Cabin Fever | Little White Lies

Cab­in Fever

13 May 2016 / Released: 13 May 2016

White rabbit costume, chequered jacket, holds stuffed toy, stands on rural road
White rabbit costume, chequered jacket, holds stuffed toy, stands on rural road
1

Anticipation.

Not enough time has passed for the original to be considered worthy of a remake.

2

Enjoyment.

A gruesome parable that urges you to check user reviews before booking your vacation getaway.

2

In Retrospect.

For fans of graphic horror only.

Unless you’re an Eli Roth com­pletist, avoid this remake of the 2002 par­a­sitic hor­ror like the plague.

Eli Roth has gen­er­ous­ly hand­ed over the entire script of his 2002 hor­ror, Cab­in Fever, to Travis Zari­wny (or Travis Z as he is cred­it­ed) in this sparse­ly imag­i­na­tive redo.

It’s hard to imag­ine a group of tech-savvy col­lege stu­dents book­ing their vaca­tion to a remote cab­in through a web­site that doesn’t offer cus­tomer reviews. A minor quib­ble, pos­si­bly, but this point is indica­tive of a real­i­ty that cares more about a ful­fill­ing genre con­ven­tions than curb­ing its short­com­ings. In Cab­in Fever 2.0 we head into the woods again (or is it for the first time?) for a bit of R&R, which turns out to be code for beer, sex and sun­set selfies.

There is inno­cent fun to be had before things go wrong, which comes in the form of a flesh eat­ing dis­ease that lurks some­where amid the thou­sand dif­fer­ent flu­id exchanges tak­ing place. After some strange encoun­ters with the locals and a spar­ing amount of roman­tic intrigue, the film pre­dictably starts to slump into a grotesque­ly graph­ic bloody show.

Aside from some com­mit­ted per­for­mances, a hand­ful of attrac­tive wide shots of misty lakes and some aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy brazen­ly ref­er­enc­ing The Shin­ing, the film is far too will­ing to relax into this mode. Per­haps Travis Z was so grate­ful to receive the nod from Roth in the first place that he felt immo­bilised when it came to inject­ing some fresh blood into this nau­se­at­ing horror.

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