Horror Film Review: Cabin Fever (dir by Eli Roth)

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When this Boy Meets World
Boy Meets World
Wandering down this road, that we call life
Is what we’re doin’
It’s good to know I have friends that will always
Stand by me
When this Boy Meets World

I imagine that I should probably apologize to Rider Strong for starting this review by quoting the theme song from the final few seasons of Boy Meets World. I’m sure that when Strong agreed to star in the original Cabin Fever, he was hoping that the playing Paul would take him far away from his best-known role of Shawn Hunter. But I have to admit that whenever I think of Cabin Fever (which, admittedly, is not often) I always think of it as being Boy Meets Flesh Eating Virus.

Cabin Fever tells the story of a group of stupid college students, including Rider Strong, who decide to spend Spring Break at a remote cabin in the woods. They’ve got weed, beer, and plans for a wild, sex-fueled weekend. Unfortunately, the majority of them also end up with a flesh-eating virus. It turns out the virus has been infecting people and animals all around the cabin. People are going crazy as their flesh decays and peels off of their bones. It’s a messy virus. With the police struggling to contain the spread, a group of locals have decided that it’s up to them to kill off anyone who is infected.

One member of the group grabs the beer and runs off so that he can spend the weekend drunk and in isolation, The other members of the group are stranded in the cabin and the surrounding woods. Bodies are falling apart and dogs are eating their owners. It’s Boy Meets Pandemic.

This was Eli Roth’s directorial debut and he didn’t hold back on the gore. While we really don’t know much about the college students in the cabin (beyond the fact that they’re all dumbasses and one of them is played by Rider Strong), we learn everything that you could possibly want to know about what that flesh-eating virus does to its victims. The film might as well be called “Nom nom nom,” because it’s all about eating flesh. Roth is also shameless about paying homage (or ripping off, depending on how much you like Roth) to the horror films that influenced him. Night of the Living Dead comes to mind, especially the ending.

(Personally, I like the fact that, with his first film, Eli Roth declared himself to be a lover of horror. Cabin Fever was released in 2002, long before the current mainstream horror boom. Eli Roth was openly celebrating horror at a time when many critics were still writing it off.)

Cabin Fever is a hit-or-miss affair, with the emphasis on miss. The virus is scary because it’s so nasty but the characters themselves are so boring that most viewers won’t care when they get infected. I did like Giuseppe Andrews’s performance as a weird deputy but otherwise, no one is the cast makes much of an impression until after they’ve lost their skin. They’re walking down this road that we call life …. and now they’re dead.

Viewed today, of course, it’s hard not to compare the flesh-eating virus to COVID or Monkeypox or whatever the latest disease is. If Cabin Fever were made today, the gun-toting locals would have been the heroes and the college students would have been the villains for daring to try to leave the cabin. Yesterday’s villains and today’s heroes and vice versa. For many, walking down this road that we call life has never felt more uncertain, even without a flesh-eating virus to worry about.

Live Tweet Alert: Watch Cabin Fever with #ScarySocial

Posted on September 24, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, ArtAttackNYC will be hosting 2002’s Cabin Fever!

From director Eli Roth comes the story of a flesh eating virus and the people that it infects! Scream as bodies are consumed from within! Gasp as Rider Strong tries to establish a career away from Boy Meets World! And no matter what …. stay out of the water!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and a few other streaming sites. I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Enjoy one more summer weekend at the lake, fiends.
Watch Cabin Fever with us Saturday at 9pm on Prime!#ScarySocial #CabinFever #Horror pic.twitter.com/YiVFMZ6cmP

— Scary Social (@SocialScary) September 21, 2022

Quick Review – Grindhouse (dir. by Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino)

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Leonard Wilson

The following was posted on 4/6/2007 from my LiveJournal on Grindhouse (which is celebrating it’s 15th Anniversary). I’ll admit I respect Death Proof a bit more now than I did back then:

Gotta write fast. Have to jump into shower and head for work.

I got into the movie theatre at about 8pm, and spent the hour talking with a pair of film students from the School of Visual Arts. At 9 (an hour before the movie), the rest of the sold out crowd appeared. I was officially 3rd in line. Sweet. 🙂 I didn’t my preferred seat (the single one on the right reserved for patrons coming in with someone in a wheelchair), but did get a seat in the empty row (meaning I could stretch my legs, even better).

The short of it: Grindhouse is paying one low price for 2 bad movies, on purpose. You get 3 great built in trailers, and two mini movies. Between the two mini movies, I loved “Planet Terror” (the Rodriguez one) more than “Death Proof” (The Tarantino film), simply because Death Proof had too much of Tarantino’s conversational style that all of his films have. It’s like you’re listening to a conversation that absolutely doesn’t tie itself to any of the storyline’s major points. It’s just “cool” stuff, but I literally almost fell asleep until Kurt Russell showed up on screen. I think that if one knows to expect this from Tarantino, it comes across better. It’s like watching both Kill Bill volumes back to back. The first one’s cool and action packed, and the second one has some action (the chase scene alone in Death Proof had me wondering how they did that), but is so slow before getting there, you want to sigh.

Being a Charmed Fan, it was great to see Rose McGowan again, and there were so many cameos to laugh at. Fergie has a cameo, and Michael Biehn’s (“Hicks” from Aliens, Navy Seals) even in this. Where did they dig up these guys?

Grindhouse is easily a party film. I’d go see it again in the theatre, but I don’t see myself getting the DVD. It takes you back about a good 30 years, and does that really well. There are missing reels, serious jump cuts in the film and the sound sometimes cuts out. 🙂 In that sense, it’s really beautiful. The audience laughed and applauded, though there were some that at the end were like “Man, that sucked.” In the 60’s and 70’s, Grindhouse movies were pretty bad. I guess it’s like watching one of those old Hammer films, mixed in with a cheap horror flick. You have to walk into this movie not expecting “The Departed” for it to work. Just have fun with what you’re seeing and remember, this is what your parents sometimes saw in the movies (it should be noted that my parents went to something of a Grindhouse once – the movie they went to see was Night of the Living Dead. The other movie that was in the show was John Carpenter’s “Halloween”, which freaked my Dad out).

The music in particular is really great. Robert Rodriguez, Chingon, and a few friends come up with a sound for Planet Terror that’s in essence a John Carpenter like sound. If you have access to the Itunes Music Store, give it a listen (I bought it). Plus, if you’re a fan of some of the older movies out there, you’ll find references to some of Carpenter’s films in there (for example, one of the songs from “Escape from New York” is actually used in the film). The same occurs with the soundtrack from “Creepshow” – The story with the drowned couple. There are also tons of older Tarantino/Rodriguez references in there. One fellow actually yelled out a line, word for word, from what was on screen. It took me a second to realize the line came from “From Dusk Till Dawn”. Sweet.

The in betwen trailers are absolutely fantastic. If I were to get the DVD, it would probably be for this reason alone. You can tell that Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Eli Roth (Hostel) really had fun with their pieces.

So, Grindhouse is worth seeing in theatre at least once with a bunch of friends, but know what you’re walking into. The movie can get gross at times and no young kid should even be brought near to this (we got carded to actually get into the theatre, and a Weinstein Rep. was on hand after the film to let us take surveys). Also before the movies, one of the teaser trailers is for Rob Zombie’s “Halloween”. I haven’t been so excited for a horror film like this since Zack Snyder’s version of “Dawn of the Dead”. This looks really good, and I’m wondering what Michael Myers is going to look like when someone like Tyler Mane (Sabretooth from the first X-Men movie) is playing him. That’s going to be creepy.

Horror Film Review: Knock Knock (dir by Eli Roth)

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Knock Knock starts out as a satire of vapid male fantasies before then becoming a vapid male fantasy. It then transforms itself into a satire of vapid torture porn before then becoming vapid torture porn. And, in the end, your main response will probably be, “Eh, who cares?”

Keanu Reeves plays Evan, an architect who has a nice house, a nice family, and a nice dog. He also has an injured shoulder, which leads to him staying home while his wife and children spend the weekend at the beach. Evan is looking forward to having the house to himself, especially when it starts to rain. I mean, who wants to be at the beach in the middle of storm, right? That night, Evan is relaxing in his home when he hears someone at the door.

Knock knock.

