The remake is now directed by Travis Zariwny, who directed “Midnight Man”, “Scavengers” and “Intruder”, with Eli Roth as the executive producer now. The story remains the same, with a group of five college friends renting a remote and isolated cabin in the woods for a week’s vacation. It starts with a man who chances upon a dead dog in the woods. He pokes it, its blood gets squirted on him and this infects him, destroying his skin in such a dismal way that no beauty products could possibly remedy.
The five friends are played by new actors: Gage Golightly (from the Nickelodeon series “The Troop”), Dustin Ingram (from “Paranormal Activity 3), Nadine Crocker (from the TV series “No Ordinary Family”), Matthew Daddario (“Delivery Man”, “When the Game Stands Tall”), and Samuel Davis (“A Close Divide” and “New Hope”).
They go to the cabin to chill out, smoke pot and have plenty of wild sex, but this doesn’t last very long. Soon, one of the girls suffers from rotting boils and this puts all of them in panic mode. They have to figure out where the dreadful infection originated and how they can defend themselves from the flesh-eating organism. They end up paying for their shenanigans with their own lives.
The new director makes a few tweaks to the material for a bit of innovation. For instance, a male deputy officer in the first movie is now a woman. Of course, you can expect the deaths of the characters in the new version to be made even more cruel and violent.
Although the flesh-destroying virus is still spread by water, the ingenious new deaths offers some fresh new spin on the material, sort of. A great edge of “Cabin Fever” is its very simplistic script and story setup so that the actual payoff is somewhat more compelling that what you may have expected.
The young cast does a great job of being tormented and dying on cam, with each one of them given his or her own moment of suffering. If you enjoy and cherish watching gore and how these five people disintegrate on screen in the course of an hour and a half, then there’s no doubt that “Cabin Fever” is the movie you have long been waiting for.
No doubt its quirkiness and grossness will thrill you, but also, each character is different and somehow, you make a connection with them and do come to care about them even before the carnage begins. “Cabin Fever” is showing in theaters starting tomorrow, released by Viva International Pictures.
