CABIN FEVER (2002) Yuck! I kinda like it. Cabin Fever is a mess. As often as not, when I watched I was wondering, what the hell? But when it was over, I was smiling and I found I'd enjoyed it. I don't know if I'd call that a recommendation, but it's gotta count for something. An attractive cast is made very unattractive here, unafraid to endure the most disfiguring makeup treatments modern technology can provide. Some movies gross you out with wounds and acts of human depravity; this one grosses you out with a flesh-eating disease. Five young 'uns who I don't recognize - one of them I understand is from Boy Meets World, but you'll forgive me if I'm too old for that to mean anything to me - play college kids recuperating from their final exams, and grateful to have a week off renting a cabin in the backwoods where they can drink beer, smoke weed, and have sex for seven days. Movies like this remind me of how little I enjoyed my college days. But hedonism turns into horror, because they run afoul of a flesh-eating disease which not only turns them against each other, but against the locals (of the two- and four-legged variety). Cabin Fever does not really have a consistent tone, but it mostly tries to ride a line between inducing phantom sympathetic agony in the viewer ("Eew! Gross!" while a hand unconsciously reaches down to make sure everything's all right with one's leg) and keeping us smiling, awaiting the next gross-out. Some of these are serious and ugly (a face eaten off of a still-living victim), some are just so go-figure unfortunate you've got to laugh (he just HAD to climb down there and poke at that body, didn't he?). A good microcosm of what the movie's going for is in a campfire story about a massacre at a bowling alley; it's told well enough that we aaaalmost take it seriously up to the point when we hear the goofy payoff. The makeup is disgusting - though not as disgusting or as plentiful as it could have been - and these horribly slow deaths do a hell of a number on these good-looking teens' good looks, so if it bothers you that teens in horror movies (or any movies) these days are too good looking, you might be pleased to see what happens to them here. When has a scene of (such a splendidly proportioned) girl shaving her legs ever been so filled with dread? It's kind of limiting, though, that this is the kind of dread this movie limits itself to. Suspense is hard to build with such a slow-acting and sure killer, so the movie's patchwork of tones is missing a sense of serious menace. Cabin Fever's most serious mistake comes in the form of Deputy Winston, who gets his own theme from Angelo Badalamenti (!) but crashes the movie down to a dead stop during both of his scenes. Just what writer/director Eli Roth was thinking in creating this character, I cannot imagine. Second-most serious mistake: the last fifteen or so minutes piles on one ending after another, regardless of plausibility (do these yokels really think they can keep such a plague under wraps without the CDC finding out?). There are more than a few questions left unanswered by the time we get to the closing credits - what's in "the kit"? What's with that kid who bites everybody? Why does the dog get Monstervision? For all the things wrong with Cabin Fever, it still left me with a smile on my face when it was over. It's easy to pick up on Roth's enthusiasm, as well as his unashamed borrowings from his influences, so one gets the impression of a young director who doesn't quite know what he's doing yet, but is likely to give us something pretty special once he figures it out. BACK TO THE C's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE