each other, acting as a purveyor of paranoia, homophobia and death. Characters that would normally die off first in traditional horror films are spared momentarily, leaving the innocent to be hit the hardest and going against the convention of killing characters for doing “bad things” like having sex, smoking pot and being all around smart asses. Cabin Fever starts off enjoyably enough until the last half of the film, where instead of focusing on the cabin and their perilous situation, Roth abandons the secluded confines of the woods to include characters from the surrounding town, including an inept Sheriff, an inbred child with a penchant for biting strangers and practicing karate, and a host of hillbilly store owners who take to the woods to kill off the remaining outsiders. This never works. The tone established in the first half of the film is suddenly changed, turning Cabin Fever into a pseudo-David Lynch film with bizarre characters and left-field deviations in plot. If Roth had stuck with his original allegory of disease and homophobia in the cabin, the film would have turned out a lot more enjoyable, instead of turning into a convoluted mess by the end.

Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006