Two young women, Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (Anna de Armas), are standing on his front porch, soaked. They tell him that they’re looking for the address of a party and that their phone has gotten wet and could they please come inside for just a few minutes and get online and find the correct address? Evan agrees. Genesis and Bel enter the house. They tell him that they’re models. They tell him about their girlfriends. They talk about their sex lives and Evan responds with a goofy smile. They ask if they can take off all their clothes and toss them in a dryer. Evan agrees. “Uh, I’ve got some robes,” Evan says and it’s a funny line because Keanu Reeves sounds sincerely bewildered when he says it.

Anyway, you can tell where this leading. It starts with a threesome and then it ends with the house getting destroyed and people getting buried alive and, to be honest, it gets a little bit boring after a while. Perhaps if Evan was truly a loathsome character, as opposed to just an awkward Keanu Reeves, there would be some sort of joy in watching Genesis and Bel taunt him while destroying his home and destroying his wife’s artwork but instead it just amount to a bunch of repetitive taunting. Despite all of their talk about how Evan represents the 1% and how quickly Evan was willing to cheat on his wife and potentially destroy his family, Genesis and Bel don’t come across as being revolutionaries or avenging angels. Instead, they just seem to be overcaffeinated with no real reason for doing what they’re doing beyond the fact that there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise.

Keanu Reeves gives a strange performance in this film. At the start of the film, he actually seems like he’s perfectly cast. When Genesis and Bel first show up at his door, there’s some genuine wit to found in his confused reaction to the two girls. But then, as the film progresses, Reeves has to start pretending to be desperate and that’s never really been his strong suit. Perhaps because he’s trying to keep up with the hyper performances of Lorenza Izzo and Anna de Armas, Reeves starts to shout every single line and it just becomes rather humorous before then becoming rather dull. “STOP IT! I COULD GO DEAF!” he shouts when the girls force him to listen to loud music. Later, when he curses the girls, he sounds like a cartoon character talking about how much he hates Bugs Bunny. I like Keanu Reeves but he’s just not a very good shouter.

I’ve defended Eli Roth in the past and I imagine that I’ll do so again in the future but it’s best to keep the door closed on Knock Knock.

Guilty Pleasure No. 37: Death Wish (dir by Eli Roth)

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Is it finally safe to honestly review Death Wish?

You may remember that this film, a remake of the 70s vigilante classic, came out last March and critics literally went insane attacking it. That it got negative reviews wasn’t necessarily a shock because the movie was directed by Eli Roth and he’s never been a favorite of mainstream critics. Still, it was hard not to be taken aback but just how enraged the majority of the critics appeared to be. Seriously, from the reviews, you would have thought that Death Wish was not just a bad movie but a crime against nature.

Of course, a lot of that was due to the timing of the film’s release. The film was released less than a month after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. At the time the film first came out, the country was in the midst of a daily diet of anti-second amendment rallies and David Hogg. Many critics accused Death Wish of being a commercial for the NRA. Others branded the film as being right-wing propaganda. In fact, the criticism was so harsh that it was hard not to feel that the critics were essentially taking Death Wish far more seriously than it took itself.

If anything, Death Wish is a big, glossy, and rather silly movie. Bruce Willis stars as Dr. Paul Kersey. Paul is a peace-loving man. We know this because he refuses to get into a fight with a belligerent parent at a soccer game. He’s also an emergency room doctor, the type who pronounces a policeman dead and then rushes off to try to save the life of whoever shot him. No one in the movie suspects that Paul would ever become a vigilante but we know that there’s no way he can’t eventually end up walking the streets with a loaded gun because he’s played by Bruce Willis. When Paul backs down from the fight at the soccer game, Willis delivers his dialogue with so much self-loathing that we just know that, once Paul gets back home, he’s going to lock himself in the basement and start yelling at the walls, Stepfather-style.

Eventually, criminals break into Paul’s house and shoot both his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and his daughter (Camila Morrone). His wife dies. His daughter ends up in a coma. Paul spends a day or two in shock and then he promptly gets a gun and starts shooting criminals. Eventually, this brings him into conflict with the same criminals who attacked his family! Meanwhile, two detectives (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) look at all the dead bodies piling up around them and just shrug it off. At one crime scene, Norris is happy to grab a slice of pizza.

