Cabin Fever (2016): Another damn Ugghh!

Cabin Fever, 2016, directed by Travis Z, streamed on Paramount+, 1 star.

The premise: Five college-age kids head to a cabin in the woods for a week, only to have party ruined by some sort of flesh-eating virus.

Sure, worth a shot, I told myself.

Well, I loved the cinematography. This movie looked great. But there were some early warning signs that this wasn't going well.

Let's just cut to the chase: Everything else about this great-looking movie was refried dog vomit. The plot, the characters, the acting, the score, the sound design, it was all crap.

I learned after the fact that this one is 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. I wish I knew that going in, but I wasn't too surprised afterward. And worse, I learned that this was a remake of a 2002 movie with the same title, produced and written by the guy, Eli Roth, who made the first one. I know next to nothing about Eli Roth. I've heard the name. But I now have zero interest in learning any more about him or the movies he makes.

Lordie, this was bad.

----------------------
Purchase Cabin Fever at Amazon. (I am an Amazon affiliate, and your clicks help support this blog.)

Comments

Post a Comment

No spamming, please. Comments containing links to external sites will be removed.

Popular posts from this blog

Dexter: Original Sin (2025 TV miniseries): A nice reminder of the glory days

Image
Took a few days off from the movies to check out the 10-episode Dexter: Original Sin, which just wrapped on Paramount+.  In case you don't know, it's a prequel, taking place 15 years before the first season of the classic Dexter series with flashbacks to another 15 years or so before that. It all serves to flesh out Dexter's backstory -- how he ended up in that blood-soaked storage container as an infant and how he honed his craft as a vigilante serial killer. I was pleasantly surprised by it. It was much better than I thought it was going to be. Original Sin, with Michael C. Hall's voiceover narration, does a fantastic job of bringing back the feeling and atmosphere of those first three or four great seasons of classic Dexter -- before the original series lost its way. Irish actor Patrick Gibson is the new, young onscreen Dexter. He looks enough like Hall physically and is able to easily pull us in without too much distraction, with a big assist from Hall's familia...
Read more

The Substance (2024): Disturbing and disgusting -- but most of all brilliant

Image
The Substance, 2024, directed by Coralie Fargeat, Mubi blu-ray (2025), 4.5 stars. I spent the first half of this movie nearly hyperventilating, covering my eyes and gasping for breath, trying to decide if I was loving it or hating it. I spent the last half nearly hyperventilating, squirming and cursing out loud at the screen, completely overtaken by this brilliant piece of filmmaking. Part of what was going on is that I am not, never have been, a fan of body horror. That stuff always gives me the heebie-jeebies. I have never been able to rewatch The Fly, the David Cronenberg masterpiece. Don't even talk to me about stuff like Saw and The Human Centipede. I have no interest. Hell, I remember freaking out for a few seconds in every episode back when I binge-watched Nip/Tuck. But The Substance I was kind of forced into. I got caught up in the buzz last fall about Demi Moore winning all those awards and about how this little horror film was making noises about Oscar nominations. I jump...
Read more

Hell House LLC (2016): No upgrade necessary

Image
Hell House LLC, 2016, directed by Stephen Cognetti, Prime Video, 3.5 stars. Hell House LLC is a top-notch found-footage film from 2016.  This was a Video On Demand release from writer and director Stephen Cognetti , making his feature-film debut. It was successful enough that Cognetti has been able to make a career of turning out Hell House LLC movies. His fifth one, subtitled Lineage , landed in August 2025. In Hell House LLC, a young entrepreneur and his staff go to work converting an abandoned hotel into a haunted-house attraction for the Halloween season. The plot is framed as a documentary crew's investigation five years later into an unexplained "malfunction" on opening night that killed 15 people. The story is told through video shot by the crew while setting up the attraction -- as well as clips from TV news coverage of opening night and an interview with the crew's only survivor. Let me interject here: We all know there are two kinds of movie fans, right? ...
Read more