Debutant director Eli Roth, was working with horses in Iceland ten years ago when he woke up in a cold sweat with an unbearable itch. His mood didn’t improve when chunks of skin and flesh came away each time he scratched.
To this freaky bout of necrotising fascitis (as it’s known to friends and family), add a binge diet of ‘70s exploitation flicks during those formative teenage years, and it’s not heart-stoppingly surprising that Eli has thrown his hat into the horror ring with his hotly-anticipated Cabin Fever, a festering low-budget gore-fest about a flesh-eating virus by way of The Evil Dead and Last House On The Left. Well, write what you know.
Like any number of films from this, or indeed any year, Cabin Fever features a bunch of teenagers who rent out a cabin in isolated backwoods. The local rednecks may make the folks in Deliverance look like sophisticated city-slickers, but that doesn’t bother this hormonally-governed bunch as they set about getting into each other’s knickers and under each other’s skin – to spectacularly splatter-worthy effect, once the weeping sores get going.
Unfortunately, however, Cabin Fever is denied true classic status by its overtly comedic tone, with too many moments requiring quotation marks around them.
The setting, for example, is less Texas Chain Saw Massacre and more The Beverley Hillbillies after an industrial accident involving Troma grade, mutation-causing toxic goo. What the director appears to have forgotten is that the whole point of cultural quotation is to make it subtle enough to keep the smirk on the faces of hardcore film buffs. What’s the bloody point if all the inferior cine-illiterate drones get it? These people made Ben Affleck a star. Forget them.
Petty misgivings aside, this is still lively and inventive fare – it makes canny use of soundtrack and surreal images. And you want scary? Check out the movie’s biting albino boy, quite the most terrifying hick this side of the Bush clan.