And I realize the Cabin Fever kids ultimately serve the same purpose, but Roth and Randy Pearlstein's script toys with Thing-like explorations of paranoia and the struggle between self-preservation and empathy, only to undercut any such narrative aspirations with stupid, unlikable characters. It's one thing for a slasher film to give us nothing but annoying, paper-thin cut-outs - they exist for no reason other than to be murdered and maimed in creative and amusing ways. I'm not saying I expect my horror flicks populated with MENSA members or anything, but it'd be nice if these kids didn't continually demonstrate such a pervasive and fatal lack of common sense. Your average below-average horror-movie yahoos. Along the way, a girl fails to notice that she's shaving the rotten skin off her own leg, a guy falls directly onto a floating corpse after poking it with a stick for no apparent reason, and that same guy so misjudges the location of a girl's vagina that he spends several minutes fingering her leg wound. The very bad thing in question is a nasty flesh-eating virus that begins rotting them alive, even as their growing paranoia drives them apart and sets this against each other. ![]() Famously inspired by Roth's own run-in a nasty skin infection, Cabin Fever takes a straight-from-central-casting group of young friends, dumps them in an isolated forest cabin, and lets very bad things happen to them. Far be it from me to disagree with Peter Jackson, but the best thing Roth has ever done was play the Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds. Eight years later and in the aftermath of a renaissance (if you can call it that) of splatter and torture porn, it's hard to figure out why anybody thought Cabin Fever was such a big deal in the first place. ![]() Eli Roth is a director who truly pushes the limits of an R-rating, and this was just a good opportunity for a director who has dealt with his share of censorship to get back some glory on Cabin Fever.Remember when Eli Roth was supposed to be the next big thing in American horror? His 2002 film Cabin Fever sported an old-school love of gleeful gore, nudity for nudity's sake, and quirky humor that helped set it apart from most of the horror spectrum at the time. Roth's vision was restored via the film's Blu-Ray release, but he didn't cut together a new version of the movie for the home video market-it already existed. The extended version with these additional scenes is actually Eli Roth's original cut of the movie that he took to film festivals before it was acquired by Lionsgate and edits were made. There may only be a few alterations, but altogether they work to create a much more nihilistic movie. It makes the same point, but in a much bleaker way and on a very sped-up timeline. It’s not just the police that enjoy some of the tainted lemonade, but instead it’s the entire town. The unrated version also features an altered ending that’s much grander in scope. If nothing else, the inclusion of these scenes at least speaks to Roth’s ability as a filmmaker-they’re not just sloppy mistakes on his part. These missing scenes actually provide a context for who that body is, even if it doesn't happen to be an important character. The theatrical version still contains a moment where the deputies discuss a body that's been found in the basement, but there are no further details provided. It solves the problem, but the scene also contained a wealth of viscera and gore all over the walls that were likely too much for an R-rating. A follow-up deleted scene shows the cops taking no chances with the contents of the basement they blast the room full of shotgun fire, then set the whole thing ablaze.
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