Parked Review
Review"There's some kids in a cabin. They got a disease. They just gave it to Dennis.” – Tommy.A group of five college friends, two couples and the required loser, head off into backwoods U.S. for some fun time drinking booze, doing sex, and shooting squirrels. And if the cabin they stay at reminds you of a certain Sam Raimi movie then you aren’t yelling at the wind friends. Forgot to mention that this takes place after their final ever college exams and before heading out into the workplace. And if that plot device reminds you of about two dozen other movies, then you are spot on. Naturally, this being a horror movie, things aren’t all aglow with well wishing and running through fields of clover. Some local dude, named Henry The Hermit, shows up and he’s sick as a dog. Naturally the loser Bert (James DeBello) shoots him and then offers no help. However, Henry really wants help getting to the local hospital and shows up at the cabin looking worse for wear. Our “heroes”, very loosely termed, are a pack of selfish pricks and offer no support. Henry decides to thieve off with their four wheel drive, which finally forces our Scooby gang into action. They beat the shit out of Henry, also the vehicle for no apparent reason, before finally setting the Hermit on fire. Exit Henry stage left and straight into the local reservoir. Seems Henry was contagious with some flesh eating disease and before you can yell “pass the duchy from the left hand side” a few of our college retards are showing some disturbing signs of ill health. Naturally this doesn’t escape the attention of the local lunatic fringe, and we head on into Deliverance country for no apparent reason. There’s some weird kid called Dennis who likes to bite people and make with the kung fu, a Father Christmas dude running the local store and waiting on the “niggers” to show up, and to round out festivities, a party-down deputy. I’m getting pretty sick and tired of modern horror Directors simply ripping off older movies, and claiming they are doing some sort of half-arsed homage to those films. Here Eli Roth turns in a complete mess, and claims it’s some sort of revisit to the past. Yeah, I got the Evil Dead vibe aimed at my horror-loving bum, but the whole rip from George R Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was simply over the top and shows a Director/Writer without an ounce of originality in his bones. This movie is simply a disgrace that seeks to shock the audience into submission due to the fact that the Director doesn’t have an smidgen of talent. Forget plot development, forget character development, and cross out meaningful dialogue. Cabin Fever is a woefully inept example of post MTV moviemaking for morons. Calling this exercise in how not to deliver a movie a horror film is complete bollocks. Eli Roth is unable to provide a single scare scene, and is over reliant on make up and stupid plot developments. Where Roth gets it completely wrong is in trying to fit too much into a creaking movie that simply doesn’t go anywhere, and which relies on winks at the audience. Okay, we have a group of friends in the woods, so this could go in any number of directions. With Roth, we go in all directions and lack a consistent movie; in short, Roth hasn’t got a single clue about what he’s doing here. We get the virus, good material there, the local inbreds, yeah whatever, and some weird store keeper who keeps a rifle for the “niggers”. How about a logical plot there Roth? This is a shambles trying to fool people into thinking they are seeing a great piece of filmmaking. Roth has clearly never heard of the concept of character development or sympathy. I didn’t give a toss about any of the twenty-something bright young things in this film, and hence had no emotional involvement with their fates. I was taken out of the movie before it could really get going, and was left wondering how much running time this piece of schlock actually had. Seemed like three or four hours from where I was sitting. To state that Roth is ripping off every horror movie he can think of is really only touching the tip of the iceberg. He even reprises Wes Craven’s Deputy Dewey from the Scream movie, and if you’re doing that sort of rip then you are definitely scraping the bottom of a very large barrel. The movie certainly has some gruesome moments to lighten the load of the road-weary travelling through its overly dreary environment. The virus itself seems to result in massive amounts of blood flying in all directions – no wounds or blemishes indicate how this goes down – or in a multitude of scabs and rotten flesh without blood flying in all directions. We get some chick with her face eaten away, which actually brought a guffock from me as I’ve seen the effect used before and here it looks more bad Halloween costume than real, and another chick shaving her legs and taking the skin off at the same time. As you might imagine this is shock tactics without the build-up to really hammer home the advantages that could have been derived from the scenes. Roth as a director is a joke. He cuts left, right, and friggin centre for no apparent reason, and even has scenes that seem to last for a couple of seconds before he cuts to something completely unrelated. The David Lynch influence can be seen with an overuse of red filter that tends to irritate rather than bring anything to the movie. There are the odd good POV shots involved, though whether or not that actual brings any depth to the movie is debatable. A largely forgettable cast rounds out a forgettable substandard movie. Eli Roth’s debut Cabin Fever is a movie which is worth watching mainly to see just what the hell is going wrong with horror in the new century. Held up as a clever movie by people who should know better, the flick is simply an exercise in Roth ego. If you like horror movies, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can make horror movies. Roth would do well to remember that adage. This might be an attempt to pay homage to 1980s classics in the genre, but clearly this Director has zero idea why those movies are classics, and exactly how they weave their magic. As one would expect, Cabin Fever tanked in Australia, earning a less than impressive $725,000 in total at the box office. For Distributor Icon, this was a disaster of almost unparalleled dimensions as Aussie filmgoers simply didn’t buy into the hype coming out of the U.S. The movie did make $21,158,188 in its native America, but considering the bidding war that went on for the movie distribution rights in that country, the U.S. distributor Lions Gate equally fell on their arses. I know Movie ScaryMinds is going to take a lot of flack over this review, but we call them as we see them. This inept piece of filmmaking receives no recommendation. Rather than catching it, I spent most of my time in the toilet depositing it where it belonged.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... Eli Roth demonstrates how inept modern horror can be.
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