Cabin Fever is a remake of Eli Roth's 2002 debut film. It pretty much follows the same screenplay, with just a few cosmetic alterations. But the setup is essentially the same. Five young people (Gage Golightly, Matthew Daddario, Samuel Davis, Nadine Crocker and Dustin Ingram) head out to a remote cabin in the woods for a weekend of planned debauchery. Their partying is interrupted, however, when a man afflicted with a flesh eating disease stumbles into their vicinity. And soon one of them is infected with the same horrifying disease. Conflict arises between all five of them as they try to figure out what to do.
A lot of recent remakes have struggled to build their own identity under the looming shadows of the original works. This film doesn't even really seem to try. It is perfectly content with replicating the original beat for beat, offering little variation along the way. It is the most pointless remake yet, the movie doing nothing to improve on an already questionable work. If anything, this movie is a little bit worse, arriving in a time where the puerile thrills of the genre no longer have an impact.
The original Cabin Fever wasn't actually very good, but it was a startlingly nasty piece of work that displayed a certain awareness of its own empty brutality. It was paying homage to a brand of horror film that wasn't around at the time, and though it did not stand the test of time, one could certainly make an argument for its place in the horror landscape. It is not the kind of film that merits rewatching, however, and certainly not one that requires a remake. There is certainly room for some improvement, but the basic core of the film isn't really worth the revisit.
And anyway, that isn't even what this new version is trying to do. It isn't trying to make things better. It's trying to do the exact same thing. There are cosmetic changes: the fratty jock is now a hipster, and the sleazy deputy is now a woman. Some of the sequences feel a little longer, the film seemingly a little more inclined to linger on the details of the brutality. But this all plays out the same way. It's a bunch of annoying characters hooking up, arguing, and dying terrible deaths in the middle of nowhere. They even mostly die in the same way as the original. Nothing new is really said.
In fact, less might be said. In mindlessly replicating what went on before, this new version loses the vital sense of camp that gave the original the appearance of a purpose. There just seems to less awareness all around, less of a sense of the filmmakers trying to achieve something within all that nastiness. The gore is what it is, the film doing a pretty decent job of depicting the violence. The acting is serviceable, but unmemorable all around. The first Cabin Fever didn't really make any stars. It's likely that the stars of this one will remain obscure as well.
Cabin Fever just doesn't need to exist. The original film was made in 2002, and it already had all the tools it needed to realize its modest ambitions. People who liked the original will likely find this to be inferior. People who didn't like the original won't find any redeeming qualities to this one. And people who have never seen the original are better off avoiding both. But this film is out there, standing as the worst example of the recent trend of pointless horror remakes. Maybe that's the point of all of this. Maybe the film exists to comment on its own lack of purpose. That's would kind of clever, but it still wouldn't be worth it.
My Rating:
