Strictly speaking, the Cabin Fever franchise isn’t a series so much as it’s a collection of movies. With a wide-open premise that only requires a flesh-eating virus as connective tissue, it’s no wonder it’s resulted in three very different movies (and one déjà vu-ridden remake). I enjoy it for that, if only because it’s a rare thing for a franchise to basically act as a glorified anthology. And if I could be even more honest (and low-brow), I enjoy it because it’s a series full of awesome gross-out gags, with each seemingly committed to outdoing the last when it comes to over-the-top gore (well, again, except for the remake—you can probably guess by now which one I consider the worst). It seems appropriate that a franchise that opened with a riff on The Evil Dead would eventually somewhat mirror that series, at least in terms of each entry feeling different from each other. Don’t mistake that for me equating it with Raimi’s trilogy in terms of quality—it’s a far cry from that, but I appreciate its willingness to stretch the boundaries of its premise (for three movies, anyway).
4. Cabin Fever (2016)


Between the scientific-military compound and island settings, Patient Zero particularly reminds me of the third and fourth Zombie entries, and there are definitely worse things I can say about a movie than that. This is especially true here since this one follows in the most important tradition of those films: it is gory and nasty as all hell, a total flesh-melting, face-peeling exercise in body horror. It’s gnarly and gross in equal measure, just like any decent Cabin Fever movie should be.

This is not an easy movie to watch: most (if not all) of the characters are awful in their own specific way, and the over-the-top gore isn’t even closest to the sickest thing in a parade of schlock that features a janitor pissing blood into a punch bowl and strip club patrons ogling a high school girl. It’s also proof that Rider Strong had one hell of an agent that was capable of snagging him top billing despite the fact that he shows up just long enough to be the victim of the nastiest body explosion this side of Robocop.

I can still remember the nervous energy and bewildered faces as the auditorium lights went up: this felt like a movie that only I enjoyed, and it all but made me an Eli Roth fan for life. It’s odd to say this about a film that I saw when I was nearly twenty years old, but Cabin Fever was a formative experience that confirmed that like-minded horror fans were out there making exactly the type of movie I wanted to see: violent, silly, kind of confounding. By no means is it a perfect movie, but it was kind of exactly the perfect movie for me at the time, and it holds up as one of the most indelible horror efforts from the past decade. No matter how you feel about it, it seems unlikely that you’d ever completely forget it. At the very least, I can only assume that nobody who’s seen it will ever feel tempted to feed weird kids named Dennis, lest they want to end up on the business end of the wackiest martial arts display this side of Pieces. comments powered by Disqus Ratings:
