As far as bad remakes go, Travis Z’s Cabin Fever (2016) is universally regarded as a flop. As a masochist with a penchant for watching predictably shitty movies, I agreed to compare the Eli Roth 2002 original to its more recent remake. If you are curious about how bad a redux can get and if Cabin Fever truly falls into this “worst of the worst” category (spoiler: it does), let me break it down for you here and save you the hour and a half run time.
Besides the infamous gross out bathtub shaving scene, the original film’s staying power comes from Roth’s tongue-in-cheek characters. Cabin Fever is, when you break it down, a slasher. It isn’t a human with a mask running around with a machete, but rather a rapidly spreading flesh eating virus. The film progresses with this antagonist as its Voorhees, slowly infecting the ensemble characters one by one. Eliminating the possibility of flat out murdering the baddie pushes the otherwise stock characters into a new back drop that requires an altered approach.
But Roth uses the same tropes: horny couple, nice/normal guy who has feelings for the nice/normal girl, the nice/normal girl, and the stoner burnout comedic relief. He lets you know he’s abiding by these traditional roles, but that’s about it. Our villain isn’t a wronged outcast and our non-nympho girl isn’t even close to our final girl. Even if Roth didn’t know what he was doing (he was a fresh-faced 22 year old when he wrote it), he makes you believe he did; the plot leads you down a familiar path and then flips your expectations.
I’m painting the original out to be some sort of a masterpiece (which it isn’t), but please remember that I watched the remake the next day which likely ranks on the worst 10 horror movies I’ve ever seen. This comedic element that rules the original, exemplified by the woman yelling at her disemboweled hog, the fox piss, Officer Winston sporting a dirt lip, et cetera, goes out the door with the remake’s cast and the ever-so-slightly jiggered script.
The direction in 2016 was clearly to kick it up a few notches and take things more seriously (and take any sex scenes and turn them into legitimate porn). But what happens when you take out the self-awareness of the delivery of the original script? You get something that watches like a hyper violent edgelord finally got to make their poorly executed, straight-to-VOD (optimistically), unoriginal garbage movie where even the Kickstarter donors are embarrassed to have their names in the credits. The acting range is narrowed to include four modes: scared, angry, arrogant, and actively copulating. The tonal changes in the near shot-by-shot remake came from poor directing choices that squash any element of creativity found in the original.
It’s pretty fair to chalk this up to Roth wanting to cash in on the remake trend. The original didn’t employ any sort of technology that got a face lift in the 14 years since its release. No tech or FX breakthroughs warranted a re-imagining. The only positive thing to come out of the remake was the removal of a couple of ill advised n-bombs. It may have been more cost effective to re-cut the original to remove any unnecessary cringe worthy dialogue and rake in some dough from a Blu-ray re-release.
Even Google is smart enough to autofill a search of “why did eli roth remake cabin fever” after the first “r.” There are too many movies in this world for you to contemplate streaming the remake on Netflix. Now that you’ve read it here (and numerous other sites if you tried searching that autofill), you can move it from your maybe-someday-I’ll-watch list to your I’d-rather-watch-Baby-Shark-videos-on-repeat list.