Summary:
With college finally over a group of five friends escape to a
remote log cabin in the woods to enjoy their last days of decadence before
joining the working world. Good times quickly sour when a sickly stranger covered in
a bloody skin disease crashes their party. Shots are fired and the
lunatic flees into the woods, but it’s too late for our five friends: contact
was already made. One by one members of the circle get ill and her skin starts to
bubble and burn as a trail of oozing sores ravages her flesh. The group’s
compassion quickly turns from repulsion to terror to survival of the fittest, as their friends
deteriorate
before their eyes. Watching the disease corrode their bodies, fear of
death sets
in and the companions turn on one another, realizing that any one of them could
be next.
Review:
When you think about Rider Strong the first thing which comes to mind is
Shawn (character he played on Boy Meets World). Cabin Fever,
which hits theaters nationwide on Sept, 12, 2003, shows the maturing of
Rider Strong's acting talents as he masterfully portrays the endearing
good-looking dork who falls victim to his own virtue.
This flick begins like every teen horror flick before it begins, by
introducing a variety of characters enjoying themselves and simply searching
for a good time. There is the sex-starved couple who besides looking good
together can't wait to take their clothes off (yes, there's nudity),
there's the shy couple which really are friends (similar to Joey and Dawson
from Dawson's Creek), and there's the gun-loving shock jock.
All that changes when a sinister campfire story about a bowling alley is
narrated. From this moment on the movie takes on an eerie darkness which
continues as the flick unfolds. This is the most impressive part of the
horror film. It does an excellent job of setting a scary/dark theme by using
different types of elements throughout the remainder of the film. For
instance, there's a scene of a woman slaughtering a pig and a retarded kid
performing karate. Most scary movies rely on a single villain (Nightmare on
Elm Street, Scream, Friday the 13th, Jeepers Creepers, etc) who is sole
source of petrifying horror in the film. Since disease doesn't have a human
face, the director (Eli Roth) does a devilishly clever job of incorporating
eerie elements into the film and scaring box office patrons senseless. After
seeing the movie I became severely petrified/paranoid of visiting a small
town or a rural area for the remainder of my life.
The nicest motif in the movie was when Marcy attempts to shave her legs
in the bathtub after contracting the disease. When women shave their legs
it's to feel beautiful and sexy, and when Marcy shaves her legs its an
attempt to become beautiful again but her legs have already been ravaged by
disease and have hideous lesions all over and the simple act of shaving
cannot make her beautiful again. The loss of beauty motif is a rather mature
theme/concept for a teen movie, but slightly refreshing since it was well
done and evoked the emotions of the characters so concisely.
Extremely good directing, which overshadows a storyline filled with clichés,
helps this movie scare audiences in more ways than one. Although the movies
main demographic is teens and young twenty-somethings, its mature
cinematography makes it tolerable for older crowds, especially if they are
nostalgic for classic horror films.
See this movie if you're a fan of:
The Evil Dead (1981)
28 Days Later (2003)
Rider Strong (Boy Meets World, Kim Possible)
Stephen King (Popular novelist)
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