Secluded vacation homes and groups of fun-seeking young people no doubt get along great most of the time in real life. But the movies tend not to be interested in their relationship when it’s healthy. Because it’s obviously much more exciting, they amplify what’s scary, not renewing, about decamping somewhere concealed from public life. It’s much easier to come up with cabin-in-the-woods horror movies off the top of one’s head — Friday the 13th (1980), The Evil Dead (1981), the recent X, and, of course, The Cabin in the Woods (2012) — than ones where people head to a woodsy abode and just have a pleasant weekend. Maybe that’s for the best: who wants to go to a movie free of conflict to concern oneself with?
Cabin Fever (2002) turns 20 next month; it is, by now, a classic of the cabin-in-the-woods horror subgenre. It’s also a conceptual rarity. Most movies with its broader conceit involve a murderer or mean-spirited entity of some kind ruining the nature-choked fun, slinking nearly imperceptibly among the ripples of trees with nothing good motivating them. In Cabin Fever, though, the killer is totally invisible to the naked eye and unconscious of the horrors they’re bringing. There’s no foolproof way to prepare for their strike.
Without realizing it at first, we first technically catch a glimpse of them when, early in the film, the college-aged spring breakers who have rented this movie’s cabin in the woods (Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, Joey Kern, and Cerina Vincent) come into contact with a wandering local named Henry (Arie Verveen). He greets them with severely blistered skin, between-life-and-death eyes, and generally disturbed vibes. The key is the blistered skin — the redness is actually the byproduct of a subsisting flesh-eating virus that won’t stop until no more sinew blankets the bones — and, later, some upchucked blood that gets all over the group’s truck when he tries stealing it. (Henry doesn’t get away with the car or his life: Strong’s character, Paul, accidentally sets him on fire, and from there the movie only gets more brutal.)
Cabin Fever is technically a no-hope-in-sight pandemic movie. But you never really think of it that way. It’s having too much a good time with itself to be seriously bleak. It’s Contagion (2011) played as a body-horror farce, unable to stop itself from enthusing over a tongue-in-cheek visual gag. There’s a leg-shaving session turned gory; an accidental tumble into some contaminated reservoir water; an in-progress sexual assault (the victim is sleeping) halted by a gotcha. (The woman’s once tanned-and-beautiful leg now looks like a slab of raw meat per an infection no one realized until now she’d had.) And because co-writer and director Eli Roth works hard to make these characters largely reprehensible, with their verbal volleying of the R word, “gay” as a euphemism for bad, and, for the men specifically, misogynistic chatter, we’re probably meant to take some masochistic pleasure in watching everybody succumb to a virus there’s no surviving.
Cabin Fever is a fun-enough movie. Roth is having the sort of good time that comes through in the filmmaking and can, at its best-realized, even give the movie an endearing quality — the sense that the person making it is excited to be making a movie at all.
But Cabin Fever isn’t quite functional as either a horror movie, a comedy, or a hybrid of the two. What are meant to be the scare scenes are too cheeky to be truly frightening. And the “comedy,” here reliant mostly on blow-hard characters acting stupidly and a twice-visited racist joke so bizarrely positioned it made me shudder, harvests no laughs. Bereft of a real climax — this is a movie where things get worse and worse and then ends, though with morbid funniness — Cabin Fever leaves you with the impression that Roth, though supplied with a decent premise, didn’t think very hard about where he wanted Cabin Fever to ultimately go. It just collects gross-outs and shocks. Roth does prop the door open — albeit unenticingly — for sequels; it’s since gotten many.
The one truly effective thing about Cabin Fever is Scott Kevan’s cinematography. He captures this autumnal, pastoral setting with such surprising crisp-aired beauty — up until the very end of the film, too — that it makes the horror interrupting what could have been an idyllic weekend in nature stick out that much more.
Peterson Reviews 