CABIN FEVER
(15) 94min 0...
Think Night of the Living Dead meets The Thing in a remote backwoods cabin straight out of The Evil Dead. but with a flesh-eating virus that causes peeling skin. gaping sores and the projectile vomiting of infected blood. Yet for all the disease’s gruesome symptoms. the true terror in this savvy horror movie is psychological. What‘s most frightening is not the symptoms of the necrotising disease, but the way the fear it creates sets a bunch of college friends at one another's throats. Don't be fooled by the film‘s 15 certificate. As each member of the group succumbs to selfish paranoia, it's not the gore that scares you, it's the kids‘ grim will to survive.
The unrepentantly derivative Cabin Fever may wear its genre influences on its sleeve. but writer/director Eli Roth's fan-boy riffs have a clever, subversive streak. As the characters start their post-college road trip, we think we know exactly who‘s who. There's the take-charge. gung-ho jock with the sexy bimbo girlfriend. the shy bloke carrying a torch for the sweet girl. and the annoying jerk. But having set up these stock characters.
Alain Corneau's Série Noire
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Roth confidently toys with the audience's expectations. defying us to predict how each of them will react to the viral threat and escalating fear. Not everything works. and there are times when the erratic pacing, in- jokey references and crass dialogue stretch one‘s patience. Nevertheless, Roth's love for the genre, his refusal to play according to the rules, and his eye for diseased humour keep things bubbling nicely. The shifts of tone
édhri’éAuéom - ALAIN CORNEAU
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Flesh eating horror is alive and well
keep you off-balance too. Soon after we squirm our way through a scene in which a female character‘s leg- shaving strips the infected flesh off her shins. her cruelly self-interested friends lock her in a shed like some infected animal. Disposable razors and minor skin rashes will never look the same again. Neither will your friends. (Nigel Floyd)
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MR IN BETWEEN (15) 98min .0
Cinematic brutalism that fails to strike a true note
THE LIST 27