Cabin Fever (2002) – Review

Hey, remember that time when Eli Roth was being touted around as “the Saviour of Horror”?
To be fair, it wasn’t his fault – it just was a matter of fortuitous timing as the horror landscape back in the early 2000s was strewn with wise-ass, post modern, teen, slice and dicers as the second age of the slasher movie ignominiously wound down only to be replaced with a sea of gritty remakes. And then along came Cabin Fever, a quirky, gooey, horror/comedy that wasn’t winking constantly at the audience or relying solely on revitalizing tired horror tropes, but instead had creepy, untapped premise that unfurled with cruel efficiency.
In that respect, it’s easy to see how Roth would be prematurely hailed as a new horror icon to follow in the footsteps of Carpenter, Craven and Cronenberg despite the fact this was only his first film; however, such hyperbole only really did Cabin Fever a disservice as some audience openly wondered what all the fuss was about. However, now we’re long divorced from those times, it’s high time we offer the illness laden movie a fresh diagnosis and retake its temperature.

Arriving at their remote log cabin with the bravado you’d expect from a group of five, party ready, college students celebrating October break, it seems that October break is going to be a monumental time-out from their studies. Nice-guy Paul hopes to finally hook-up with his long-time crush, Karen; couple Jeff and Marcy are just looking to let their hair down and token loud-mouth Bert just wants to get fucked up and shoot squirrels with his air rifle.
Things seem to be going well (despite Paul trying to process a ton of mixed signals from Karen), until Henry, a local hermit from the area, staggers into their life and triggers a downward spiral that turns their lives into shit. Henry, you see, has contracted a mystery virus from the corpse of his dead dog and its effects make the Ebola virus seem like a case of the sniffles and the students panicked attempts to warn him away from the cabin goes horribly awry when they accidently set the poor dude on fire and he runs off into the night.
Shaken by this turn of events, the group try and pull together to try and go get help, but due to a string of insanely bad luck and the fact that a lot of the surrounding folk round these parts are noticably quite eccentric (to put it mildly), matters soon unravel when its revealed that Karen is now infected too. From here the quintet splinters spectacularly as each have a decidedly different coping method when paranoia, fear and sickness start running rampant and the icky, freakish, body horror starts ravaging their skin and liquifying their insides.
Between this, wild scavenging dogs, the occasional odd local and an incompetent police force, will any of the youths make it out in one piece?

With the mantle of being future king of horror off of his shoulders, it’s something of a prudent time to reassess Eli Roth’s early output and when viewed with fresh eyes it becomes clear that the director was less trying to single handedly resurrect old-school, horror and was more trying to put his own stamp on squeam inducing horror/comedy with decidedly Lynchian spin. Thus Roth gives us a gleefully mean comedy of errors where miscommunication, fear, panic and a truckload of ignorance steer our leads into making virtually every wrong decision you could possibly make when a dangerously virulent virus is dropped in their laps.
What helps Cabin Fever’s hugely off-kilter tone is that it five main characters, while by far the most normal people in the movie, are still a clutch of horribly, entitled, self obsessed kids whose gossamer thin veil of humanity evaporates the seconds someone starts coughing up blood. Indicative of this is the character of Paul whose earnest attempts to do the decent thing keeps ending up having horrific side effects like a nightmarish Farrelly Brothers movie – while trying to ward off an ailing Henry with a flaming log, he only succeeds in igniting the poor bastard and his hapless attempts to decipher Karen’s mixed messages ultimately lead him having unprotected sex with Marcy. On the flipside, Karen and Marcy prove to be ineffectual voices of reason, often drowned out by the bullish yelling of the insanely toxic Bert who seems to be a thuggish, bullying, amoral prick even before the virus starts. And as for Jeff; he becomes the poster child of disassociation as he holes up in a cave to wait the whole thing out.

In a weird turn of events, the noticable dated  usage of homophobic slurs and other seemingky problematic utterances work in the movie’s favour (Bert wants to shoot Squirrels because they’re “gay” and later calls a sickly Karen a “fucking whore” simply because she isn’t keeping her distance) – where it felt like Roth was puncturing the kind of Jock mentality featured in teen comedies like American Pie, Cabin Fever now feels more in line with films like Bodies, Bodies, Bodies which saw a similar group of self-obsessed, young adults come to a miserable end from a problem born of their own doing.
If it sounds like I’m taking this all a bit seriously, thankfully Roth doesn’t and as a result, Cabin Fever is tremendously amusing as he takes his years working with David Lynch to great use and crams the supporting cast with oddball and weirdos. Be it party obsessed deputy, Winston; mulleted, kung-fu child-mute, Dennis and a bearded old store keeper whose use of the “N-Word” leads to an end-of-film punchline that’s the best laugh in the movie.
While it was obviously too early to anoit Roth as the next big thing in horror, the man undoubtedly knows his stuff, dropping in visual references to such classics as The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Burning and Night Of The Living Dead and employing effects house, KNB, to deliver some genuinely repellent sequences. I defy you to watch impassively at the aftermath of a meeting between a defenceless Karen and a hungry dog and the moment when an infected Marcy scraped the skin right off her legs while she shaves is virtually guaranteed to cause mass recoilings – plus the harmonica gag is fucking priceless.

It isn’t quite a timeless classic and it certainly wasn’t the eureka moment horror fans were promised, but give Cabin Fever a chance and you might find that you might be down with the sickness…

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