Have you ever watched a series of movies and just thought: why?
Let me put it another way, when I satcdown to watch the second Cabin Fever movie, I couldn’t help but wonder why someone thought that Eli Roth’s fun, icky debut actually needed a sequel. However, after watching the third film I also remember puzzling over why it also needed a trilogy and now that I’ve finally made it to the remake (made a mere fourteen years after the original) I’m questioning why this has happened as well.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I actually rather like the original Cabin Fever’s quirky unpredictability and as a horror fan, unnecessary franchises are something of a regular minefield that just needed to be traversed every so often to get to the good shit, but whether I live to be a hundred or I die tomorrow at the hands of a flesh eating virus, I will never understand why Cabin Fever was deemed worthy of four installments in under fifteen years.
Maybe low budget horror producers are coming down with something…
Stop me if you’ve heard this before… So there’s this group of five kids who rented a cabin deep in the woods in order to spend a week-long vacation away from everything that seemingly includes television, phone reception, video games and weed. While Jeff and Marcy are presumably planning to fill the hours with long bouts of sweaty sex and Paul is hoping to score with his long time crush Karen, fifth wheel Bert decides to curb any withdrawals from online gaming by revealing he’s brought an assault rifle with him which he plans to use to shoot squirrels with or something.
However, while out on his rodent annihilating spree, he comes across a hermit living in the woods who seems to have contracted something pretty fucking serious as his flesh is already starting to decay. Bert manages to scare him off (by fucking shooting him), but opts not to share his experience with his peers, hoping that it will all come to nothing, but unbeknownst to the group, the deadly virus has already working it’s magic. One by one the quintet start falling foul of the exceedingly virulent disease, but when things start to look extra bleak, the survivors find that other issues have assembled to prevent them simply escaping.
Whether it’s the hostile locals stopping them making a break for it, the appearance of a hungry and virus ridden dog, or just good old paranoia causing them to break ranks, soon each of these five friends are at each other’s throats as their survival instincts and fear instantly override years of friendship.
As the blood starts to drip and skin starts to slip, matters get evermore gruesome until the question becomes not who will be left, but what will left of them?
Things are about to get real sick.
The problem with reviewing the 2016 version Cabin Fever is that I’m not entirely sure where to start because this thoroughly unnecessary remake hues so closely to Eli Roth’s original, I have no idea why anyone even bothered. In fact, the two movies are so similar, when I saw Roth’s name attached to a co-writing credit I just assumed it was there because the original creator just handed over the original script to someone else to make a couple of updates over their lunch break. However, the real intriguing question is why anyone donated their precious time to get this thing made – I mean, the pay couldn’t have been that great, right?
For a start, Cabin Fever is hardly what you’d call a beloved franchise as the second and third instalments are universally pointless and so you couldn’t cite a series course correction as a reason to green light a remake; similarly, the only real additions to the film is inclusions of more modern tech such as smart phones or the swapping out of an air rifle for a bona fide assault weapon. But from here on in, the vast majority of the Cabin Fever remake is exactly the same so the only sensible reason I can think of is that Roth wanted a version of his film out there that didn’t include so many casual, gay slurs that were pretty prevalent at the time.
Anyway, for whatever reason the filmmakers had to resurrect the moldy carcass of a franchise nobody asked for, the final result is admittedly competent, but also completely pointless if you’ve watched the original. Worse yet, director Travis Zariwny isn’t able to fully replicate the quirky humour and Lynchian oddness that Roth brought to his debut that made his deliberately obnoxious characters feel more rounded as they struggled to escape this body rotting nightmare. Once again we have a remake all but steam-cleans every shred of the quirks out of the original leaving a bland husk in its wake that inevitably makes it feel like every other remake that’s flubbed the charisma of its inspiration.
Still, seeing that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, there’s the occasional high point here and there. The gore effects are somewhat more refined that the 2002 version with the gruesome moment when someone tries to put one of their ravaged friends out of their misery with a spade. While the 2002 swing at this scene was pretty straight forward, this new take makes things much, much worse that just prolongs things for the victim to an insane degree. Alongside that, Zariwny tries to squeeze some of his own personality into proceedings, but only succeeds in replicating the opening moments The Shining (complete with score), which is something of a problem when your most obvious directorial flourish has been stolen part and parcel from Stanley Kubrick.
Another rather noticable issue is that even though the movie doesn’t manage to replicate Roth’s uber-quirky tone, it still keep the original movie’s more stranger moments. In the original, the bonfire story concerning a murder in a bowling alley added to the off-beat nature but here it’s merely filler with no real point at all and while Dennis the mute porch kid is all present and correct, his lack of nonsensical kung-fu also makes his inclusion somewhat pointless. Worse of all is inept, party loving, frustrating Deputy Winston who now has been gender-swapped into a mysterious, female officer of the law who veers between being clueless and frighteningly proficient with a sniper rifle simply depending on what the movie requires her to do. All these moments just added to the whole, weird cocktail that Roth was bringing us back in the 2000s, but here it’s just either distracting, annoying or both and rarely actually funny.
While not technically a bad bad film, the Cabin Fever remake does suffer horribly from a fatal case of over familiarity that will no doubt annoy fans of the original and bore newcomers no matter how gnarly the recreation of the infamous leg shaving scene comes out.
Puts the “flu” into superfluous.
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