Cabin Fever (2002) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

Director Eli Roth went on to make Hostel, so I guess in its way this is the Lake Tanganyika of current horror. It’s also famous for not living up to Peter Jackson’s wild praise. I almost turned it off a half-dozen times. Yet I kept with it, and by the finale’s perfect punch-line, I thought I might have just watched some kind of insane minor masterpiece. Cabin Fever, reusing David Hess’s corny yet menacing Last House on The Left folk-rock, knows its ancestry. The characters aren’t any more or less characterized than the stick-figures of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Evil Dead, yet they seem more asinine and unlikeable. Are young folks less likeable than back then? Maybe, and this plays into Roth’s fairly clever point, which finally clicks into place with a brilliant final joke that upends the film’s political scheme, subverting the cliche of redneck racists and making us reconsider the young “heroes” as a bunch of narcissistic twits who rotted from their own frathouse-fit, devour-the-world self-satisfaction. It could still have been better. The script drags badly even at 89 minutes, and particularly in an encounter with a neo-Barney Fife policeman who’s a closet party-animal, it’s stuffed full of clumsy padding and random gore. But there’s some talent here. It reminded me, in turn, of a near-brilliant little film of the late ’80s, called The Carrier, where citizens of a small town are beset by a plague. It channeled Stephen King American Gothic and allegorical weirdness into a work that fairly nags at the memory. It was superior, yet nothing came of the folks who made it.