Cabin Fever

Starring: Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent, Joey Kern     Written by: Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein    Directed by: Eli Roth

The Story: 

Pretend its Saturday night and you don't have a damned thing to do. Then a friend calls you and invites you to a kick ass keg party! There's gonna be lots of really hot girls there, he says, and explains to you that its gonna have the biggest, baddest, bestest keg of beer, a wicked-cool band and enough good food to feed a small 3rd world country. So, happily you get all gussied up, and head with all due haste to this party. When you get there you find out that the hot girls number to maybe four and they all look like Shemp from the Three Stooges, the keg is really just a 12 pack of Black Label (arguably one of the nastiest, cheapest beers on the planet), the band sucks and the food consists of stale potato chips of indeterminate age. After you spend a few hours there you go home crawl into bed and wonder why in the name of Sanity you even bothered to get dressed and go to this turd of a party in the first place.

Well, that's what I felt like after watching this movie. It came in a pretty package and I'd heard a little hype that it was a pretty good flick....but, I was lied to, my droogies. The story had potential, but it didn't seem to go anywhere, the characters were actually worse than the usual cookie cutter personalities you get in these kinds of movies...and I'd heard this was supposedly a "black comedy". If it was someone must have erased all of the jokes from the script. There's only one truly humorous part in the movie and a lot of people will probably find it offensive. And that joke comes at the absolute END of the movie which is a long time to sit through for one lame gag.

Paul, Bert, Jeff, Marcy and Karen are college students. They rent a cabin in what can only bee called "Hicksville" USA for a weekend of sex and pot smoking and head out in Jeff's truck. I don't know if its Spring Break or if they just graduated or what. The movie doesn't bother to tell us, and it doesn't matter anyway. Why bother with a small detail like that when the movie doesn't bother to give anyone a real personality. What traits they do have are the traits that will annoy the piss out of you. Paul has the hots for Karen, Karen 's personality at best can be summed up as absent, Jeff is self absorbed cardboard cutout, Marcy has a nice rack and Bert is obnoxious. For that matter, Bert is so obnoxious I wondered why the others would want him around for in the first place. When I was in college I knew a big fat loudmouth, obnoxious beer guzzling moron like Bert. My roommate nicknamed him "The Oaf". If you wanted to ruin a party just invite the Oaf. He could clear a room faster than anthrax.

The plot is supposed to be about how Karen comes down with a mysterious flesh eating disease and how the others get all paranoid and afraid that they'll contract it while Karen wastes away. In a nutshell that's what it says on the box. But before we can even get to that part we have to go through meeting the local yokels at Hicksville's general store, watching Paul make goo-goo eyes at Karen, watching Jeff have sex with Marcy (okay, that's not too bad....except that Jeff is a wuss so you'll wonder why Marcy would want to roll in the hay with him....well, considering her other options....Paul the dweeb or Bert the Oafx2 I can see it)  watching Bert accidentally shoot (but not kill) Henry, a local hunter (more on that in a moment) and meeting some pot smoking camper that has a dog. All of this occurs BEFORE the disease part of the movie comes into play and none of has a daggone thing to do with anything else except for Henry. Henry is the one that transmits the disease to our erstwhile friends, but how he got it is never, ever, ever explained. The pot smoking camper guy seems to exist only for the scene where he shares a joint with the group and to introduce the dog. Hell, the dog makes several appearances afterwards without him, which....hell, it doesn't make any sense.

Nothing makes any sense, for that matter. When Karen succumbs to the flesh eating virus her friends panic and shoo her away, making her sleep in a tool shed so they don't contract the disease. Now, they say they're gonna go get help (Jeff's truck is disabled) and then they proceed to not do anything. Yeah, Jeff and Bert find another house but change their minds about getting help when they find out that the woman living there is related to Henry. (They accidentally set Henry on fire the night before). What's stupid about it is the woman doesn't know what happened to Henry and in a twisted way, it was self defense. Henry was spewing blood and trying to steal their truck. Why didn't Jeff and Bert let this woman call for help when their friend is DYING? They could have done that without telling her a thing about how they set Henry on fire and let him run into the woods to die.

I swear this movie felt like it was two days long. I was praying that the disease would hurry up and kill them all. But it took forever for anything remotely interesting to happen. When Deputy Winston arrives at the cabin I threw in the towel. Not only was he a pointless character, he was just plain annoying. I'm thinking this quirky fellow was meant to be comedy, and lord help us. Anyway, this tired movie dragged on until all of the main characters were dead. There ain't no happy ending to it, but you won't care. None of it makes the slightest bit of sense, because the script didn't invest anything in the characters to care about. Its deeper than just telling you that the characters made really bad decisions at crucial moments. They did. The problem is I can't see real people acting like anyone in this movie. Characters on Beavis and Butthead acted more realistically then these goons. When the movie finally ended I was relieved. Unfortunately I was relieved of two hours of my life and a nice chunk of change I spent on this flick. The only saving grace this movie had was the moderately offensive joke at the end. (see below if you must know what it was) The sad thing is that there was a decent movie in there somewhere. It was just buried under predictable plot elements, silly useless characters and an overall layer of general dullness.

