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Cabin Fever [2002] As tabloid frenzies go, necrotising fascitis [the so-called 'flesh-eating bug'] was such obvious horror movie natural it's a surprise it took so long for someone to deliver an exploitation film on the subject - though the specifics of the disease are skipped over here by a script eager to get to the good, gruesome stuff and Cabin Fever is at least as much an entry in the backwoods menace cycle as it is an epidemic movie. A hermit [Arie Verveen] discovers his dog mysteriously dead. He catches the fast-acting bug, then wanders around the woods losing his flesh and his mind. Five youngsters - lovers Jeff [Joey Kern] and Marcy [Cerina Vincent], shy soulmates Paul [Ryder Strong] and Karen [Jordan Ladd] and beer-drinking clod Bert [James DeBello] - arrive in the area for a post-finals party and get creeped out by the strange, Deliverance-like atmosphere of the local shack, where an albino kid sits outside biting strangers [at the kids' suggestion, the proprietor puts up a 'do not sit next to Dennis' notice] while a folksy old man [Robert Harris] curates a vast bottle collection and proudly notes that a rifle on display is 'for niggers' [set-up for a clever later joke as he turns out not to be a racist]. In the woods, the kids rub each other the right and the wrong ways and Bert runs into the hermit, whom he credibly doesn't put himself out to help. Later, in a plot lick paralleled by Dreamcatcher, the blood-spewing victim shows up at the cabin and the kids semi-deliberately set him on fire after destroying their own car in an attempt to see him off. His corpse winds up in the reservoir and the bug gets into the drinking water. Karen, the sensitive girl who regrets the situation, comes down with the disease first and the others lock her in a woodshed to stave off infection, showing their true characters in the crisis. The bug spreads, cuing gruesome moments like a memorable leg-shaving scene, and everyone has the knack for doing exactly the wrong thing. The film plays not only on the fear of disease but the way infection turns everyone panicky and ruthless, as the friends who dump Karen in the woodshed are themselves turned on by rifle-toting townsfolk and, in the end, local authorities who restage the finish of Night of the Living Dead to clamp down on the problem. There's a fine line between homage and simply stealing ideas, but in
his debut Eli Roth mostly manages the former, threading in 1970s-style
plot elements [even reusing David Hess's songs from Last House
on the Left] while doing interesting things with unexpected
character arcs for the kids. The effects scenes are credibly horrid,
but the film oddly makes little of the rapid progress of the disease,
infecting characters only to cut away to action elsewhere, then taking
all manner of detours [there's an odd bit in hospital with a visitor
listed as the Bunny Man and Porky's-ish comedy about a party-loving
Sheriff's deputy] as it gets away from the truly upsetting material
to cover all the exploitation or horror-suspense bases. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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