Cabin Fever

Oh, what high expectations I had! Vintage throwback to 80's horror flicks! Scary and "greusomely funny"! It can't be! Well, yes, I guess that part was right. It can't be. Or at least not for "Cabin Fever", Eli Roth's gruesomely stupid horror flick about a flesh eating virus that rampages as quickly through a group of bone-headed college students as Roth discards various directorial influences. His film would be good if it wasn't so bad.
The students in question are as annoying as you could believe. Our hero is Paul (Rider Strong), that nice guy that horror movies love, the one that loves the bitchy blond girl Karen (Jordan Ladd), that the audience is maybe supposed to think is somehow less shallow than her cohorts. Think again. We have the oversexed couple, Cerina Vincent and Joey Kern, as Mary and Jeff. And then there's James DeBello as Bert, that douche-bag character that tells amusing anedotes about masturbation and shoots squirrels because "they're gay". Our protagonists (I use the word "protagonists" loosely) have rented a cabin in the woods of that kind of backwoods town that only exists in movies anymore. They get there, the couple has sex, the baffoon goes hunting, and the two non-lovebirds dance around each others feelings without coming to any definite conclusions. I'm bored just writing about their escapades.
Well, eventually, the flesh-eating disease has to factor in. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you: proceeding our introduction to the idiots, we were served a prologue in which a man finds his dog affected by the terrible disease. Unfortunately, this may be one of the best scenes in the movie. It therefore only heightened my interest, which slowly was deflated over the course of the film.
Well, that man gets infected by the disease and catches up with our "protagonists" when Bert accidentally shoots him. The man complains of disease, Bert doesn't listen, doesn't tell friends of incident, man shows up again, "protagonists" don't know what to do, man tries to steal their car to go into town for help with his disease, they don't like that, attack him and car, one of them sets man on fire, he gets pushed into body of water, kids forget about him. Oh no, the man has now infected the water, the water which the kids will be drinking. They don't know what to do. They killed a man! Well, it's not long before Karen contracts the disease and is cast out like a leper by her friends. She's forced into the shed, where she grows increasingly sick. Who's next? Who will survive? Who cares?
Oh and then there is that random rabid dog that shows up who poses further threat for our "protagonists". I don't even remember how this dog came to be. It just kind of appeared like a bad horror flick convention.
So many scenes in "Cabin Fever" are without purpose. Eli Roth's random, unfunny cameo is maybe supposed to be ironic in its complete disconnection to the film. However, it's too brief to be truly funny and yet too long to be truly nonchalant. In short, it disrupts the flow of the film. "Cabin Fever" is the kind of film that will sacrifice all integrity to elicit cheap laughs.
Some of the film is well-directed and well-shot. The opening credits in which we presumably follow skin as it slowly encounters the disease effectively builds dread and apprehension while being visually interesting. Or the scene in which the dog chases an unfortunate victim, Eli makes the shot completely red in tent, a nice touch. His influences run very "The Evil Dead" but he's not a polished enough director to do anything interesting with these references. While "The Evil Dead" was aware of its terrible-ness and exploited it to grandiose, spectacularly B-movie effect, "Cabin Fever" is convinced it can simply be a good movie by being a bad one. Not quite.
The gruesomeness is oppressive, never scary and frankly more annoying. It is a constant reminder of the ways in which this movie could have been better. Never did the movie truly frighten me but maybe made me reconsider my digestion choices before watching certain films.
The random kid yelling "pancakes" might have been funny if I liked this film any more. As it stood, it felt pompous and gratingly in-joke-y. But Roth forget to let the audience in on the joke.
The performances are nothing noteworthy, the characters are presumably made to be so annoying we encourage their demises. Unfortunately, this was the case but only to an extent. I could only pray for their inevitable downfall. But I also prayed for the film's downfall. If I had never been introduced to these characters in the first place, I wouldn't have had to expend the energy to care.