jordan ladd, james debello
rider strong, joey kern
cerina vincent
unfashionable observations rating: D
Eli Roth’s movie tells the story of five newly-minted college graduates beginning their summer vacation by taking a relaxing escape to a remote log cabin in the woods. Things get weird from the very beginning, even before they arrive at the cabin. When they stop at a mom-and-pop grocery store, they meet an inexplicably morbid and introverted kid who promptly bites the hand of one of the five friends. Don’t ask why. That’s just what happens. It’s a self-described horror movie, remember? Things like this are supposed to happen.
When they finally arrive at the cabin, we’re subjected to the requisite sex scene almost immediately. Meanwhile, the other three friends are shooting at squirrels and taking a dip in the nearby lake. The whole group is having fun, and living it up in the middle of nowhere, far away from the demands of the real world. Things could not get any better.
And of course, they don’t. Soon thereafter, the merriment is abruptly disrupted when a seeming madman covered in bloody sores comes knocking at their door. In between his bloody coughs and painful moans, he asks them for some help. When they nervously shut the door on him due to fear and revulsion at his physical condition, he goes into a desperate rage and climbs onto their truck, presumably to drive himself to the hospital. Armed with bats, knives, and even a rifle, the five friends go outside to try to stop him. They manage to get him out of the truck after he has vomited blood all over the inside. They subsequently beat him and somehow even manage to set him on fire. The lunatic finally runs away into the woods, his body covered in flames from head to toe.
In what promises to be one of the funniest lines in all of horror movie history, one of the girls says of the incident, “That man asked for our help, and we lit him on fire.” Truly, these five college kids aren’t exactly models of compassion and empathy.
Soon after the incident, one of the girls starts to develop the same bloody sores that afflicted the lunatic. Afraid that they will get the disease too, the other four friends decide to lock her up in a shed. As the disease ravishes the girl’s body, the other friends get suspicious of each other, thinking that any one of them may have also caught it.
Ultimately, the affliction that spreads among the five friends is nothing more than mere stupidity. Instead of getting onto their truck to drive back home—or doing anything that would get them far away from the cabin—they decide to linger to see what happens! None too smart, they find out the hard way.
The rest of the movie is as nonsensical as are the five friends. We’re introduced to an arbitrarily evil police conspiracy, an irrational and angry Christian mob armed with rifles, and a dog that eats human flesh. In short, Armageddon itself materializes in this small cabin in the middle of nowhere—all without even a semblance of coherency to the story.
Aside from the bad acting and the tortured plot line, the film editing was particularly jarring. At times, scenes would last for all of 5 seconds, only to quickly cut to something completely unrelated. Indeed, it was easy to tell that this film was trying to cover too much ground in the context of a horror movie. There were simply too many unnecessary subplots and characters for what was supposed to be a rather straightforward story. Because of this, the movie seemed to drag on for hours, even though it had a relatively short running time of 94 minutes.
In the end, the scariest part of Cabin Fever was not the contagious disease, but the ease with which this movie spiraled into a wholly unintelligible mess.
I’d give Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever a D.