And really, that’s it. It sounds simple because it is simple. There is absolutely no narrative complexity to be found in Death Wish, which is why, in its own cheerfully crude way, the film totally works. In real life, of course, vigilante justice is not the solution and the death penalty is often unfairly applied but, from the moment the opening titles splash across the screen, Death Wish makes clear that it has no interest in real-life and, throughout its brisk running time, it literally seems to be ridiculing anyone in the audience who might be worried about the moral ramifications of a citizen gunning down a drug dealer.

Death Wish is a big extravagant comic book. It takes Paul one scene to go from being a meek doctor to being an expert marksman and, when Paul dispatches one criminal by dropping a car on him, Roth lays on the gore so thick that he almost seems to be daring us to take his film seriously. By that same token, Paul kills a lot of people but at least they’re all really, really bad. In fact, the criminals are so evil that you can’t help but suspect that Roth is poking a little bit of fun at the conventions of the vigilante genre. Even the fact that Willis wanders through the entire film with the same grim expression on his face feels like an inside joke between the director and his audience.

The critics were right when they called Death Wish a fantasy but they were wrong to frame that as somehow being a flaw. It’s a cartoonishly violent and deeply silly film and yet, at the same time it’s impossible not to cheer a little when Paul reveals that he’s been hiding a machine gun under his coffee table. It’s an effective film. Eli Roth delivers exactly what you would expect from a film about Bruce Willis killing criminals in Chicago. It may not be a great film but it works.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Weekly Trailer Round-Up: Beautiful Boy, Mile 22, Juliet Naked, The Equalizer 2, The House With A Clock In Its Walls, King of Thieves, Assassination Nation, Mandy

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

Lisa already wrote about the new trailers for The Predator and Zoe. Here are some of the other trailers that were released last week.

First up, there’s Beautiful Boy. Based on the memoirs of both David Sheff and his son, Nic, this movie is based on the true story of David’s struggle to understand and deal with his son’s drug addiction. It stars Oscar nominees Steve Carell, Timothee Chalamet, and Amy Ryan. It will be released on October 12th by Amazon Studios, who are hoping that they’ll have the same success with this film that they had with Manchester By The Sea.

And now, to quote the poet Python, for something completely different. Mile 22 is the latest action film from star Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg. Mile 22 is due to be released on August 17th.

Also due to be released on August 17th is Juliet, Naked. This Nick Hornby adaptation is about a rock star (Ethan Hawke) and the couple (Rose Byrne and Chris O’Dowd) who are obsessed with his music. We can expect this one to inspire many comparisons to High Fidelity.

On July 20th, Denzel Washington returns as retired CIA assassin Robert McCall in The Equalizer 2. In the sequel, he’s investigating the death of a friend from the first film.

The House With A Clock In Its Walls is the latest fantasy film to be based on a children’s book. It looks like a change of pace for director Eli Roth, if not star Jack Black, and is set to be released on September 21st.

Also based on a young adult novel is The Hate U Give. Amanda Stenberg plays Starr, a young African-American woman who finds herself at the center of protest and controversy after she witnesses the fatal police shooting of her best friend. The Hate U Give will be released on October 19th.

King of Thieves is the latest film from The Theory of Everything‘s director, James Marsh. Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon, and Ray Winstone are over-the-hill thieves. (Didn’t Caine already do this in Going In Style?) This British film does not yet have an American release date.

In Assassination Nation, the citizens of suburbia become outraged and violent when a data hack leads to all of their darkest secrets being exposed. (This would never have happened if they had just taken part in the Annual Purge like they were supposed to.) Assassination Nation will be released on September 21st.

Finally, in Mandy, Nicolas Cage plays a man who seeks revenge on the cultists and demons that killed the woman he loved. Mandy will be released on September 14th.

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Clown (dir by Jon Watts)

Posted on May 26, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Clown, a gory horror film, sucks.

I can’t say that I was particularly surprised to discover that it sucked but still, I was hoping that it would be better than it turned out to be. That’s largely because the film itself has a fairly compelling backstory. In 2010, director Jon Watts and his co-writer, Christopher D. Ford, uploaded a fake trailer for Clown to YouTube, in which they stated that the film would be produced by Eli Roth. Roth saw the trailer and was so impressed that he actually did decide to produce the film.

