Oh, and Deputy Winston is now played by Louise Linton, whose imitation of Giuseppe Andrews' authentic "party man" attitude is painful to watch. Although there are a few cosmetic changes to the basic story, all for the worse (Bert is now "a gamer" who brings an AR-15 on the trip with him instead of a smaller, more old-fashioned rifle, which comes off as completely insane even if the character is meant to be an obnoxious blowhard), the plot basically plays out from beginning to end. Instead of a week of fun and flings, however, they encounter Henry (Randy Schulman), a local drifter who's being consumed by a strain of flesh-eating bacteria. Jeff and Marcy have come to enjoy each other's company, Paul has come to try and close the deal on his childhood crush on Karen, and Bert has come just to make everyone's lives miserable. Elements that once made Cabin Fever charmingly different now feel like obligation, suffocating this new version by Travis Zariwny (who goes by "Travis Z" on the packaging and in the film) before it even begins.įor those who haven't seen the original, the story follows close friends Paul (Samuel Davis), Karen (Gage Golightly), Jeff (Matthew Daddario), Marcy (Nadine Crocker), and Bert (Dustin Ingram) on a weeklong getaway to a secluded cabin. Cabin Fever doesn't go back to whatever draft Roth and Pearlstein had cooked up initially instead, it appears to be based on a transcript of the finished film, with every line reading, improvisation, quirk and inflection now hard-coded into the draft. Unfortunately, there's one small difference between what I had heard was happening and what has happened, and it makes all the difference in the world. Early reports pegged Cabin Fever 2016 as one that simply repurposed Roth and co-writer Randy Pearlstein's original screenplay, changing only the deaths and their contexts, making it sound like a contemporary version of Gus Van Sant's ill-advised yet persistently intriguing Psycho remake. I also find sequels and remakes an interesting business instead of being put off by the idea of favorite classics being touched, I'm fascinated to see how some other set of people believe they can fit the lightning back in the bottle. I even have a soft spot for the much-derided sequel, which comes dangerously close to recapturing that same magic, before changes made by nervous producers become too intrusive to ignore. Full disclosure: I'm a massive fan of Eli Roth's original Cabin Fever, which takes the tropes of the cabin-in-the-woods movie, a spectacularly unique cast, and a memorably off-kilter sensibility, and blended them into exactly the kind of movie one would like to stumble upon unexpectedly during a late-night horror movie binge.
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