I know it isn’t a World Screen movie, but it came on television on Friday night, and my roommate and I refused to watch Troy for a variety of reasons, so we were left with Cabin Fever. I had heard of it from somewhere – or maybe it was while researching Hostel. Anyway: College kids go out to hicksville, rent a cabin, and come into contact with a deadly flesh-eating virus that slowly consumes them all.
The reviews – which I only read after watching the movie – suggested a cinematic experience quite different from the one I had. Richard Roeper unsurprisingly called the movie an “ugly gorefest” – he’s the conservative of the couple, after all – while Roger Ebert admitted that director Eli Roth was “trying to do about four things at once, to make a horror film, a comedy, a satire, and a political parable about infectious diseases and none of them work”. Hackneyed, they called it – cliched. I think these reviews are unfair. I did see the substantially cut television version, devoid of a dog mauling a dead body (although plenty of corpses with the flesh eaten off), but I’ve seen far worse gore. More importantly, I think Eli Roth is trying to do something new with Cabin Fever.
The beginning of the movie is far from interesting. That’s the part that reads like a typical horror movie. There’s the Good Girl, the Good Guy, the Slutty Girl, the Bad-Ass Guy, and the Stupid Guy. There’s also the crazy yokels at the general store, racist and inbred. They all act according to their roles. But after an afternoon of sweet romancing (for the Good Girl and Guy), hot sex (for the Slutty Girl and Bad-Ass Guy), and shooting squirrels and a diseased hick (for the Stupid Guy), things start going a little bit off – not just the meat, but the formula, and it’s all started by a pothead from California named Justin, who calls himself Grim, who used to compete in the X-Games and has a dog named Doctor Mambo.
After five minutes with Grim, he is never seen again (whole, that is), and at first we tried to figure out why Grim was introduced at all. We decided it was to give Good Guy a truck to drive to town later on, but this could have been managed without such intent focus on Grim (such focus in a horror movie usually implicates Grim as the bearer of a Dark Secret or as the villain himself). But Grim marks the departure from all rationale in Cabin Fever. After this the formula cracks – the Good Girl is the first to get infected and is quarantined to the shed, where she dies; the Stupid Guy turns out to have the best survival instincts; the Slutty Girl displays the most loving and maternal behavior out of everyone; the Good Guy becomes a skillful killer of innocent people in addition to displaying astounding stupidity; the Bad-Ass Guy, after abandoning the others, comes back to the cabin after the rest are dead and though at first he seems to cry and show remorse, he starts smiling and laughing: “I made it! I made it!” Then of course there’s the “worst cop ever” whose sole philosophy is partying, and who only agrees to kill Good Guy after he chases the other party-goers away by killing a few with guitars and vomiting blood on some others (this movie was also reminescent of 28 Days Later for this and many other reasons, although in substance alone, not style), saying, “You killed the party, man!” And if that’s not enough to convince you of this movie’s psychosis, it ends with the cops stopping by the general store to drink some contaminated lemonade – suddenly rap music intrudes on hicksville and a group of black teenagers walks toward the store. You remember from earlier that the store owner has some means of disposing of black people, being the hick he is, and you see him hurry into the store with a scowl. Inside the store, he takes a rifle off his shelf as the black teens approach – then hands it to the first one, singing the rifle’s praises, and starts to greet them with ghetto handshakes, saying, “word” and “dog” and all of that. Yes, a fact we learned in the beginning of the movie is now null.
In the hands of a less skilled director I would submit Cabin Fever’s lack of logical flow to Something Awful’s movie reviews. Yet, I don’t write off this one. There is a fair amount of cinematographic coherence, after all – as the movie winds on the cuts and flashbacks and random flashes of red all serve to remind the viewer of what “cabin fever” really is: “a condition that produces restlessness and irritability caused from being in a confined space”. Informally, it drives people mad, and what are we if sitting still watching a movie about college kids being picked off one by one in a remote location if not trapped in a confined space of the mundane horror plot? No wonder we, like Good Guy’s hallucination in the hospital of a large bunny-suited man leaning over another patient (Donnie Darko’s Frank, perhaps? He’s listed as “we’ll never tell” in the credits), start seeing things.
So yes, this movie degenerates into a hallucination. It doesn’t have the sharp technological awareness of The Signal, so all it can manipulate is plot and vision, but it does so fairly convincingly.
Toward the end, the Good Guy has smashed up hicks that have come to kill them (an admitted homage to The Hills Have Eyes) and is searching for help or civilization, whichever comes first. He’s stolen Grim’s truck and is driving down the highway when he runs into a deer, which inexplicably has two of its legs stuck in the windshield and starts frantically flailing them in Good Guy’s face, like it’s dancing – it’s a spastic, maddening scene of pure absurdity, and my favorite in the whole movie, I have to say – until he shoots the creature off the hood, then gets out and looks at it for a while, as if remembering he’s supposed to be Good. The car engine then inexplicably dies (perhaps a nod to the inane plot devices that riddle most horror movies). Cut then, to a new group of college students partying by a bonfire, just like our crew was before the virus came – a stranger comes out of the woods, interrupting their normality, covered in blood. We know, of course, that it’s Good Guy, but they see the same thing that our main characters saw when the diseased stranger came rambling up to their front door – a threat, a bloody disgusting menace whose pleas for help must not only be turned down, but forever suppressed in violent death. Except Good Guy manages to kill them or otherwise frighten them away.
And I think that’s a good analogy to what shoestring-budgeted Cabin Fever is trying to do to the horror genre as a whole. I wouldn’t interpret this scene or the quarantine theme as some kind of sociopolitical commentary on the state of the world as a whole – I would, however, concede that it’s commentary on the state of the horror movie. Good Guy reaches this semi-climax after having a realistic reaction to a crisis, because what is realistic in a horror situation is a bloody disgusting mess of a plot with no neat wrap-ups, no satisfying endings, no narrative coherence. That’s what actually happens to people in crisis situations, but formulas, like most anti-crisis systems, defy realism in favor of practiced procedure. Cabin Fever is the threat, the mess, the nonsensical stranger, breaking the calm of the standard formulaic Hollywood horror and butchering it. And for that, it’s bloody wonderful.
(throughout the movie, I kept thinking of the video for “No One Knows”, by Queens of the Stone Age. especially when the deer went through the windshield.)
