When the fever escapes the cabin

I love Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever. Aside from playing on our fears of getting a flesh-eating disease, it also makes the threat—the monster—our own friends. It shows how quickly we would turn on each other to protect ourselves. It shows how society ostracizes the sick and ill. And it keeps it all contained to a handful of people in a cabin. But like any good infection…it has to spread and get worse. And so, we get the sequels!

CABIN FEVER 2: SPRING BREAK (2009)

Supposedly, Ti West hates that he directed this sequel and totally disowns it. What’s to hate about a mindless, gross out teenage horror flick?

Aside from having virtually no plot beyond “kids go to prom and get infected by disease from first movie” (okay, there’s an insubstantial storyline about two boys fighting over wanting to take the same girl to the prom), Cabin Fever 2: Spring Break has a lot going for it:

• Both lead actor Rider Strong and Giuseppe Andrews, the cop from the first movie, reprise their roles to make this a direct sequel.

• The explanation of how the disease spreads from the cabin to the school is presented completely through an opening credits cartoon.

• During the prom night preparation montage, we see the principal getting ready…with his bear boyfriend!

• The prom opens with the fricking “Prom Night, All Right” song from the movie Prom Night.

• The soundtrack rules, including the disco classic “Born to be Alive”, as well as tracks by The Ramones, Sparks, Minimal Compact, and Gleaming Spires.

• Gross out scenes include a janitor pissing in the punch, plenty of people puking all over each other, a birth in a bathroom, an explicit shot of a penis emission, and…well, I think that’s more than enough.

• The infected basically walk around like zombies.

• Through a closing cartoon, the movie implies that the disease will spread worldwide thanks to a stripper.

Maybe I can see why Ti West disowned it. But this trashy sequel is a winner as a standalone film.

CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO (2014)

 There are a few good things about Cabin Fever: Patient Zero. The flesh eating disease is more disgusting than ever before—including a nasty oral sex session. The infected look and act more like zombies than ever before. There’s an infected catfight involving a huge black dildo. And one of the male leads is hotter than hell and spends a majority of the movie shirtless.

Then there’s the rest of the movie…

• In an underground facility, Sean Astin is being held captive because it is believe he is the antidote to cure the virus. He spends most of the movie looking like he doesn’t understand how he got there. And by that I mean, how he got from an epic Peter Jackson film trilogy based on a huge classic fiction series to being in a second Cabin Fever sequel.

• A group of four kids heads off to a deserted island for a bachelor party and we just don’t care about any of them or their relationship drama.

• We care even less because the movie keeps jumping from Sean Astin being stuck in the facility to these kids getting high and it’s like we’re watching two completely unrelated movies.

• Eventually, the two movies become one as the kids find the underground facility on the island. I’ll admit, it’s pretty creepy down there for a while. But then the kids meet up with Sean Astin, at which point the “I’m just in it for the paycheck” feel returns right up to the film’s conclusion.

Straight guys will eat anything!

But the biggest offense? The movie pretends the far superior crappy Cabin Fever 2: Spring Break doesn’t exist, even though there was a perfect opportunity to have the stripper from the end of the second movie come to the island for the bachelor party!