Cabin Fever (1/2 star)
review by Jon Waterman

Welcome to “28 Days Later...” meets sheer stupidity. A few young people go off to a cabin for a week of partying. After an overly long and uneventful setup, they come across a man wandering in the woods. He’s infected with some strange disease that seems to be eating his flesh. So, of course, they kill him instead of trying to help him. Now they have to find some way to stop the disease from spreading and make it out of there alive.

Are we really meant to care if these people live or not? Usually as a story goes on, we’re given some reason as to why we should like someone such as a main character or an underling we know will die near the end. Instead, everyone turns into a worse human being than they started as. Maybe some would welcome this change, praising the against the grain nature. Not me. If I don’t care what happens to the people I’m watching, why should I keep watching?

The characters are all pretty shallow and very ignorant. Nothing gets accomplished except for furthering disease and making me hate the movie more. And then there are the people that are thrown in just to lengthen the already way too long movie (at 94 min). We got the stoner that really only shows up once, the partying cop that’s as pointless and as awkward as anything else you’ll see on screen this year, and to top it all off the little boy that sits on a bench and bites people (and provides one of the most ridiculously random things put into a non-comedic movie).

Perhaps I should use the term “non-comedic” lightly. It’s quite funny, but I seriously doubt most of it is intentional. I’ve never seen BB gun with a clip that sounds like a rifle before. The blatantly funny stuff of course doesn’t work. But it’s scenes like listening to the party cop blabber on with the horribly goofy music in the background or seeing one of the girls crying in the bathtub as she shaves her diseased legs that add the real humor to it. I probably haven’t laughed harder this year…and I saw “Grind.”

Speaking of that crap on wheels movie, Joey Kern is in both that and this. He pretty much plays the same character here, except without sunglasses and a dance break. Of course the rest of the cast sucks, too.

The director, Eli Roth (who came up with the story, produced and co-wrote with Randy Pearlstein – actor in “Dead Man on Campus”), for some reason allowed a slew of weird shots that tried to make the movie look more artistic, but really just looked incredibly staged. That mailbox doesn’t need to be so prominent in the frame if it serves no purpose. Overall, though, the film looked nice. It was shot well, and I applaud the use of makeup rather than computers, but as soon as people started talking, it was all down hill.

Avoid this one like the plague…or “Cabin Fever.”

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