Your car and mobile phone don’t work, and there’s a disturbing looking hobo lurking out there in the trees.
Then one of your friends falls sick with an illness which makes their skin peel off like wet papier-mâché.
What do you do ?
Do you bravely set out on foot to get help, or do you lock them into an outbuilding, and pray that they haven’t infected you ?
That’s the dilemma facing Paul (Rider Strong), Karen (Jordan Kidd), Bert, Macey and Jeff in CABIN FEVER, a genuinely scary and gruesomely funny 2003 horror flick which is unashamedly inspired by low budget classics of the 70s like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and "The Hills Have Eyes". Those films managed to scare audiences silly without resorting to multi-million dollar computer generated images, and first time director Eli Roth achieves much the same result with a cast of unknowns, numerous buckets of fake blood, and a tight, no-nonsense story.
All the familiar elements of a horror movie are present and correct, from the teens in terror, to the in-bred hillbillies, and the isolated location, but there are none of the tiresome, self referential jokes that had become the staple of Hollywood horrors in the early noughties with the "Scream", and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" series.
CABIN FEVER also neatly sidesteps the stale clichés of the horror genre.
None of the group decide it would be a good idea to split up to search for help, no one creeps silently up behind someone else, grabs their shoulder, scaring them half to death, then says “hey Brad, we’ve been looking for you”, and neither of the girls twists her ankle while running for her life.
Roth’s twist on the formula is to make the terror invisible. Its not a masked man with a chainsaw, or a family of deformed cannibals, but an ebola-like flesh eating disease which turns the teenagers end of college holiday into a living nightmare.
CABIN FEVER is funny, scary and a refreshing change of style. Just don’t watch it on your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment