B-film horror flick provides a fountain of A-musing fun.
In a time where paranoia over diseases is rampantly visible in the headlines and the minds of the public with the whole SARS, envelope full of anthrax and West Nile scare, it seems almost fitting that some director from ‘out of the woods’ would come along and put this frightening notion into a the next horror flick.
The blood shack is a little old place where people get together…and where they eventually fall off with the traditional one by one elimination formula, setting the pace for a film full of fun savagery set amongst the panic of something worse than the worst case of acne which replaces the traditional masked boogey man from the woods as the silent killer. Director Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever pokes fun at the horror genre, no not in a Scary Movie type of way, but in a plenty to laugh about and plenty to be excited about manner where convenience-store kids with a nasty habit of biting into strangers in hillbilly country and where the woods is the ideal location for about a hundred of what I call ‘close-calls’. Doors get opened, shots get fired and people get sickly sick, this is where Roth has his fun with the genre revealing a surprise behind a door or by sparking up the audio of the picture with some dog barks.
You can tell that you are in for a fun time when the opening credits commences with the sound of birds chirping to the unique sound of flies swarming around something, which leaves us with our imaginary thoughts of what decomposition sounds like. With only a familiar looking boy from a lame television show to pinpoint, the cast features a bunch of no names and features at least one jackass having too much fun with a shotgun, who you kind of hope gets eliminated in the first round. Roth understands the genre and masters his low-budget debut with awful looking human flesh eating disease prepared with plenty of horror, but does not exclude the comedic elements.
Cabin Fever is perhaps not the most sophisticated in the horror genre and it isn’t necessarily innovative, it doesn’t transform the genre, but it is certainly an homage of sorts to the classic b-horror film formulas which have encountered a new resurgence of sorts with studios like Lion’s Gate taking the risk. Growing up in the 80’s I had my fair share of beta video horror fun, watching films about teenagers going off to cabins to lose their virginity and their lives and fittingly Eli Roth’s directorial debut applauds such films as Evil Dead and inserts a different taste of gore and does the job by provides plenty of moments where you fall out of your seat in laughter or crawl back into it fearing what the next image glimpse will be.
Originally viewed at Fantasia film festival on July 17th.