They take Eli Roth's naturalistic world view to the nth degree, punishing even the most virtuous players with horrifying fates-in fact turning them into harbingers of human extinction.
The thing that separates Cabin Fever 2 from other films of its kind is West and Malkin's uncompromising vision of their characters. John also contracts the disease, leading to a spectacular wood shop-revival of The Evil Dead 2's shed scene. Alex has deteriorated to the point where he can barely see or stand because his penis is oozing pus. While ducking the assassins, John and Cassie run into Marc, who's gone murderously insane. What's surprising is how soon their situation becomes absolutely hopeless. Of course, our three protagonists find themselves trapped in the school. This means chaining the school doors, shooting the principal in the face, and doing room-to-room sweeps to kill anything that moves. We never learn if the men with the rubber suits, gas masks, and assault rifles are from the government or a private, corporate militia, but their mandate is clear: Keep the virus from spreading. You see, the students' problem isn't just the disease, it's also the mysterious agency that's descended on their school to contain it. The harder they try to conceal their pale skin, bubbling sores or detaching finger nails, the more they come into contact with other people-resulting in blood-piss in the punch bowl, some ill-fated swimming-pool sex, and a panic that puts Carrie's climax to shame. Add to this at least one cut where the music is delayed by a few seconds, as well as the film's nauseous palette, and it's hard to escape the feeling that West and company are trying to deconstruct high-school horror movies while also making one that's intentionally bad (and, perhaps, inspired in its badness).īy the time the dance rolls around, the virus has manifested in a number of people.
#CABIN FEVER 2 SPRING FEVER MOVIE#
His actors are so naturalistic as to appear untrained they're all really interesting to look at-in any other movie of this kind, Wasser would have been cast as the gangly nerd-girl instead of the hot hero chick. The tired character pairings, prank set-ups, and dressing-up montages are all there, but West employs a charming, cavalier attitude towards them. Alex settles for a bathroom-stall blowjob from a recently dumped tart too bad for him that A) she has braces and B) she washes him out of her mouth using a bottle of infected water that she'd been nursing before they got together.įor half the run-time, Cabin Fever 2 plays like an anti-homage to 80s horror movies, specifically, Night of the Creeps. John pines for his dream girl, the smart and unavailable Cassie ( Alexi Wasser) while dodging her abusive boyfriend, Marc ( Marc Senter).
Following a trippy, animated introduction that traces the virus's journey from the woods to a bottled-water processing center, we find ourselves embroiled in pre-prom drama with geeky outcasts John ( Noah Segan) and Alex ( Rusty Kelley) scrambling for dates in order to avoid a sad horror-movie marathon with their slightly more pathetic friends. Instead of treating this like a Friday the 13th sequel and bringing in another hapless crew of kids to discover the infested cabin, West and Malkin focus on the high school where that bus was headed. Even with a swollen, dissolving face and limbs that peel off on the branches he runs by, Paul makes it to an open road-across which he is quickly splattered by a school bus. The story picks up almost exactly where part one left off, with Paul ( Rider Strong) trying to make it out of the woods where he and his now-dead friends contracted a mysterious, deadly disease. I didn't fully understand what Eli Roth was getting at with his movie until I saw what West and screenwriter Joshua Malkin did with theirs. It blacked out and stumbled drunkenly for clues, vomiting up sickly green visions of a rabbit mascot. The film, like its characters, appeared to succumb to a high fever and a flesh-eating virus. That was the only push I needed to watch it right away.įor me, the only thing that made the original Cabin Fever memorable was the way in which it ran a standard-issue, kids-in-a-cabin movie completely off the rails in the last twenty minutes. But on a recent episode of the Double Feature podcast, I learned that the film was directed by Ti West, who made the eerie and inventive The House of the Devil. I'd never intended to see Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever because it's a direct-to-video sequel to a horror movie I only kind of enjoyed.
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