Cabin Fever

Rating: R

Run Time: 93 minutes

Director: Eli Roth

Starring: Jordan Ladd, Rider Strong, James DeBello

“You just want to grab the person next to you and fuck the shit out of them.”

I really wish Eli Roth were the person next to me at this moment.  I don’t want to fuck him; I want to beat the living shit out of him…

I have subjected myself to a string of shitty movies lately.  Cabin Fever is just one more flick that continues the trend and perfectly epitomizes this particular dry spell of mine ten-fold.  The movie is nonsensical.  The dialogue is atrocious.  The expendable meat is even more contemptible than usual.  The film is rambling and desultory, devoid of much of a plot. There is no forward momentum to the story.  There is nothing at all logical about the entire experience.  Even the reasoning of the group of vile young adults who are the focus of the flick is, if at all possible, even more idiotic than is generally the norm in this sort of shit-fest.

If you are a Roth fan, please explain to me the attraction.  This was supposed to be his good movie, right?  I will never watch Hostel now. 

I’m not averse to watching disturbing movies, outre gore movies, exploitation movies, movies depicting torture, or any combination thereof, if there is a need for the thing.  I understand that the enjoyment or vilification of some aspect of a film that deliberately tries to shock or even alienate the viewer is entirely a matter of subjectivity for each of us.  My tolerance of this kind of show extends to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, House of a 1000 Corpses and its sequel, Hatchets I, II, & III, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, or Taxi Driver.  My God, man, I liked Saw well enough and actually find merit and message in Cannibal Holocaust.  But Cabin Fever is just fuck-awful, derivative and unoriginal without possessing value as an homage to one of those other films, it is filled with character after character whose deaths do not elicit audience empathy, and it’s just plain stupid.           

Cabin Fever is not half bad, it is wholly, unashamedly, irredeemably, unabashedly all the way bad.  I should have known a movie whose lead was the co-star of one of my most reviled 90s sitcoms wasn’t likely to satisfy me on any level whatsoever.  But I had no idea a horror movie could plunge to the depths this one plumbs and still earn a theatrical release. Or be reviewed well. 

Some have suggested it be viewed as a black comedy or parody (of what, I have no idea).  The problem with this theory is that the filmmakers play it straight throughout at least the first half of the movie, until they are far too committed to a vision of the film as a legitimate horror outing.  Then, mid-way through, they try to get ironic on us.  It’s too late, mo-fos.

Here’s where we begin: a hobo-looking fellow returns to his campsite with what looks like some roadkill for dinner, only to find his dog dead and the bloody carcass open from neck to groin.  The dog is so obviously dead from even the most cursory glance that the incredulity of the homeless guy looks a little ridiculous.  Really, the dog is not so much obviously dead as obviously the most fake-ass prop, but let’s, for the sake of fairness, try to suspend our disbelief.  If the homeless guy can do it, so can we.

Next up, we see five kids heading for a weekend of fun at somebody’s cabin in the woods (sorry, but that’s what it is).  The gang are the most sorry excuses for humanity I have seen since, well, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, another recent shitter that has been reviewed well.  I’m not even going to make the effort to identify these characters with names or the names of the actors who play them because the characters are all cut from the same vain, self-absorbed, cloth.  Here is my exception: one of these assholes is played by Rider Strong (“Boy Meets World”).  Not only is he as much of a dick as the other two male co-leads, but, being Rider Strong, he is a terrible actor playing a dick.  Somehow, some way, the combination of talentless douche and insufferable character made the viewing experience infinitely more painful for me.

Now we swing back to the old man.  He’s been infected with something.  Did he get this from the dog?  Fuck if I know, because I didn’t know the dog had an infection.  While we’re on the subject of the dog, however, I will say this: he has better presence and acting chops than the entire cast of this debacle…and he’s a fake-ass prop.   Now to the where the old man meets the assholes.  One of them happens onto the homeless, woods-dwelling unfortunate and refuses to help the poor guy when he asks for and so desperately needs it.  Flat out refuses.  You wouldn’t think that even complete douches would tempt the wrath of God, the fates, karma, or whatever you happen to believe, quite so blatantly as this jackass does.  The poor homeless bastard returns to their cabin in the evening, still seeking help, and the stupid fuckers end up accidentally setting him on fire.

This does nothing to save them from what’s coming, however, and the rest of the movie deals with their efforts to save their own sorry asses at each other’s expense.  Have we become so cynical that we must populate a cast with young characters and then demonstrate that every single one of them is entirely devoid of even the most rudimentary sense of moral responsibility or compassion for others, even among themselves?  Have we become this inured to a pointlessly nihilist approach to movie-making that this is what we get for characters?  What is Roth trying to say?  I cannot tell, but it adds nothing of value to the very real societal problem I, in my dotage, am beginning to see:  our alienation from one another and our increasingly antisocial behavior threatens to destroy us.  The behavior here is on display for no other reason than to show people who fuck each other over to survive, yet end up dying anyway.  Maybe it’s a Sophoclean metaphor used to decipher the tragedy of the Millenials, the tragic flaw being woven into the tapestry of this generation being that you can be as shitty, cynical, narcissistic, and vain as you care to be…but you’re still gonna end up dead, fuckers.         

Is this what Eli Roth believes?  Perhaps so, given that he followed this with Hostel.  But in this film there is no dramatic import to how these young adults turn on one another.  Because they are all assholes to begin, when the virus infiltrates the group, they really just become even bigger assholes.  Lost is the resonance of the key theme of Deliverance, Straw Dogs, or The Hills Have Eyes, that we are capable of descending into the worst kind of savagery and will use extreme violence, fighting fire with fire and claiming an eye for an eye, to protect our own interests and to survive.

Here’s another thing, while I’m on it:  some horror works well when there is no explanation for the bad thing (what it is, where it came from, etc.), whether it be monster, ghost, deadly virus, you name it.  This movie, however, cannot bear to be inexplicable; it chokes on the lack of an origin story for the flesh-eating (I guess, who really knows) bacteria or whatever it is.  The lack of exposition regarding the infectious agent leaves a big, gaping hole in a plot that cannot afford one, because the story that unfolds behind it is simply not strong enough. ***

Because of this, Cabin Fever is a long, verrrry long, string of scenes of no intrinsic significance that do nothing to develop narrative continuity; it’s just one unimportant thing after another.  This is not helped by the main actors, who suck as much as actors as their characters do as morally bankrupt tits.  If Roth were aiming for a black comedy (I’m not convinced), the performances need to be tongue in cheek or a little mannered; this cast is not up to that. 

Anyway, as I said, once everyone starts getting whatever the fuck it is they’re getting, they start acting even more cravenly and, incredibly, even more obnoxiously than before.  As they do, the movie descends further into irrelevance. 

Shall we try to salvage something out of this experience?  Let's use Cabin Fever as a model for how not to make a horror movie of this sort.  Here we go!

1. Populate your movie with despicable characters whose deaths the audience will not only not mourn, but will instead actively root for with every fiber of their being.
2. Create an undefined menace that has no antecedent to explain what the hell it is,where it came from, and just exactly what it does.
3. Write shittty dialogue (so bad it has three tees) that is littered with profanity, to demonstrate how bereft your imagination truly is.
4. Arrange your scenes by no logic discernible to anyone with a fucking brain so there is no inter connectivity between one asinine idea and the next and the movie just stumbles ever onward inexorably toward an ending that will release the viewer from his pain and incredulity.
5. As either a consequence or the driving force behind #4 (I’m just not sure), just don’t worry about anything so bourgeois as a plot and, whatever you do, don’t let it get in the way of your vision of further corrupting any-bloody-someone so unfortunate as to stumble in to the theater to see the morass of doo-doo you’ve created.
6.  Do make a late act effort to shift gears entirely into what could kindly be called black comedy, if it were only the least bit fucking funny.  Still, however, continue to litter in scenes that can only be taken seriously in order to confuse further those of us who form your audience.
7. Be sure to have about six endings too many.  Make sure they go on and on.     

  

I have heard it said Cabin Fever is a parable for the AIDS or SARS crisis.  That is almost unthinkable, because if it were, it would be an absolutely tasteless insult to anyone with HIV.  I’ve heard it’s a parody…of what, Ebola virus?  Does that seem like a good idea? 

Let me end with a few of the things that are never explained, because, hey, I cannot stop myself at this point without hitting on every single thing I can remember that made my viewing experience so very, very unpleasant:

• Why does that fucking retard kid Dennis bite?  And why does he scream ”pancakes” and then do a little ju-jitsu before moving in for the kill?
• Who is the guy with the dog who shows up with the weed?  That whole scene is nonsensical.  (Yes, I know it’s Eli Roth, but what does he have to do with anything?) 
• Winston…really?
• The storekeeper and the racist comment is explained in a way that is, if anything, even more racist in its irreverence…why would a person do that?

Senseless cruelty, extreme gore, sex, profanity, all have their place in the right kind of story.  But don’t they have to earn it?…even a little bit?  What is the upside to creating a fictional world peopled with vile, selfish, amoral characters?  Because if the point is to show how we crumble and fall and turn into quivering mounds of jelly when forced to act in extremis, why broadcast that inevitability by giving us people who would, judging by what we see of them even before the shit hits the fan, only ever do exactly that anyway?

   

To end: the movie is depressing.  Is it depressing because the subject matter is uncompromisingly hard-hitting?  No.  It’s because I looked back at the end of it all and realized I had wasted an hour and a half of my life that I will never ever see again.  The one thing I can say in its defense is that Cabin Fever is an effective explanatory model for Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, because I would swear that hour and a half was twice as long.

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 3/10

Cabin in the Woods

Rating: R

Run Time: 95 minutes

Director: Drew Goddard

Starring: Kristen Connelly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchinson

SPOILER ALERT:  if you have not seen this movie yet, do not read this review, which is really more of a commentary anyway...

Cabin in the Woods/CITW is probably one of the most written-about horror movies in recent memory.  I'm not so much of an egotist as to believe I’m going to add a whole hell of a lot to what’s already been said.  Then again, what the hell.  Since I'm merely going to add my two cents to what's already been said by perhaps more eloquent voices, there's no real need to rehash the plot in anything other than the broadest of outlines; you probably already know it anyway.  So, here we go: the cast of college students, all of whom cut against type in one significant way or another, travel to a cabin in the woods and, in short order, start dying.  That, in a nutshell, is our point of departure.

I have come here to praise CITW, not bury it.  But I’m going to address the things I didn’t care for first.  My criticisms are nothing new either, but they diminish, just a smidgeon, the overall accomplishment of the film, although I'm torn as to whether it compromises the experience of watching it.  Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon made a decision to riff on a pretty specific sub-category of horror cinema but seem to imply that their commentary has universal application to the horror movie genre, which I’m not so sure of.  As has been said, the whole cabin in the woods scenario (specifically, the locale) would seems to specifically apply to The Evil Dead, its sequel, maybe the F13 franchise and its various first cousin campgrounds slasher flicks (movies like The Burning, Sleepaway Camp, The Final Terror, and these specifically in terms of locale and the slasher rules of the game: character types, Final Girls, sex=death, etc.).  I don’t think they care to reference Wrong Turn and its sequels or Cabin Fever and its sequels.

Yet the motif we have here, despite the multiplicity of options available to the players (all of which end in death, of course), adheres much more closely to the slasher film than any other recognizable form I am aware of.  The archetypes of slut, athlete, intellectual, fool, and virgin more properly belong to that playing field than anything else today, and that whole genre is beginning to run out of steam…yet again (save for the recent unnecessary remakes of so many of them; will the slasher never die?).  The director Goddard’s explanation is that the guises of the game have changed over the years, or even centuries, but the stakes have always been the same and the formula must stay fresh and current, consistent with any particular society's (Western, Asian, racial/ethnic) prevailing cultural fears and apprehensions.  If that is true, then maybe the filmmakers’ explanation for why we are presented with some strange combination of the demon possession slash-zombie gut-muncher-slash redneck/hillbilly horror-slash-lonely woods slasher killer sub-genres is a valid one.  I can live with that.  Particularly when that distinctly Western image is juxtaposed against the J-horror trope in another environment.

Still, I don’t know if it is true that the most enduring horror tropes of the current cultural landscape still involve a manipulation of clichés developed in movies from the ‘80s.  That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case in the other countries we are shown who participate in the ritual, whose horror motifs seem more current that our U. S. variety (although, admittedly, the Asians have been making horror movies about ghosts for years; we have only recently taken notice).  Still, I must admit that a perusal of new horror releases at Netflix or Vudu seems to confirm the Whedon/Goddard argument.

Whatever the case, the experience of watching the movie is still dizzying and thought-provoking.  Not perhaps as thought-provoking at the intellectual level as a classical philosopher's dialectical discussion of, say, Virtue or Justice; but still, one demanding the viewer pay close attention to the film to get the absolute most out of it.  CITW is one worth repeat viewing to tease everything out (unless I'm just obtuse).

I don’t often read much after the fact to learn what the creators of most forms of art or entertainment were trying to say with their creations; it is, I think, a fault of mine.  Still, a benefit to this approach is that, if or when I do go back to look for explanations, it can be personally gratifying to see how closely my understanding of a movie matches the creators’ intentions, and that can’t be a bad thing; unless, of course, my thoughts don’t match the creators’ own, in which case I feel rather like a fool.  I find that I feel like a fool frequently.

In any event, if it is true that Whedon and Goddard were trying to revitalize certain older forms and parody torture porn equally (as has also been suggested), I say the result is a failure.  If, on the other hand, they are commenting on how humanity’s appreciation of scary stories is rooted in a much deeper, darker, more sinister precedent, then the result is nothing less than brilliant…or at least pretty damned smart.  I’m going with the latter, because that is much more interesting an idea anyway and seems to be an explicit theme in the screenplay.  That the rules of the game are merely symbols of fetishistic elements in a ritual designed to save us by appeasing something terrible; that, for me, adds a depth of meaning to our viewing experience that makes us simultaneously voyeurs and co-conspirators. 

If that is so, are we experiencing some crazy movie within a movie?  Is art imitating life?  That is, are the creators suggesting that the tropes of horror films developed from genuine rituals?  Not literally, of course, but in the Jungian archetypal sense?  Race memory, even.  Does horror fulfil a need similar to the Aristotelian theory regarding tragedy, to trigger some cathartic event that allows us to vicariously relieve ourselves of the weight on our souls?  It cannot be as simple as pure escapism, because we could say all movies fulfil that role; all are fantasy, after all.  Horror satisfies the need in us to be horrified, which is distinct from terror.  If a simple definition of horror describes the intrusion of the unnatural or abnormal into the natural/normal, perhaps horror operates to allow us to view our otherwise shitty, dissatisfied lives through a different prism. 

Yes, it is true that my life sucks, but I’m not:

1. The parent of a child who is possessed by a demon
2. Being stalked through the woods by an indestructible, zombie serial killer
3. In thrall to a vampire who is slowly draining my life away
4. Haunted by a malevolent ghost who won’t quit fucking with me

This view is a little like Alvie Singer's philosophy concerning the horrible and the miserable, which I paraphrase: the horrible are people who have three eyes, are horribly disfigured, or who are double amputees; the miserable is everyone else.

Or, more cynically, is the movie just an example of the tail wagging the dog?  Is it all a big joke?  Like, “Hey, let’s make a movie where, come to find out, the horror in horror movies is really orchestrated by a cynical cabal of corporate types to appease the angry nether gods?”  Because, you know what?  There is a sense in which it is!  The corporate types are Hollywood executives, who are the cynical arbiters of what kind of horror we want to see (unless they decide we don’t want to see any kind of horror during a certain period; in which case they’ll nix any plans and bury anything in production or even some stuff already in the can, like, oh say, The Cabin in the Woods- It’s ultimately all about the money, after all, isn’t it?); anyway, that would make us the angry crowd that needs to be fed Christians.  Is that my original idea?  No.  Is that necessarily even valid?  Who knows?  

And please let’s not use the prefix “meta” to define all of this, shall we?  We hear meta this and meta that being tossed about far too liberally and often these days; its misuse has diminished the term’s value considerably.  I say, meta-fuck it…let’s meta-move on.  Oh, and while we’re at it, down with “post-modern,” too.

The movie doesn’t work without Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford as Sitterson and Hadley.  They walk the fine, perfect line between irreverent disregard for the victims they are condemning to ritualistic death and a solemn appreciation for what compels them to do so.  It is often difficult to tell whether or not their inappropriate jokey banter is a defense mechanism against the greater realization of the awful truth of what forces them to sacrifice these victims (who are, by the way, unlike so many characters who populate shitty movies of this ilk, likeable people; I don’t think that was accidental on the filmmakers’ part) or whether they’re just dickheads. 

The screenplay presents them as cocky assholes, but we have not scratched too far beneath the veneer before we reinterpret what we’ve seen to conclude that they are, if nothing else, highly competent professionals whose skill in orchestrating and directing each aspect of the ritual is vital to its success.  And they are two very frightened men.  Really, imagine the incredible pressure inherent in the job.  In terms of CEO pay, if these guys are executive level, they fucking earn that 200 times the amount of the least highly paid employee at the Facility.  They’re still assholes, though.

The last show to attempt anything quite as tricky as CITW (one or two false moves and the edifice crumbles) was, I suppose, Wes Craven's Scream, itself viewed by most as a post-modern twist on the slasher.  I love Wes Craven.  His ability to reinvent himself through consistently developing good ideas that resonate with the prevailing culture in at least three different decades is as uncanny as it is ultimately profitable to the studios that trust him.  I think we could even say CITW is something of an elaboration upon the ideas elucidated within his New Nightmare in the sense that he posits a real and frightening actuality behind what we horror fans look upon as just plain fun.  

Much has been said regarding how the movie works as a loving homage to and a subversive critique of the horror genre.  How exactly the film works as this nifty hybrid is another story, and I still have a host of unanswered questions that bugged me, mostly in a good way, about the movie:

• Are the monsters real or facsimiles, cloned, robotic, what?
• How are potential employees of the Facility introduced to its purpose and the horrible truth it conceals from the rest of us?  What if they decline the job after it's offered?  
• How exactly did the sacrificial system develop over time and what might have been earlier
• scenarios and victim archetypes?
• Just how does the movie within a movie work?  Are horror tropes (literary or otherwise)  
• borrowed from the reality of the sacrificial system, or is the converse true?
• What exactly do they do the other 364 days out of the year?     

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 7/10