CABIN FEVER RIDER STRONG MOVIE

While I appreciate some of the stuff Roth was doing in this film, there is still a ton to pick apart.

CABIN FEVER RIDER STRONG MOVIE

The early 2000s version of what is ‘cool’ feels very dated in this movie (kids with hair so gelled it looks to be made of plastic- California bro accents- lengthy sex scenes with no reason). He thinks gore is inherently scary, but it’s not if it’s not set up correctly. His characters are all the same, they have no sense of individuality (“college kid” is not a personality trait)- his female characters in particular are painfully one-dimensional.

His shots are boring, and often poorly framed and his staging almost always feels unnatural. Roth’s direction in particular never has any flair. But while I appreciate the concept, the execution of this film, much like all of Roth’s films, lacks a lot. Sickness is a real killer, and it’s cool to have a movie address that. We really haven’t had too many horror films where a disease is the scariest thing on screen, but if you think about it plagues and sickness are responsible for more deaths than Jason Voorhees, Michael Meyers, and Freddy Kruger a billion times over. For me it felt very reminiscent of early scenes from Stephen King’s The Stand scary because you didn’t quite know the rules of the disease- what it did or how it spread. I also think that the concept- a super-contagious flesh-eating virus- is a cool idea for a horror movie. Either way, there are scenes that come off as absolutely hilarious (sick guy vomiting blood all over their car for no reason- many of Bert’s scenes- characters making absolutely ridiculous choices for stupid reasons), and those were the scenes that worked best for me.

I want to believe that the silly lines and situations were all done intentionally, but maybe Roth truly believed what he was showing us would be scary. Sometimes the writing is so on the nose that I don’t think it possibly could’ve been written as earnest dialogue, and other times, I’m not sure if I’m giving Roth more credit than he’s due. I say that it sort of works, because it only works in half the scenes. It takes genre tropes and adheres to them in a way that’s almost laughable, but then it twists them ever so slightly, so that it feels as if the film is sort of making fun of these tropes while still using them. As I mentioned above, this film has a sort of Meta feeling. Almost every line of dialogue is stilted and strange, but for this movie that sort of works to its advantage. Roth’s writing is absolutely horrendous for 90% of this film, it’s as if he’s never heard a real conversation between two real people before. This film suffers from a lot of the same problems as Roth’s other movies mainly, Roth’s fingerprints are all over it. After a sick man comes near their cabin, the friends try to isolate themselves from a flesh-eating virus, but the disease continues to spread.

We lit him on fire.”įive college kids, Paul (Rider Strong, “Irish Twins”), Karen (Jordan Ladd, “Death Proof”), Bert (James DeBello, “Detroit Rock City”), Marcy (Cerina Vincent, “Not Another Teen Movie”), and Jeff (Joey Kern, “Super Troopers”) head to an isolated cabin in the woods for a week of rest and relaxation. Still, it is an Eli Roth film, and while I can’t claim this to be a great movie, at least I made it through this one. It’s somewhat restrained when it comes to the violence (though the sex scenes are still a bit much), the writing actually has a somewhat meta tone and reminded me a lot of “The Cabin in the Woods”, and the overall concept is something I haven’t seen done before, and it works pretty well as a story. However, if I had to pick one of his films to watch, it would be this one… not because I think this is a good movie, but because I think it’s probably the best Roth can do. Roth just isn’t for me (I have yet to see “The House with the Clock in it’s Walls”, and that one actually interests me). When I worked at a movie theater I tried to watch “Green Inferno” but found it painfully hard to watch due to the horrific acting and abysmal writing when I was still in high school, a friend and I tried to watch “Hostel” but we turned it off after the first twenty minutes. In fact, out of the three films I’ve tried to watch by him, this is the only one I’ve made it all the way through. I typically don’t care for Eli Roth I find his films to be poorly written and filled with meaningless torturous violence and unnecessary superfluous sex scenes.

Cabin fever rider strong