Campy gorefest about five oversexed college slackers trapped in a remote woodland cabin who find themselves pitted against each other when some of their number become infected with a virulent flesh-eating virus. Playing on viewers' growing unease over biological pathogens, director Eli Roth raises thought-provoking questions about the way we treat those ostracized by society, but any serious discussion is cut short by the film's formulaic premise and predictable reliance on blood, beer and babes. Excessive gory violence, sexual encounters with nudity, recurring drug abuse, as well as pervasive rough and crude sexual language. O -- morally offensive. (R) 2003
Full Review
Five college friends on spring break in the North Carolina woods find themselves pitted against one another when several members of the group contract a highly contagious flesh-eating virus in the campy gorefest "Cabin Fever" (Lions Gate).
Laced with gruesomely dark humor, director Eli Roth's frightener aspires to social satire but, true to its crude blood-beer-and-babes pedigree, quickly plummets into B-movie silliness.
The grisly affair opens with a carload of preternaturally good-looking, oversexed slackers driving to a remote cabin for a weekend of co-ed debauchery. No sooner do they arrive when two of the hormonally hyperactive herd, Jeff (Joey Kern) and Marcy (Cerina Vincent), turn off the car engines and turn on theirs, jumping into bed for a scene of gratuitous sex. The group's evolutionary missing link, Bert (James DeBello) -- think Jim Belushi in "National Lampoon's Animal House," but not as classy -- left without a mate, loads up on brewskis and ammo and heads into the woods to shoot possum.
Communing with nature, Bert accidentally shoots a blood-soaked hermit who looks like he was either flayed or is AWOL from George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." Promising to return with a doctor, Bert hikes back to the cabin, but remains quiet about his encounter. Later that evening the plague-ravaged man stumbles into their camp begging for medical assistance. Split over what to do, Bert takes charge and slams the cabin door in the man's face. When the hermit tries to steal their Jeep, they beat him mercilessly, setting him on fire and sending him fleeing back into the woods, but not before he infects the vehicle -- their only means of escape -- with bloody projectile vomit.
Unbeknownst to the frazzle-nerved frat-pack, the hermit dies and his rancid corpse falls into a nearby reservoir, contaminating the cabin's water supply. Predictably, one by one, the group members become infected, as they drink and bathe in the diseased water.
The remainder of the formulaic 10-little-Indians plot is a series of attempts by the healthy members to get help for their stricken comrades -- whom they treat as lepers with increasing hostility and paranoia. Their attempts, however, are frustrated by the "Deliverance"-esque redneck locals, as well as by a ravenous rabid dog with a hankering for their rotting flesh.
Like Danny Boyle's recent "28 Days Later," the film taps into viewers' growing anxiety over the threat of biological pathogens, giving shape to their collective nightmares similar to the way radioactively mutated monsters mirrored the nation's nuclear fears during the Cold War. Roth also seems to share Boyle's fascination with the potential, almost Darwinian, cruelty latent in man.
However, unlike Boyle's splatterfest, "Cabin Fever" does not paint the disease as the prime culprit, but places the blame for their misfortune squarely on the shoulders of the characters' own selfishness, a lesson which resonates loudly in our age of AIDS. Rather than treating the hermit -- and later, each other -- with kindness, they recoil into insular self-preservation, prompted by fear and repulsion, putting survival above solidarity with the sufferings of others. If they had exhibited a minimal amount of compassion early on -- not to mention self-restraint -- much of their misery could have been avoided.
Regrettably, the inclusion of graphic violence, gratuitous sex and drug abuse, though staples of the subgenre, undermines the film's credibility as social commentary and offers more insight into male adolescent fantasies than it does into the psychology of tribal ostracism. Sex is portrayed as either a recreational sport or as a primal, almost reflexive response to fear, a far cry from the sacred dignity bestowed on it by Catholic theology.
Due to excessive gory violence, sexual encounters with nudity, recurring drug abuse, as well as pervasive rough and crude sexual language, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R -- restricted.
Movies have been evaluated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishop's Office for Film and Broadcasting according to artistic
merit and moral suitability. The reviews include the USCCB rating,
the Motion Picture Association of America rating, and a brief
synopsis of the movie.
The classifications are as follows:
- A-I -- general patronage;
- A-II -- adults and adolescents;
- A-III -- adults;
- A-IV**
- L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. L replaces the previous classification, A-IV.
- O -- morally offensive.
** Discontinued classification. All archived movies that were originally in the A-IV category are now classified as L.