Review: Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, disturbing gross content, sexuality/nudity and pervasive language (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 2 out of 5

Before he became one of the most beloved horror filmmakers working today, Ti West was a young hotshot talent with a couple of indie horror flicks under his belt itching for his big break. And in 2009, he made two films that each promised to put him on the map. One of them, The House of the Devil, was widely acclaimed, and in hindsight not only marked him as a filmmaker to watch but foreshadowed the coming 2010s boom of "elevated horror" with its emphasis on slow-burn chills and throwbacks to '70s/'80s vintage Satanic Panic flicks. Then there's this, a sequel to Eli Roth's 2002 body horror splatterfest Cabin Fever, which at first glance might've looked like the sort of film -- a sequel to a well-received mainstream hit that helped put its own director on the map -- that would do more for West's career than another little indie, and I imagine that this was no small part of the reason why he signed on. Unfortunately, the experience of making it turned out to be so wretched, with much of the film being reshot and edited by the producers against West's wishes, that he tried to give it the Alan Smithee treatment and have his name removed from the credits, failing only because he wasn't yet a member of the Directors' Guild of America. To this day, he has disowned the film and regards it as a black spot on his filmography.

I'm telling this story because this is another one of those movies that I went into knowing it was gonna suck, and yet curious as to how bad it actually was. I rewatched the original Cabin Fever first, and it still holds up as the sort of movie it set out to be, a nihilistic, darkly comedic gorefest in which a bunch of jackasses get what they all have coming to them. Say what you will about Roth's tendencies as a filmmaker, but he knows how to make a flat-out sadist show and do it well. While this movie has moments that worked, from its icky gore effects to some of its more creative touches, and I don't doubt that West's vision was heavily tampered with by the studio, I also wonder if he was the right person to even direct this in the first place given that his tendencies making horror movies stand almost wholly opposed to Roth's. The film tries to replicate the black comedy feel and hate-sink characters of the original, but it also tries to make its protagonists likable enough for me to root for them, and fails on both counts by falling into a hazy middle ground where I couldn't bring myself to root for or against the people on screen. It doesn't have a story so much as it has a series of events, and while I get the tone it was going for in how it tried to convey this series of events with the same nihilistic glee that Roth brought to the first movie, it ultimately felt like it pulled its punches in all the wrong places even as it brought the gore. Ultimately, it's not completely irredeemable, but it's not something I can recommend, even if you're a fan of West or the first movie.

This film follows on right where the last one left off, with water from the lake contaminated by flesh-eating bacteria bottled and sold at a high school where the students are getting ready for prom. Right away, I tuned out about thirty minutes in once it became clear that all of these characters were one-note teen sex comedy stereotypes: the handsome but nerdy protagonist Jonathan, his horny best friend Alex, the "good girl" Cassie who the protagonist has a crush on, Cassie's rich and popular boyfriend Marc, the mean popular girl Sandy, the slutty girl Liz (who we later find out also works as a stripper), and the disapproving faculty. None of these characters were interesting, and even the ones I was supposed to like just came off as assholes, most notably John when he gives Cassie a big speech about how she's too good for that jerk Marc and really deserves a nice guy like him, a speech that felt like a bitter incel rant and yet we're supposed to agree with given how Marc is portrayed as a vile, jealous bully throughout the film. (It didn't help that, while none of the cast here was particularly great, Marc's actor gave a truly terrible performance, one of the least convincing bullies I've ever seen in a movie.) The film was trying to give its victims a bit more depth than the usual teen horror flick, but it did so by bringing in tired clichés from a different genre instead and doing nothing interesting with them that other, more straightforward teen sex comedies like American Pie and Superbad didn't do better.

And when it wasn't focusing on the kids, it was focusing on Winston the "party cop", the one returning character from the first movie (barring a brief cameo in the opening). As a minor supporting character who we only got in small doses, Winston in the first movie was tolerable and hilarious, a bumbling dumbass who feels like he became a cop so he could abuse the perks of his job to score drugs and get laid, thus explaining some of the terrible police response to the events of the first movie. Here, however, he's one of the heroes, suddenly gaining a burst of intelligence to put together the source of the deadly disease burning through the school and trying to warn his bosses and contain it... all while still otherwise being the same party-hard dumbass he was before. As a guy who we're supposed to root for to save the day, Winston wasn't funny or cool, but simply annoying, somebody who contributes nothing to the film and doesn't even do much to help, once again causing more problems than he solves for everyone else. He suffered from the same problem that the teenagers had, in that trying to give him more depth as a character paradoxically made me like him less, since a key part of what made the first movie work was that the characters were all a bunch of pieces of shit whose deaths would be no great loss. The subplot with the soldiers in gas masks and hazmat gear who lock down the school during prom had the potential to be interesting, but all they do is serve as menacing, faceless bad guys who explain why the remaining uninfected teenagers can't just leave the school.

I will give this movie credit for the brief moments that worked. As in the first film, the special effects were top-notch, giving viewers graphic scenes of human bodies decaying and falling apart. Highlights include the truck driver who starts dying in the middle of a restaurant, one kid who got infected through oral sex whose dick is now falling off, a graphic twist on the "prom baby" trope, and of course, the big obligatory homage to Carrie during the prom sequence where nearly everybody winds up infected by the tainted punch bowl. The soundtrack too was on-point (can't fault a horror movie using the theme to Prom Night), and there are lots of moments of visual flair that hint at the version of this movie that Ti West was trying to make, most notably the animated opening and closing credits sequences depicting how the infection spreads. Once the second half of the film drops the terrible attempts at making a teen comedy and turns into the sort of grim body horror flick that the first one was, I started having some actual fun with it as I shut off my brain and just enjoyed some gnarly carnage. This movie's better qualities beyond the gore feel like they came out of a different movie entirely, leaving me wondering just how far the reshoots went, especially given what West has said about his experience working on it. He's said in interviews that he was trying to make his own version of a John Waters movie, and occasionally, I could see that poke through, especially with the darkly comic ending at a strip club.

The Bottom Line

Ti West has disowned this movie for a reason. Even fans of his are advised to skip it, a deeply compromised film that feels like an insipid 2000s teen sex comedy mixed with a fairly forgettable splatter film. It wasn't outright terrible, but it's already a movie I'm forgetting I watched.