Lions Gate Films
Back in 2002, Eli Roth was just still just getting asked if he was related to Tim Roth, mixing up buckets of fake blood and didn’t have a whole slew of vomitous horror credits and one truly satisfying assassination of Adolf Hitler on his resume. But all that changed with the release of Cabin Fever, the sometimes funny, always disgusting gorefest that took Shawn from Boy Meets World (real name Rider Strong) and made him meet a whole lot of other things. Like eye puss.
The horror film was atypical in its typicality. It followed a group of recent college grads who head to the woods for a stay at a remote cabin for some summer fun (of course they do), where they resolved to party and screw their woes away. Naturally, they meet and ignore the bevy of creeps, drifters and blaring red flags they see on their way, and their fun becomes derailed when some contaminated drinking water leads to massive, gruesome infection. It’s hard to hook up when your skin is peeling off in chunks, isn’t it? Roth’s film was a great entry into the genre because it paid homage to so many films that came before it – Friday the 13th, The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – while putting its own bloodier, nastier spin on things (you don’t necessarily think about Blair Witch when rotting flesh and boils are showing up on screen; you think about what Roth’s created) and paved the way for films like The Cabin in the Woods to take place.
So it’s getting remade. Because 2002 didn’t just happen 12 years ago and we don’t remember everything that’s happened in the film, including the two iffy sequels to the film, the direct to DVD Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (directed by Ti West), and the upcoming Cabin Fever: Patient Zero. The new Cabin Fever will have no involvement from Roth, his collaborators (like co-writer Randy Pearlstein) or Indomina, the production company in charge of creating the other films in the franchise. Indomina was originally working on a fourth film for the series called Cabin Fever: Outbreak, set on a cruise ship, but that’s been scrapped for unknown reasons.
Besides being way, way too soon for a remake (the blood’s still fresh in our mind, guys) it just seems wholly unnecessary what with the existence of The Cabin in the Woods. Sure, they’re horror films of different feathers – one is-monster based, the other is nestled comfortably in gore, but as mentioned before, one owes its roots to the other. When there’s already a supremely funny murderous modern cabin horror in existence, and the original is in no need of retouching, why bother with the remake? Why not go forth and try to remake something even more hellacious and gory? With Roth’s Green Inferno hitting theaters soon, there’s already something else to best.
Since it’s probably going to get remade anyway, the least the new filmmakers could do is keep the pancakes involved, for everyone’s sake.
