Ah, remakes. The ire of many a film critic around the world. Now I would like to say that I am not against remakes. If a film had an interesting concept with poor execution, or a filmmaker feels they can bring a new interesting take on a film then I think a remake can be a good thing. The perfect examples of this are 'The Fly' (1986) and 'The Thing' (1982), both fantastic remakes of 'The Fly' (1958) and 'The Thing from Another World' (1951) respectively, as well Hitchcock's 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1956), a remake of his film of the same name from 1934. Unfortunately, good remakes do seem to be in short supply as most either just shit all over the original film, copy it almost exactly, or both. In the case of 'Cabin Fever' (2016), it managed to take a film that wasn't great, to begin with, and turn it into a steaming pile of crap, so much so that it is almost fascinating. The film follows a group of teens who are spending the weekend in a cabin in the woods. Once there they realise that a dangerous, flesh-eating disease is rampant in the area and they are in danger of catching it. Fearing for their lives they start to turn on each other as one by one the disease spreads to each of them.
If you have any interest in watching this absolute trash pile then I would recommend either not watching the original 2002 film or avoiding watching this until you have forgotten everything about the original or you will have the problem I had in that you are watching the exact same film again, only if any semblance of fun had been ripped out of it. This film is about as close to a shot to shot remake you can get without being exactly the same. They don't change anything about the narrative and most of the script is the same. The only thing that has really changed is that it takes some of the dated dialogue out and I guess it should be applauded for that. But you know your film is horrendous when the only positive that I can find is that they were able to take out some offensive language from the script. Bravo. Despite being almost the same film as the original it also manages to be worse in every single department. The technical side of the film, although mostly fine, is nothing to write home about and there are a couple of moments which are poor where they replace horror with close-ups and quick cuts like some shitty action scene. Speaking of horror, one of the better aspects of the original film was the gore effects. You would think that 14 years on they would be able to improve on these gore effects, but like everything else, in this film, these effects seem half-arsed and are not effective at all. It often just looks like they threw a bucket of fake blood on people and were like 'yeah that will work'. This was the one aspect of the film I thought that they could improve on and they failed miserably. I also will quickly just mention that the acting in this film is horrendous. There is no need to spend any more time on it, from top to bottom the acting is terrible.
Okay, I know I just spent a decent amount of time speaking about how this film is basically the same as the 2002 film, but they do change one thing. They strip away the comedic aspect of the original and try to make a pure horror film. Okay, fine that makes sense. But do you not what you should do if you plan to change the entire tone of the film? Maybe change the FUCKING SCRIPT. How can you possibly expect to change the entire tone of a film and yet keep the quirky weird script of the original? All this leads to is a film that is completely all over the place tone-wise. I mean it also doesn't help that the film fails to be scary on any level, instead just being unbelievably boring. Despite being just over 90 minutes it seemed to never end. No thrills or scares to keep me interested, just dull. I get the feeling that the filmmakers knew that the film wasn't scary as they decided to try and trick the audience into thinking it was by adding a score that effectively acts as the 'laugh track' of the film telling you when you should feel scared or on edge. The problem is that the score is one of the most overbearing scores I have ever heard. Instead of being a score that underpins what is happening in the film, it slaps you in the face with how you should feel. It is quite ridiculous just how much the score drowns out everything else in the film. Oh, and it also rips off 'The Shining' (1980). The score for 'The Shining' is in fact just utilising the 'Dies Irae', a sequence of music that is used in hundreds of films to signify death and so to say that this film rips off 'The Shining' specifically may seem harsh. But no, it does, using a score that is almost identical to 'The Shining' including that it is played over a bird's eye view shot of a car driving down a country road. Pretty blatant in my book.
The 2016 version of 'Cabin Fever' is shit. I am not sure how much else there is to say. Every aspect of it is just horrendous, from the script, the acting, the score, the scares, and the gore, nothing is good. Genuinely the only positive I can find is that it took out some of the dated language of the original script and that is it. Is it the worst film I have seen during these lockdown reviews? No, but it is knocking on the door. Pure crap that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.