Cabin Fever (2016)

Rating: 1/5

I find it strenuous not to begin this review with a gospel-style "Why, oh, why, Lawd?!", because the remake of Cabin Fever just breaks so many rules, it's hard to know where to begin. Well, let's start with time: how long is a reasonable period between remakes of a film? 30 years perhaps? Certainly not 15. That's how long it's been since Eli Roth's original screamer of a teen horror was released, and it did not take long to gather a cult following. But the majority of the original's audience is still young enough to identify with the story (the teens are all played by people our age, anyhow). I saw Cabin Fever in 2005, at the age of 13, and it remains a favourite. Its perfect blend of bloody gore, intrigue and hopelessly millennial humour made it pure gold to my generation, and the next up.

Secondly, if you're going to remake a movie, isn't the crummy excuse always that the makers are 'giving it their own twist' or reimagining the story in some form? What is the point of remaking a fifteen year old movie, and doing it almost shot-for-shot identically?! There is basically nothing to distinguish this Cabin Fever from any of the other dead-teenager riffraff. I counted four instances throughout in which the action did not borrow exactly from its predecessor's. Four. Way to make original material, guys. And perhaps the most offensive thing to top it all off: dialogue is identical, except for the 2000s humour. No 'gay'. No gay squirrels to shoot, and no romantic protagonist to tell not to be gay. This blows.

So here we are. Don't anybody dare watch this crapfest without watching the real one. Anyhow... the kids (*ahem*late 20s*ahem) are off on spring break or whatever and rent a cabin in the woods whose neighbouring landscape is inhabited by your classic yokel bunch (see other reviews for fun with the Yokel Bunch!), which was still a fairly original bit back in 2001. The douchey third wheel who once brought a pussy air rifle along, for shooting aforementioned gay squirrels, now has a fucking AK47 (Murica), and does considerable damage to the infected hobo he accidentally shoots.

When the guy rocks up to the cabin later, the mayhem ensues: they get infected...it's in the water... etc. Fairly standard, especially because by this point, you have given up on director Travis Zariwny (in the credits, he even has the audacity to go by just Travis Z...how hip) making any effort at originality. But one of the four differences that severely got under my skin was the sex change of Deputy Winston. You'll recall that Winston was originally played with absolute perfection by evasive actor/musician Guiseppe Andrews, as a young slimeball with social issues who was as obsessed with partying as he was with doing an unwittingly terrible job at being a policeman. Here we have your average Page 3/Playboy fodder (Louise Linton), i.e. a young woman, playing Winston, with almost identical dialogue. Here, it comes off as just some strange copper in desperate want of a threesome but not the balls to ask for one.

I seriously don't know where to go from here. I just find myself reminiscing about all the hilarious scenes in the original Cabin Fever... the guy who swallows the harmonica -- the kids selling infected lemonade for 'fiiiive siiints' -- the local hick that's got a shotgun on the wall 'for the niggers', only for a car full of black dudes to roll up during the closing credits and thank the dude for fixing the shotgun up for them. It was just so of its time, and the thing is, a lot of people of my generation... we still think it's the time. We don't feel old, and we still enjoy the things we did during adolescence, and that includes Eli Roth's Cabin Fever. If kids today want to check out a good, gory horror movie, they can fucking well buy the original! (It's not as if they'd want to return it to Blockbuster, even if that were still a thing).

POST SCRIPT - The paragraph I just finished with is significantly effective as a conclusion, so I thought I'd add some interesting, though terrifying, tidbits. Years ago, my sister and I watched Cabin Fever with our Pop, the learned old devil. And he informed us that the gross flesh-eating disease to which the teens succumb is in fact a real thing. The aptly named Necrotising Fasciitis really is a killer virus that eats away at your body and kills you within a day or two. Rare but real, and what are the odds of getting an ambulance on the phone by the time you realise your fucking fingers have fallen off anyway?!