Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever

I recently saw The Cabin in the Woods, a horror movie that's been praised and lauded for being a ridiculously over-the-top blend of parody and homage, and one that is certainly unlike just about any horror movie out there. Funny, gory, and tonally absurd. The Cabin in the Woods was definitely worth the hype and the acclaim. But it still wasn't quite as good as a similarly-named hilarious horror movie from ten years prior: Cabin Fever. Cabin Fever had the set-up and outcome of any generic horror flick; a bunch of kids go camping in an isolated area in the woods, and then an infection - in this particular case, a water-borne flesh-eating virus - begins to take them down one by one. They die one by one at the hands of both the virus and each other, and we're left with the knowledge that the deadly water is now being bottled and shipped around regionally as drinking water. What makes the film work so well is its ability to simultaneously play straight and also be filled with sophomoric gags such as thinking you're fingering a girl and then realizing you're just fist deep into a festering wound on her inner thigh. I wasn't around for the early '80s, obviously, nor have I seen many horror flicks from that time, but apparently Cabin Fever was a pitch-perfect homage to that specific period and genre, perhaps with a greater sense of self-awareness. Whenever you can include the line, "That guy asked for our help and we lit him on fire!" organically into your movie, you've made a fantastic movie.

At any rate, Cabin Fever was indeed a fantastic movie, but this sequel was not. The premise just barely allows it to be a natural continuation of the original movie's story; the bottled water makes its way to a high school prom, and sure enough, there's an outbreak on the dance floor and kids are puking blood all over each other and a number of dresses and tuxedos are ruined. Spring Fever manages to recreate Cabin Fever's gory campy style very well, actually. The problem this time around is a complete lack of tonal awareness and charm. There are too many characters doing too many things both before and during the prom, and before we can even figure out who is who (and who has already had some of that bottled water), we're at a full blown crisis. There's also an unfortunate shift from "humorous amounts of excessive blood and gore" in the original movie to "really gruesome and no longer funny depictions of rotting flesh, loss of teeth and fingernails, the bloodiest bathroom miscarriage ever seen, and a mangled penis that oozes a strange orange pus." Blech. Compound this with the issue that none of the characters are especially memorable or differentiable - there's a reason stock stereotypes like "the dumb slut" and "the brainiac" and "the asshole jock" exist, after all - and there really aren't too many saving graces here. It'd be easy to pin the letdown on the change in directors, since Eli Roth just seemed to know exactly what he was doing in the first movie, but even Spring Fever's director, Ti West, apparently did his best to distance himself from this final product. I guess there's plenty of blame to go around, but perhaps the original movie was just never going to have an equal sequel regardless.

As a follow-up to Cabin Fever, then, Spring Fever is pretty much a failure. New cast, new director, new setting, and none of the old charm. But as a stand-alone campy and grotesque B-movie, Spring Fever does the trick just fine. There are allegedly two new Cabin Fever movies in the works, and even though this one showed that slapping the franchise name on a movie about a flesh-eating bacteria does nothing to actually make it anything like that original Cabin Fever movie, I'm sure I'll at least be interested in checking them out at some point in time. You know - should they come to fruition at all. Anyway, if you haven't had the pleasure yet, see Cabin Fever. It's awesome.