All in all I think I would have enjoyed myself more if I went to a weak keg party with the Oaf.

Best Lines:  “Its like being on a plane when you know its going to crash....everyone around you is screaming, yelling, 'we're going down, we're going down!' All you really want to do is grab the person next to you and f**k the sh!t out of them because you know you're gonna be dead soon, anyway.” -Marcy  fears they all will die of the disease and comes on to Paul.

Are you kidding me?

1.) There's not one character in this flick that doesn't argue with Bert or think he's an asshole. Which begs the question....why is he here? 2 guys, 2 girls and Bert. Beer guzzling dickheads like Bert usually hang out with other beer guzzling dickheads. I can't see someone like Bert even wanting to go hang out in a cabin with 2 couples. Why would he go? To listen to everyone else having sex at night? And why would the others want him to come? None of them seem to like him very much and even if they did would you want a 5th wheel around? I like my old buddy Scotty enough, but I don't want him around when I take my wife on a getaway weekend to a remote log cabin.

2.) Henry the hunter is the first to contract the mystery disease. He apparently wanders through the woods for an entire day before stumbling onto Bert. (Who shoots him, but only wounds him) But later in the movie we see that Henry's wife and home are within walking distance of the kid's cabin. so why didn't Henry just walk the [unwrite] home? I'm not buying a "He was disoriented from sickness" excuse, either. He had his wits about him when he first figured out that something was wrong. And when Karen got sick she was pretty lucid. I can tell you exactly why Henry went to the cabin instead of home....ITS A STUPID F***ING MOVIE!

3.) Why is it that every time there's a movie where people are trapped in a remote location and one of them has a cell phone, they can never get a signal when they need to call for help? Why, God, why?

4.) As I get older I find that I worry about the future of those younger than myself a lot. I meet way too many kids that are just plain stupid. I mean D-U-M-B. Like these morons in this movie. When they try to stop the very sick Henry from stealing their truck  they pretty much wreck the vehicle themselves. Bert shoots a bullet right into the front grill, for Pete's sake. Jeff and Paul hit the truck with sticks and bats more than they hit Henry! The whole time this scene went on I kept thinking "why are they destroying their only means of transportation?".

5.) I can watch Alien and not question Ripley going in search of "Mr. Jones" the cat while the alien monster is loose on the ship. But I can't get my suspension of disbelief wrapped around this.....Bert is trying to fix the bashed up truck. The Pot Smoking Camper's dog makes one of his appearance. Now the PSC never comes back after his first scene, but the dog shows up periodically to snarl and chase the others. Well, Jeff is standing there with the rifle firing warning shots at the dog while Bert works on the truck. Why didn't Jeff just shoot the damned dog? Huh? Why? Its clearly a vicious animal, they're clearly in trouble, Karen is clearly in need of immediate medical attention and Jeff won't shoot a dog? I like animals a lot and I would've busted a cap in that mutt faster than you could say "Ol' Yeller".

Sex and nudity: Marcy has sex with Jeff and later Paul. She's seen topless several times.

Huh?:

Why don't we find out where this disease comes from? Secrecy isn't helping this movie. I think they writers didn't bother to think of a reason for the virus to exist.

The disease works faster on some than it does others. Henry is sick for what looks like at least a day before he dies...and the disease didn't kill him, Paul did, when he set him on fire. Karen seems to be slowly dying. At least 2 days goes by before she dies. (and heck, Paul killed HER too! He bashed her head in with a shovel because he didn't want her to suffer anymore.) But Marcy seems to deteriorate within hours of catching the disease. (Now that I think about it though, the disease didn't kill her either....the dog did!) now that I think about it no one dies of this disease! They all get killed in some other fashion!

Don't ask me why the local sheriff would decide to just kill victims of the disease instead of taking them to the county Hospital like he said he would. For that matter, why didn't the doctor in the clinic call the county hospital or the CDC and alert them that some unknown virus is causing an epidemic in this small hick town?

The Final Judgment:  There's only one reason this movie isn't going into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. That's because at the end of the movie the one lame ass joke that I thought was a little funny caught me by surprise. When the movie starts the main characters stop at the local General store for supplies. There's a rifle hanging over the register and when they ask the old guy running the store what its for he replies "That's for the Niggers". They call him a racist f*ck and leave. At the end of the movie a group of black youths go into the store. The old guy reaches for the rifle and...and...gives it to them, telling them its all cleaned up just like they asked. Then the old guy starts shaking their hands and saying "Whassup, my nigga!" and generally greeting them like one of the bruthas. That's the joke, folks. Toldja it was lame, but it did make me chuckle for a half a millisecond.