Boy Meets Cabin Fever
Written: Nov 13 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Perfect acting, great direction, ending.
Cons: Not as great as Identity.
The Bottom Line: Cabin Fever is a newer horror film actually worth checking out.
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| updateghost's Full Review: Cabin Fever |
I was interested in seeing Cabin Fever from when I first heard of it. At Sundance... or one of those film festivals that only rich people or kids with lots of about-to-be-defunct credit cards go to, the movie was widely approved of, for its "homage" to old horror movies, which other people just said was "creating new horror." Not really being much a fan of old horror movies, I had no idea what they were really talking about. And Peter Jackson said he really liked it too.. so yeah, I was definitely interested. And the trailer really kicked a*se, from what I remember.
Being 16, I generally can't get into Rated R movies without a parent, and my family isn't the type that can really afford to go see your 8:30 showing at the local Regal Cinemas, so my mom and I waited to go see it at the $1.50 theater half-an-hour away.
I loved it. She said it was the worst movie she'd ever seen.
Finishing Cabin Fever, I felt somewhat reminded of Identity, which had some great touches of humor in it, but was very strong with its thriller genre all the way through, and at the end, it had completely twist of genre. Cabin Fever is somewhat the same- its keeps it horror genre strongly all the way through, adding in humor at spots, and then pretty much has a total change of genre towards the end. Identity's change was sarcastic but not so obvious, but Cabin Fever's was plain as day.
Five teenagers, Jeff, Karen, Paul, Marcy, and Bert, all take off into Paul's childhood cabin after their college exams. They have stereotypes that work for me because I see these kind of groups every day- Paul's just some really nice guy who's interested in Karen, who is a very cute girl, who has a sort of sisterhood with the INCREDIBLY hot girl Marcy, who is in a relationship for only sexual purposes with the jocky looking Jeff, and then there's Bert, who really likes beer.
After a run-in with the town locals (which I find to be a damn funny scene), the kids arrive at the cabin, and have a good time, Paul and Karen rowing in the lake and Karen being a tease, Jeff and Marcy having great college sex, and Bert drinking beer. They enjoy a campfire at night, and then... some weird guy with decayed skin shows up. They chase him away, and are a little disturbed by the incident, but only Karen really gives a lot of thought to the matter. And then... someone gets infected with whatever the weird guy had.
The fear starts, all of them fear infection, quarantine the victim, and the entropic decay begins. I think that's all I'll really say.
Cabin Fever is, simply put, a great movie. Its not a great movie in terms of AFI, but it is a great movie in terms of the amount of fun you have, the humor it uses, the scare tactics it contains, the interesting characters, and the reality of the first three quarters of the movie- the last part seems to take a backseat in sincerity, but its incredibly fun and well executed. A terrifying aspect of the movie is that the disease contained in it is an actual disease, called "Necrotising Fasciitis," and yeah... that's pretty scary stuff.
But more about the movie... Eli Roth, who I've heard of in places before, comes out with Cabin Fever as a first time director. Its feels far from amateurism, but it gives you a sense of first-timer director-ness, as if this is a director whom had this great directing skill within him for all his life, and suddenly just decided to release it onto us in a sort of epic way- you can feel the pride and confidence radiating from the camera angles and colors in this movie, and there's really just a sort of beauty to it. Roth's sarcasm towards the end is simply brilliant.
The acting isn't particularly stunning- you won't sit there and say "HOLY DAMN THAT'S SOME GOOD ACTING," but you'll never be able to say, "Wow, that line was pretty crappy" either. The actors just work as they should work- really, I think it'd be worse if these were Oscar-worthy performances, and seeing as the actors hail from some pretty bad movies (Scary Movie 2, ugh), and only one is recognizable (Rider Strong, who's definitely a different person than he was in Boy Meets World), they do a perfectly fine job.
And the music is just creepy. I don't know where it's from, who composed it, or whatever, but it fits every scene perfectly, and if you're feeling a bit light-hearted during a scene, the eerie tone of it can really set you straight.
With all that said, Cabin Fever, as good as it is, is one of the goriest movies I've seen in damn long time. I mean, it was just really, really gory. Pig intestines... decadent skin... blood everywhere... but its really just kinda fun. I really got a kick out of this movie, and I think it'd be worth your time to check out.
Rating: B+
Note: If you're a reader of my reviews, feel free to look through my old ones, where I've gone through and added these "ratings" at the end of them.
Recommended:
Yes
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updateghost
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Member: Tom Speaker
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