Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2007)

Director: Ti West
Starring: Noah Segan, Alexi Wasser, Rusty Kelley, Marc Senter, Giuseppe Andrews

SYNOPSIS

In the first Cabin Fever, the last surviving victim of the flesh-eating virus managed to make it to the local river before dying. Unfortunately, an unscrupulous “spring water” factory is taking untreated water out of the river to sell to a local high school, just in time for the senior prom. One batch of punch and a few fatalities later, not to mention quarantine by the army, and things don't look good!

REVIEW

I had pretty low expectations for this movie going in, ironically because of its credited director's own statements. I was in London for Frightfest last year, and West did a Q&A while promoting his new movie House Of The Devil (a very good, if slow moving, film by the way). There, he answered a few questions about this sequel to Eli Roth's début, and essentially said that the movie had been taken out of his hands and re-shot, and that he was only credited because the traditional “Alan Smithee” credit was no longer available. From what he said, it sounded like this was going to be an abortion of a movie, edited down from his original splatter-filled vision.

However, it's not only pretty good, but also on the hardcore end of what you'd normally expect from a studio sequel. For a start, while parts of the movie are definitely played for laughs, it's nowhere near as uneven as the first film. The high school element helps fill up the cast with bodies for splatter gags, while the inevitable massacre of the prom is pretty well done, there's only so much a disease can do. So, we get a bunch of army guys with mysterious and nefarious motivations while Guiseppe Andrews returns as the stoner, cheerful but dumb and incompetent local cop who ties the events together.

There's pretty much it. I can't recall everything West said in the Q&A but I do remember him saying something about the opening and closing animations. They're pretty bad, I can see the style they were going for but they don't really work and stink of "we have plot holes to fill but won't allow the budget to shoot live action". The epilogue is also pretty tacked on and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and there are lurches in tone throughout the movie that do indicate tampering - especially as House Of The Devil is such a tightly constructed work, it's difficult to reconcile the messy work here as simply being West's own.

Overall, it's an enjoyable movie that, despite its many flaws, still manages to be a fun little movie that's better than most direct-to-DVD movies, though I would hope that a director's cut would become available at some point in the near future.

7 / 10