Cabin Fever (2002)
Rated R for strong violence and gore, sexuality, language and brief drug use
Score: 3 out of 5
The directorial debut of Eli Roth, a filmmaker whose name would go on to become synonymous with 2000s splatter cinema, Cabin Fever is a film that represents, for better or worse, Roth at his least constrained, free to run wild. Already, he was showing a solid grip on atmosphere and how best to present his film's big, gory set pieces, all while embracing a willfully campy tone that prevents it from getting bogged down in grim darkness. At the same time, however, it also showcases the nihilism that permeates so many of his films, with most of the characters being absolute jackasses who seemingly goes out of their way to cause problems. Cabin Fever is definitely an acquired taste, a movie that helped foreshadow the "torture porn" era of horror in the Bush Jr. years with its focus on the main characters' suffering and physical and mental degeneration. If stupid, unlikable characters are a deal-breaker, then look elsewhere, but if you're an aficionado of high-quality gore effects and campy grindhouse horror/comedy, then this film is certainly your ticket.
The killer here is a unique one. Instead of a big, hulking brute of a man like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, it's tiny: a waterborne bacterium that eats the flesh of the people it infects. In other words, the perfect excuse to show vivid scenes of people slowly rotting away in graphic detail, as sores and blisters open up on their skin, their lips and gums recede, and their eyes turn bloodshot. Our victims here are a group of five college students -- the "good" couple Paul and Karen, the "naughty" couple Jeff and Marcy, and the proudly single Bert -- heading out into the woods for a spring break getaway at the kind of remote cabin that's seemingly built to be a horror movie slaughterhouse, with no cell phone service, a long drive to the nearest town, and exceedingly weird and suspicious locals. One of those locals, who was infected and is now in terrible shape, arrives uninvited and drives the kids to scare him off with a can of aerosol and a torch, but not before he tries to steal their truck to get help and vomits blood all over the interior. Worse, his corpse winds up falling into the lake where the cabin gets its water from, making this quite possibly the only horror film where getting completely shitfaced on cold, prepackaged, self-sanitizing alcohol is your best course of action.
I was not kidding when I said that this is a cast of dumb assholes. Gay slurs are thrown around with impunity, Bert decides that he's gonna spend his vacation shooting squirrels and starting fires with zero regard for safety, the cop Winston turns out to be a ragingly incompetent drunk, characters cheat on each other with impunity, a store clerk tries to shoot Paul over something his mentally handicapped son Dennis did to himself, Karen accuses Paul of being gay when he fails to respond to her advances, and the moment that Karen becomes the first to fall ill, her friends decide that the best way to not get infected is to lock her in a cold shed. Almost immediately, this film establishes the main cast as a group of repulsively unlikable people, with each of them displaying some sort of obnoxious tendencies over the course of the film. Only Paul and Marcy ever really display much in the way of non-asshole tendencies, and even then, they cheat on their respective significant others to have an affair motivated by fear of dying. None of the acting was all that bad, either; this was entirely on the script. The film felt like a test of just how unlikable you can make the characters in a horror movie, and it then goes on to establish at the end of the first act that every one of them was completely screwed from the moment they got to the cabin. This is a sadist show practically designed to get you to root for the disease as it burns through the crowd.
