Since the Cabin Fever franchise started back with Eli Roth’s 2002 debut, the series has established a very obvious set up that saw obnoxious, toxic “bros” become literally toxic when they succumb to the ravages of a relentless, flesh eating virus. The first movie set up the premise rather well as the first selection of youths saw a vaction of drinking, sex and drugs go horribly awry as their friendships soon disintegrated as fast as their bodies. However, thanks to a string of production problems, the sequel couldn’t manage to equal the wit of the original despite the presence of Ti West behind the camera.
Well, never let it be said that you can’t keep an insidious, putrifying virus down and with Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, we have a prequel that spells out exactly where the grotesque disease came from. But the question has to be asked – did we need to find out how it all started and did we need an increasingly silly series to suddenly cut back on the comedy?
Marcus is preparing to start the next phase of his life as he is only a day away from marrying wealthy heiress Kate in the Dominican Republic, but before he can tie the knot, he has to make it through his bachelor party that’s being thrown by his immature best friend Dobs, his brother Josh and, for some reason, Josh’s shapely girlfriend Penny, who has something of an intimate past with the groom to be. Somehow, his buddies have managed to find an unpopulated island and charter a boat there in order to get as drunk and stoned as they possibly can.
At first everything as fine as you’d expect with beautiful surroundings and copious ways to get fucked up, but despite some sexual tension between Marcus and Penny, the only alarming other thing that occurs is that Penny and Josh spy large amount of mutilated fish remains while scuba diving.
Of course, we know that these aren’t your normal kinds of fish remains due to the fact that on the other side of the island, there’s a CPEC lab that’s investigating the case of a Mr. Porter, a man who is carrying a deadly, flesh eating virus that’s already caused something of a mess. However, while Porter is undoubtedly as infectious as a rat in the 1300s, he seems asymptomatic and thus may prove to be the key to discovering a cure. However, the increasingly bitter Porter isn’t planning to play ball until he can see his wife.
Meanwhile, after their little dip with the fish remains, Josh and Penny find that they’re developing skin rashes that over time start to get ever more serious and progressively gooier.
With the virus running rampant, trust all but evaporates and the only hope Marcus and his gang possibly has it to make it to the lab – however, it seems Porter has set a plan in motion that could bring doom to us all.
As a lifelong horror fan I’ve seen so many movies spread into becoming laughably unnecessary franchises I possibly couldn’t name them all, but surely one of the most tenuous series in modern history is the Cabin Fever movies. To be fair, I’m extremely fond of the first film and its sense of humour that added a sense of nihilistic ridiculousness to the usual jocular antics, however, its first sequel was a tremendously uneven affair that just couldn’t balance the humour and gore right. Well, if you thought Spring Fever got the balance wrong by making things way too silly, Patient Zero goes too far in the opposite direction, keeping the unlikable teens but cutting back on the overt humour until it’s time to double down on some over the top gore gags that also have become a mainstay of the series.
The main issue is, if no one wanted to watch a Cabin Fever sequel that was way too silly, why the hell would you reason that people would want to watch one that’s far more serious and as a result, Patient Zero insists on shoving you into quarantine with a bunch of whiny, self obsessed teens without the balm of humor to smooth out that abrasive nature. Thus, comically unlikable simply becomes unlikable as we follow these rapidly ailing idiots into oblivion as they wander through ever more gloomy sets in order to unlock a twist ending that doesn’t entirely make sense.
However, the largest elephant in the room is the bewildering presence of Lord Of The Rings’ Sean Astin in the cast which essentially means that he’s gone from Samwise Gamgee to Samwise Gungey in under a decade. By far the most terrifying thing in the entire movie is that the actor must have one of the shittiest agents in Hollywood for him to turn up in this dreck and the subplot of him trying to escape quarantine is not only bland and humourless, but feels utterly out of place in the franchise. Speaking of the franchise; while I’ve since given up the hope of seeing another actual cabin in this series (no one seems to get a fever either, now that I think about it), Patient Zero barely even feels like it’s an official entry due to it’s clumsy tone and its location.
Director Kaare Andrews may have a long and varied history writing comic books (he’s arguably most famous for Spider-Man: Reign – ypi know, the infamous limited series about an elderly Peter Parker who has killed Mary Jane with his radioactive sperm), but he certainly doesn’t have a particular firm grip on the material here. Any dramatic set up that is exists between the characters literally goes nowhere, which is weird when you consider that the franchise’s whole schtick is to have best friends at each other’s throat when shit gets serious.
However, if there’s one place where this third bout of Cabin Fever actually pays off is with the gore quota which, I have to say, is actually pretty impressive. In fact, I’d go as far to say that the bravura moment that sees a heavily infected Penny get into possibly one of the most grotesque cat fights in movie history as she and a similarly ravaged lab tech literally rip handfuls of skin off each other before the victor caves in the skull of her enemy with a gargantuan, black dildo – let’s not even get started with the act of cunnilingus that ends with impressively cringeworthy results.
Still, as fun as gooey, drippy, skin melting gore is, it’s a fairly hollow plus when the movie they’re contained in is mostly boring as hell. The attempts to link the prequel to the series are tenuous at best – if Preston wants to spread the virus to the rest of the world so bad, are we to believe he bypassed all the world’s major cities in favour of a remote area of North Carolina – and although it’s arguably a step up from the turgid second movie, Patient Zero leaves me with zero patience with this entire, sickly franchise altogether…
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