REVIEW: Cabin Fever

Review by- Allan Lear

It’s a common complaint that there’s nothing original going on at the movies these days. While the majority of blockbuster films are raiding the intellectual copyright of the comics industry, the horror genre in particular is represented on the big screen by nothing but remake after pointless remake of the most recognisable franchises available.

The results are hit and miss. Rob Zombie actually made a very good fist of rebooting Hallowe’en and bringing Michael Myers back from the dead (a task that is seemingly impossible to replicate for the real Mike Myers). Shame Zombie went and ballsed it all up with his sequel, really. The Friday the 13th remake went well, but Nightmare on Elm Street’s reboot suffered from the obvious problem that Robert Englund is Freddy Kreuger and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

Then we ran out of obvious horror legends to reimagine, so producers started having ideas like bringing back Cabin Fever, a successful but minor horror hit from 2002 that was directed by the up-and-coming Eli Roth. Reportedly it made back its piddling $1.5m budget twenty times over, thus clearing the way for two direct-to-video sequels that, surely to God, nobody ever watched. Now Roth has passed the script on to a director called Travis Zarwiny, whose biggest credit to date appears to be that he worked on the execrable Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. As a grip. Meanwhile the scriptwriter for the original Cabin Fever, a gentleman named Randy Pearlstein, has handed in a photocopy of that 2002 script, although he has made a few minor alterations. He took a joke out. It was quite a good joke.

The advantage of the fact that the script has barely changed is that the plot remains admirably simple. In fact, if you look up the plot for the remake on Wikipedia, it gives you the whole film in one sentence: “A group of college students on a weekend getaway in a remote cabin are exposed to a flesh-eating virus”. Yes. Yes, they are. In the original this nameless disease was probably an analogue of the then-popular necrotising fasciitis, which was doing the rounds of all the best tabloids and had its wedding photos printed in Hello. In the wake of the recent Ebola problems, the remake is at least timely.

Having established the straightforward premise of a skin-dissolving disease eating teenagers on holiday, the film hands over to the technical team to have all the fun they can with the gore effects for the next eighty minutes straight. The gore effects are very well-realised, very realistic; maybe a little too realistic. I don’t know about you, but if I’m watching a splatter movie I want there to be real splatter; ludicrous amounts of claret flying about all over. You know Peter Jackson’s early zombie film, known variously as Brain Dead or Dead Alive? Where at the end the hero just glues a lawnmower to his torso and runs into a crowd? That’s what I’m talking about. All the realistic effects of this version of Cabin Fever don’t stick in my head half as well as the original’s slightly dodgy shot of Cerina Vincent with her gob hanging off.

The 2016 film isn’t awful, by any means. The acting’s fine, in as much as there isn’t a huge amount of acting required, as in any slasher flick; it’s mainly shouting, screaming and nudity. The standout turn comes from Louise Linton as the peculiar Deputy Winston. All the cinematography is professional, the effects – as I say – are to a high standard, and some real thought has gone into the soundtrack, which is nicely discordant and unsettling. But I never quite got away from the thought that the whole thing was a completely futile exercise, presumably dreamt up by Eli Roth as a way of giving some of his friends on the technical side a leg-up in the industry.

The funny thing is, I can sort of see what they were trying to accomplish here. Roth, following the success of the Hostel films, now pals around with Quentin Tarantino and can command a reasonable budget for a project these days. There is a precedent for this sort of thing: following the great success of his first, phenomenally cheap, independent film effort, auteur writer / producer Sam Raimi was able to command serious money to produce a sequel. Evil Dead II was, according to star Bruce Campbell’s memoirs, made on a budget of around £3m dollars, almost exactly ten times the budget of the original indie feature. Despite being billed as a sequel, EDII is about 90% straight remake of its predecessor, and it’s probably one of the most successful remakes ever in terms of widespread acclaim; every horror fan worthy of the name will profess a great affection for Evil Dead II, and it’s regularly the first genre film out of people’s mouths when they name their favourites.

What has been achieved here, however, is something more akin to Gus Van Sant’s notoriously needless remake of Psycho. Why, people asked at the time, would you remake a classic film simply by doing a shot-for-shot remake? The question in this case is why you would do that to a film which isn’t a classic? The original film is a definitively mediocre horror movie, unremarkable in every sense; it’s not even bad enough to be a legendary duffer. It is, in every sense, just another film – and so is this.

In summary: if you’ve seen Cabin Fever then you’ve seen Cabin Fever. If you haven’t, it’s a fun enough way to waste two hours; but it doesn’t matter which version you see, so go for whatever’s cheaper where you are.

Review by- Allan Lear.