Movie Malcontent / CABIN FEVER

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CABIN FEVER / Malcontent's Mark: C-

September 12th, 2003

Paul: Rider Strong
Karen: Jordan Ladd
Jeff: Joey Kern
Marcy: Cerina Vincent

Directed by Eli Roth.
Written by Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein.
Rated R

To paraphrase film critic Gene Siskel, “In writing, it’s called plagiarism, in film, it’s called homage.” The movie Cabin Fever pays homage to several movies in the civilized-folks-menaced-in-the-rural-America genre; borrowing from Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, Night of the Living Dead, and The Evil Dead.

Cabin Fever’s premise borrows the most from Evil Dead: college friends spend a weekend in the woods and are terrorized by some nonhuman entity. It all starts when a stranger comes stumbling from the woods, covered in blood and sores. When he says he’s sick, they choose to beat the crap out of him instead of take him to a hospital. Once the sick man is dispatched, one by one the kids get infected by a flesh-eating virus.

Every scary movie needs a malevolent force that terrorizes the lead characters. In trying to do his own version of Evil Dead with a flesh-eating virus as the malevolent force, director Eli Roth paints himself into a corner. Although a virus can be relentless, there is something just a bit benign about a virus. Its strategy for killing is pretty straight-forward, it can’t surprise us with new and interesting ways to attack; Roth doesn’t have much room for play. And although Cabin Fever also tries to be a zombie movie, a flesh-eating virus doesn’t cause rage or insanity, so there can’t be any of the “friend or enemy?” paranoia that we get in most zombie movies.

And what are the rules of how it is contagious? Can we root for anybody, or are they all pretty much dead from the moment they discover the virus?

You can tell Roth knew how unscary a virus would be, so he tries to compensate; the kids are also terrorized by flesh-eating dogs, angry hillbillies, and a kamikaze deer.

Like the Evil Dead movies, Roth tries to inject a tongue in cheek humor into the proceedings. But Roth misunderstands how Evil Dead director Sam Raimi was able to pull off the wink-nudge humor. Raimi’s kind of horror/comedy worked because, like in Evil Dead 2, the malevolent force in the movie doesn’t want to just kill the main character (scary), it wants to mess with his head too (funny). Evil Dead 2 was a horror film that was also a comedy because the dead weren’t just evil, they had a sense of humor. That’s why we see the dead girlfriend of lead character Ash dancing in the backyard like she’s in a Fred Astaire movie.

As Roth tries to follow by example, he mistakenly presumes that anything absurd will be funny because it’s just plain absurd. Let’s take the kamikaze deer for example: one character drives down a road and crashes into the deer. The deer’s legs smash through the windshield and proceed to kick at the driver’s face. The character then uses a shotgun blast to dislodge the animal. If the flesh-eating virus was somehow responsible for this sequence, THEN the audience will find the sequence both humorous and scary. But since the deer and the virus are unrelated, it’s just an absurd red herring.

There’s one moment where Roth gets the funny/scary dynamic right: two characters decide to have sex since they will probably die from the virus anyway, but afterwards, they run to separate bathrooms to rinse and disinfect themselves.

The characters are all stock characters: there’s the lovelorn loser, the slutty girl, the innocent girl, the dumb jock, and the preppie guy. And a there’s a brief cameo by the stoner, but he’s introduced only so that there’s a recognizable dead face later on. They all die in the order that we’ve come to expect them to. It would be interesting if the characters realized they were trapped in a cliché and huddled behind the one character that always seems to survive these movies.

Evil Dead also had stock characters, but among the Cabin Fever actors, no one has the dynamic personality of Bruce Campbell. (Although one actor has the porn star name Rider Strong.)

There also could have been more of a sense of place. There’s a lake nearby, but where is the cabin in relation to the water? Also, there seems to be several neighbors, but at certain times in the movie, the neighbors are right next door, and at other times, they are miles away. And the cabin itself is underutilized. In the Evil Dead movies, the cabin took on a life of its own, literally.

Director Eli Roth is clearly a fan of horror movies. He has the screen bleed red just like in The Hills Have Eyes. He has the impoverished rural folks acting weird and menacing just like in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Just once I’d like to see a horror film with wealthy CEOs acting weird and menacing in Manhattan high rises.) But rather than bring something new to the genre, Roth gets too caught up in his own fan-boy fantasies. Homages are thrown on the screen in such a slapdash quality, you wonder if Roth is paying tribute to the films, or just completely lacks any creativity or imagination.

I was disappointed by how it appears Roth may have felt limited by his low budget. Personally, I think one of the best things for a scary movie is a low budget. Just look at The Blair Witch Project. Nothing sucks the scares from a horror film like a producer with unlimited resources; just check out the Joel Silver produced schlock Thirteen Ghosts and Ghost Ship. And it worries me that Michael Bay, director of ostentatious trash like Armageddon and Bad Boys II, is producer of the upcoming remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

When Raimi had a low budget, it just spurred his creativity. That’s why we get to see the camera swoop around and maneuver in ways we hadn’t seen before in horror movies. And with a limited budget, Raimi knew he couldn’t make any corpses look real, so he intentionally makes them look fake, which also works as being both scary and funny.

Cabin Fever appears to be intended for horror fans, but as horror fans we have been starving for new ideas. This is the very reason a so-so horror movie like Jeepers Creepers 2 can have a huge opening weekend at the box office. We’ve been waiting for the next step after the Scream trilogy, but Hollywood can’t deliver. We are given gimmicky sequel/reinventions, like Bride of Chucky and Freddy vs. Jason. Or reissues, like The Exorcist and the upcoming Alien: The Directors’ Cut. Or retro-80s tribute movies, like Fever and the upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Even if Massacre is well-made, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re not going to see anything new. And regardless of how poor the first Jeepers Creepers may have been, at least the filmmakers were willing to try something new: a mysterious half-human, half-bat creature, with its own set of eccentricities.

What Cabin Fever does have going for it is the gloom of a spooky story. It was smart to have the film’s action occur in the Fall and to release the movie in the Fall. We all like a scary story this time of year. Too bad Cabin Fever eats away at our patience for a creative and original horror movie.

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