I didn't like it, and I never revisited it.Uzi Doorman is the main protagonist and primary anti-heroine of Murder Drones. And it was formative only in the sense that it helped teach me what I very much didn't want to see more of. I saw Cabin Fever in theaters as a young 20-something who went to the theaters every Friday to learn cinema. that isn't any more pleasant than 80's puritanism. The message wasn't "if you have sex or do doobies, the bad guy will get you!" It was "you're stupid, and you're meat, and you deserve to die horribly and alone because all you are is stupid and meat." And that. and gets punished for it by being penetrated by a rabid dog's teeth, where she more or less comes apart, albeit offscreen. Cerina Vincent's character has desperation sex with the guys. until the "horror" is revealed that the whole time, the guy had been sticking his fingers in an abscess in her leg. Jordan Ladd's character gets non-consensually fingerbanged. There's just a lot of unpleasant young douchebags, who allow each other to be torn to pieces. There are no people I am made to care about in Cabin Fever. What I mean is, there are no pleasant people that I'd like to spend time with Cabin Fever. Both are some of my favorite horror films. The Descent from a couple of years later has a dark ending. John Carpenter's The Thing has a dark ending. So I guess that's good.īut by the same token, that doesn't mean I have to like what they replaced the 80's puritanism with, and that was complete moral nihilism. It is many things, but puritan in its impulses it is most definitely not. But we were still in a bit of a liminal state where horror frequently turned out to be "Well, we know how to write a slasher film, so let's do that, but jokingly hang a lampshade on everything the script does as it does it."Īnd Cabin Fever does get well away from that. The slasher genre as a whole was on its way out, and Scream had redefined horror. I will give the film this: the horror genre at the turn of the century was still grappling with the strict puritanism of the 80's slasher films, where having sex and doing drugs were sins to be punished by the slasher, and the Final Girl came to represent the chaste, demure young woman that knew her place and wouldn't cause Bob Dole or Jesse Helms to retire to their fainting couch to recover with a mint julip. And I gotta say, I really didn't like it at the time, and it has only aged poorly in retrospect. If anything, Cabin Fever is emblematic to me of the post-9/11 nihilism and bleakness that really dominated filmmakers' attitudes. But I think I would've really preferred to see Marcy survive. Still, I don't know if I would classify the decision as "refreshing". even before Karen, who had been reduced to bloody sludge by that point. So yeah, it came as a real surprise that Marcy was the very first character to die off. It almost felt as if the sex scene's sole purpose was to facilitate that bittersweet ending. He would die, of course, but live on through his child. It seemed virtually inevitable that Marcy would survive, and end up discovering that she was carrying Paul's baby. My suspicion that she would survive was further cemented when she bedded Paul, and they insisted on telling the audience that they weren't using a condom. Marcy had "last woman standing" written all over her. In fact, it was used all over the place as a promotional shot for the film. She ventures out into the woods all alone to look for help and that image of her standing by the cabin, brandishing the rifle, was very striking. Obviously Karen was slated to be a goner very early on, but the movie promotes Marcy as this stalwart go-getter type that you can easily see powering through to the end. I have to say, I was really taken by surprise when the film ditched the final girl convention.
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