It gives us good reason to, as well. Roth knew just what he was doing in presenting the setting of the film as a world gone mad, like what would happen if the makers of Grand Theft Auto did a slasher game. The film is imbued with pitch-dark comedy at the expense of everybody involved, whether it's Roth's cameo as a raging douchebag hiker, the behavior of Winston the "party cop", the downright comical amounts of blood sprayed as the characters get sick and start vomiting (side note: the famed KNB EFX Group did the gore on this one, and it is spectacular), or especially one of the film's most famous moments, the "pancakes!" scene. That last one in particular is a good litmus test of whether or not you will "get" this movie, perhaps even more than your opinion on the main characters. On one hand, it's a scene that comes out of nowhere and exists only to derail the protagonists' chances of finding help, less through logic and more through directorial fiat, but on the other, it's a flat-out hilarious scene that comes out of nowhere and provides one of the most "what the fuck did I just watch!?!?!?" moments I've ever witnessed in a movie. This movie constantly skates on the edge of madness, never falling over the edge and always operating by its own twisted internal logic but never going over the side and turning into a farce, and it, more than anything, was what made me enjoy this movie as much as I did. It's a ride that swings wildly in quality, but no matter where it was, it was interesting and never boring. Perhaps the best demonstration of how this attitude and tone serves the film so well can be found in its remake from two years ago. Keeping Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein's script but abandoning the comedic tone in favor of serious horror, that version was, by all accounts, a vastly inferior retread that basically nobody likes.
I was not kidding when I said that this is a cast of dumb assholes. Gay slurs are thrown around with impunity, Bert decides that he's gonna spend his vacation shooting squirrels and starting fires with zero regard for safety, the cop Winston turns out to be a ragingly incompetent drunk, characters cheat on each other with impunity, a store clerk tries to shoot Paul over something his mentally handicapped son Dennis did to himself, Karen accuses Paul of being gay when he fails to respond to her advances, and the moment that Karen becomes the first to fall ill, her friends decide that the best way to not get infected is to lock her in a cold shed. Almost immediately, this film establishes the main cast as a group of repulsively unlikable people, with each of them displaying some sort of obnoxious tendencies over the course of the film. Only Paul and Marcy ever really display much in the way of non-asshole tendencies, and even then, they cheat on their respective significant others to have an affair motivated by fear of dying. None of the acting was all that bad, either; this was entirely on the script. The film felt like a test of just how unlikable you can make the characters in a horror movie, and it then goes on to establish at the end of the first act that every one of them was completely screwed from the moment they got to the cabin. This is a sadist show practically designed to get you to root for the disease as it burns through the crowd.
It gives us good reason to, as well. Roth knew just what he was doing in presenting the setting of the film as a world gone mad, like what would happen if the makers of Grand Theft Auto did a slasher game. The film is imbued with pitch-dark comedy at the expense of everybody involved, whether it's Roth's cameo as a raging douchebag hiker, the behavior of Winston the "party cop", the downright comical amounts of blood sprayed as the characters get sick and start vomiting (side note: the famed KNB EFX Group did the gore on this one, and it is spectacular), or especially one of the film's most famous moments, the "pancakes!" scene. That last one in particular is a good litmus test of whether or not you will "get" this movie, perhaps even more than your opinion on the main characters. On one hand, it's a scene that comes out of nowhere and exists only to derail the protagonists' chances of finding help, less through logic and more through directorial fiat, but on the other, it's a flat-out hilarious scene that comes out of nowhere and provides one of the most "what the fuck did I just watch!?!?!?" moments I've ever witnessed in a movie. This movie constantly skates on the edge of madness, never falling over the edge and always operating by its own twisted internal logic but never going over the side and turning into a farce, and it, more than anything, was what made me enjoy this movie as much as I did. It's a ride that swings wildly in quality, but no matter where it was, it was interesting and never boring. Perhaps the best demonstration of how this attitude and tone serves the film so well can be found in its remake from two years ago. Keeping Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein's script but abandoning the comedic tone in favor of serious horror, that version was, by all accounts, a vastly inferior retread that basically nobody likes.
The Bottom Line
The reception to that remake illustrates my thoughts on this movie in a nutshell. If you try to take it seriously, you will hate it, but if you embrace it as the pure camp that it is, the work of somebody who seemingly set out to distill every horror stereotype into a single bloodbath, you will have a great time. It's the sort of movie where the special features include "Chick-Vision" that puts up the silhouettes of hands covering one's eyes whenever a scary or gory scene comes up, and whatever your immediate reaction to that fact was will likely be in line with how you regard the film as a whole. Either way, it's a very sick and twisted ride.
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