Cabin Fever
This was shot for under half a mil and premiered at the Toronto Film Fest’s Midnight Madness program. Apparently the bidding war began before the film was halfway done. It was given a 2,000 screen release, and grabbed a gross domestic haul of $21-million.
There is no question that this film is bad. The question: is it bad intentionally or un-?
Is it a passable horror spoof or a really shitty, amateurish waste of time? To me, this revolves around the old man and the gun scene that happens maybe 15 minutes in. As it stands in the final cut, it’s one of those creepy, these-guys-could-get-scary-later inbred hick sort of scenes – until the end of the film, when the punchline is revealed, and you see it’s a joke. So the fraction of the scene in the first act gives no cue that the rest of the film should be taken as a comedy, quite the opposite. However, it’s easy to imagine an alternate cut in which the scene played out in full, cuing us to see the film as a spoof.
The only thing that matters is what’s on screen, however, so we must treat this thing as an unintentionally bad film, a film with so many basic comprehension problems it was basically unintelligible. Why is she canoeing away alone? Why is he shooting his own truck? Why do those hicks want to kill them? What’s the point of the surfer dude? Why are they cradling the infected friend whom they were shunning moments ago? Humans just don’t act like that, ever. But I must say I laughed ‘till I cried at the most specialest line ever, delivered straight: “He asked us for help. We set him on fire.”
I actually found this movie painful to watch.