Zariwny delivers some minor gross-outs, but his slick production manages nothing resembling scares, tension, or a sense of dread. The tainted water angle seems even more ripe for horror these days thanks to terror threats and real-world nightmares like the Flint, MI situation, but the film makes no effort to tap into new fears. Following the same genre tropes – cabin in the woods, weird locals offering veiled warnings, etc – that barely worked thirteen years ago isn’t doing anyone any favors either.īody-horror films are still capable of creeping us out, but the effects and characters here offer up far too stale of an experience meaning there’s barely a cringe-worthy beat to be found. There are cosmetic changes here – the sheriff is now a blond sex-pot, the most annoying of the friends is now a Call of Duty-loving dick, the “pancakes!” kid no longer knows karate – but nothing works to elevate or fix issues in the original. (To be fair it’s one of the five jerks who damage the car, but sure, we’ll blame the understandably distressed sick guy.) Faced with a deadly, highly-infectious virus the five proceed to do exactly what you’d expect – they act like assholes, exchange bodily fluids, and do everything possible to ensure their demise. When an infected stranger approaches them for help he’s shot, berated, and set on fire, but before he disappears into the woods he succeeds in damaging their car. It feels flat throughout, the bloodletting disappoints, and perhaps most damning of all, it neuters “pancakes.”įive friends head to a cabin in the woods for a few days of sex, drugs, and general obnoxiousness – they’re pricks to each other and to the equally one-dimensional local yokels – but they discover too late that a flesh-eating virus is hiding in the water.
It’s no accident either as director Travis Zariwny is using the original script by Roth and Randy Pearlstein – a fact that makes it all the more strange that this version manages none of Roth’s already minor accomplishments.
CABIN FEVER 2016 PLOT MOVIE
Sure they’re narrative duds, but they at least made sense in the grand scheme.Ī fourth movie hits screens today, but rather than explore the story in one direction or another this Cabin Fever is actually a near beat-for-beat remake of Roth’s original. Neither managed to recreate Roth’s raw, manic mayhem, but they both upped the gross, body-centric gore for those of us into that sort of thing.
Like any moderately successful genre film it also started its own franchise with both a sequel and a prequel hitting home video in the years since. Sure it’s heavily flawed, but it’s also a nasty little shocker that accomplishes its admittedly slight goals with a messy efficiency. It also introduced us, without reason or explanation, to the “pancakes!” kid. As a debut it marked Roth as an energetic film maker to watch, the practical makeup/gore effectively played up the always-disturbing body-horror angle, and it put a fresh spin on the cabin-in-the-woods scenario by avoiding both slasher killers and the supernatural. Whether or not you’re a fan of Eli Roth’s 2002 feature, Cabin Fever, there are elements that make it one of the early 21st century’s more memorable horror films.
0 kommentar(er)
