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Cabin Fever
(Reviewed September 11, 2003)
-
They should have called this one "28 Days Lamer."
This shockingly cheap-'n'-cheesy waste of time takes "don't believe the hype" to a whole new level. The producers somehow got an inexplicably glowing quote from "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson for "Cabin Fever"'s ad campaign. That wholly unjustified praise will sucker scads of trusting Frodo fans into buying tickets for this timid, timewasting turd. What those hapless hobbit-heads may not realize is that Jackson himself directed one of the cheapest, stupidest, most flat-out unwatchable horror movies of all time early in his career (1992's "Dead Alive," aka "Braindead"), so his critical faculties regarding this genre should automatically be regarded as more than suspect.
Most of "Cabin Fever" looks like a student project handed in by a guy who was nowhere near the top of his class. It can't make up its mind whether to try being scary (it isn't) or go for "Twin Peaks"-style tongue-in-cheek weirdness (a bicycle-riding party-fan cop with the looks and acting chops of a 1970s porn star is genuinely amusing, making you wish the whole movie had been played for those kind of left-field laughs).
The plot? A bunch of college kids who are renting a cabin in the woods come in contact with a virus that makes them spew blood and lose chunks o' flesh. (What fun!) Our Heros are straight from the Central Cliche Casting: The jock, the blond, the stud, the slut and the "nice guy." They do things no human being ever would do (a friend catches a virus? Lock her in a shed overnight on a bare mattress! Now that's compassion!) (Or even stupider: The most manically germ-phobic and fastidious member of the group, who runs away in "I don't wanna catch it" terror when things start getting gruesome, returns to the cabin later for an extended walk around inside the grotesquely blood-splattered place. I don't think so!)
The movie does include a couple of (very brief) topless shots of the slut, which certainly were appreciated. But when the scariest thing about a horror movie is its opening credit sequence -- mere words appearing against an increasingly blood-soaked background -- something is, as they say, amiss.
Back Row Grade: D-
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