Killer Blog from CyberSpace: Cabin Fever

Recently on a few movie-related forums I visit, I saw mention of Cabin Fever being the goriest movie they had ever seen. It's not an old movie, only having been in theaters two years ago. I remember the trailer not being anything special and thinking, "how could a movie about a disease be that scary?" For the most part I was right, and I want to know what Cabin Fever those folks on the forums saw because this can't be it.


Cabin Fever's casting follows teen formula number 12 as we follow them on their
little vacation into the woods. We have the sex crazed couple (Jeff and Marcy) who want nothing more than, well, sex. Then we have the mister nice guy/obvious hero (Paul) who's come along hoping to get in good with his long-time crush (Karen) who, much to his confusion, is throwing historically cruel mixed signals his way. Finally we have the dumb jock (Bert) who can't seem to notice one basic problem: there are only two girls on the trip, both of whom want nothing at all to do with him, yet he seems totally fine with that prospect and would rather hunt squirrels and talk about his dog licking his balls than get laid.

Once at the cabin, the kids (yeah, I guess at 33 they're kids to me) are visited by an infected homeless man,  complete with an almost skinless face, who is vomiting blood all over the place. They fend off the pukester by beating their own truck to death, setting the guy on fire, and then letting him run off, ablaze, into the woods to die. Trust me, it sounds a lot nastier than it really appears.

Later we see the homeless man's fate, face down in the reservoir that supplies water to the cabin. With the homeless man gone, the scariest thing on-screen for a while is a glass of water. Eventually Karen starts sipping on a glassful and the skin in her naughty parts takes a turn for the worst. Her "friends" lock her up in an old horse barn to rot so they don't get infected themselves. Paul doesn't care because he knows he ain't getting any now.

At a few points in the movie we see some flash-forwards, most dealing with Karen's fate. What I don't understand is why these flashes stopped once she was put in the horse barn. It made me think that maybe she had some precognitive powers or something, since the flashes had nothing to do with the others. They're used a few times, then suddenly they're gone. I don't get it.

The actor playing Bert, James DeBello, perfectly nails a jock role. I kept thinking to myself, "I knew that guy in college!" He's perfectly obnoxious, thinks only of himself and doesn't think twice before speaking. Hell, he doesn't think once before speaking, he just does!

For the most part the rest of the story goes as you might expect. Jeff deserts everyone to escape the disease while others try to find help somehow. Marcy drinks some tainted tea (tea?!) and we're treated to a semi-gory leg shaving scene that I think still wasn't THAT bad (just a flesh wound). Bert fixes the truck, gets infected and takes off on the gang, only to be confronted by a pancake-hungry kid and his relatives who decide his infected ass needs to die (don't ask). Paul puts Karen, with her permanently toothy face, out of her misery with the back of a shovel.

With everyone dead, Paul stumbles upon the reservoir with the floating hobo. This was probably the scariest scene of the movie as Paul climbs down the rotted wooden ladder to poke the corpse with a stick, only to fall right in on top of it. You could see it coming, but you still cringed up in a ball as he tried desperately to get out of the water over and over again, and all the while you're screaming, "Close your damn mouth you fricken idiot!"

I'll end things there in case you want to see the ending for yourself. There's a funny scene with Jeff toward the end of the movie that you could see coming from a mile away, but it was still funny. But was it the "goriest movie ever made?" I've seen worse, really. I can be squeamish if there's some really nasty gore in a movie, and I didn't feel that at all during Cabin Fever. OK, maybe that one time when Bert tells his masturbation story by the camp fire, but that's it.

Terror level [highest=10]: 5
Death toll: 11
Quote of the flick: "Pancakes! Pancakes! Pancakes!"