Filming began in 2010 and the film spent a while playing the festival circuit, where it got the type of vaguely respectable reviews that are usually given to low-budget horror films made by amateur filmmakers that no one is ever expecting to hear from again. In 2012, Dimension Films and FilmNation Entertainment acquired the rights to distribute Clown. What followed was an agonizing wait as Clown was basically released in almost every other country in the world. except for the USA. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 2016 that Clown would get an American release. During that time, Jon Watts received deserved acclaim for directing Cop Car and he was hired by Marvel to direct Spider-Man: Homecoming.

As an admirer of Watts’s subsequent films, I was really interested in seeing Clown. So, yesterday afternoon, I sat down and I watched Clown on Netflix.

Clown is the story of a stupid guy named Kent McCoy (Andy Powers) who tries to save his son’s birthday party by dressing up like a clown. What Kent doesn’t know is that the clown makeup is cursed and that, by putting it on, he’s now allowed himself to be possessed by a demon that feeds on children! What a dumbass! Kent tries to wash the makeup off his face but it won’t come off. He tries to take off his rainbow wig, just to discover that it’s now permanently attached to scalp. His wife uses a screw driver to try to pop off the red nose but, instead, she just rips his real nose to pieces. (The family dog eats the red nose and promptly becomes possessed.) Kent keeps telling everyone that he’s been possessed by a demon but no one believes him. Everyone just thinks that he’s a weirdo in clown makeup.

It sounds more interesting than it is. For all the promise in the idea of a possessed clown, Clown doesn’t do much with it. Clown is 90 minutes long but it only has enough plot for 30 minutes. The remaining hour is basically made up of characters repeating what we already know. We watch as Kent learns that the clown makeup is cursed. Then, we have to follow his wife as she does her own research and discovers that the clown makeup is cursed. Then, Peter Stomare shows up and starts explaining to everyone that the clown makeup is cursed. By this point, I was yelling at the screen, “I KNOW THIS ALREADY!”

Throughout the film, there are hints of the Jon Watts’s talent but, for the most part, they remain merely that. There’s an effective scene that takes place in a jungle gym at Chuck-E-Cheese’s and occasionally, there will be a line of dialogue or a movement of the camera that actually lives up to the plot’s subversive potential. However, especially when compared to Cop Car and Spider-Man, Clown is an abysmally paced film. It’s also terribly acted with Andy Powers neither sympathetic nor compelling as the possessed man in clown makeup. Not even a reliable character actor like Peter Stomare can bring much to the material.

The general rule of most horror films is that, no matter what the threat, dogs and children usually survive. The film not only breaks that rule but it breaks it multiple times. In fact, there’s so much blood spilled in the film that I actually found myself getting depressed watching it. Lacking both a satiric edge and any real interest in subverting the horror genre, Clown instead comes across as being unnecessarily mean-spirited. It’s just not much fun to watch.

When it comes to killer clowns, stick with Pennywise.

Here’s The 2nd Trailer For Eli Roth’s Death Wish!

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Judging from the majority of the comments on YouTube, a lot of people do not seem to understand that Eli Roth’s upcoming Death Wish is a remake of an earlier film. And the few who do realize it seem to be under the impression that it’s either a remake of one of the Punisher films or a rip-off of The Foreigner.

I mean, seriously, that’s kinda pathetic. There’s no excuse not to know your film history.

Anyway, here’s the 2nd trailer for Death Wish! It doesn’t really look that good but hopefully, it’ll still be better than The Brave One!

Here’s The Trailer for Eli Roth’s Death Wish!

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

We all know that Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. What is not so clear is what to do about it.

Now, some would argue that perhaps a good first step would be for Chicago voters to stop electing douchebags like Rahm Emanuel, reject the city’s political machine, and actually make the sacrifices necessary for actual reform while taking an honest look at the effects of systemic racism, police corruption, and the bloated municipal government.

You could do all that or you could just give Bruce Willis a gun and send him out on a murder spree. Guess which solution Death Wish goes for?

This film, from Eli Roth, will be released on November 22nd. I imagine our resident Charles Bronson experts, Gary Loggins and Jedadiah Leland, will have a lot to say about it.

Music Video of the Day: Thank You, Judge by BlueBOB (2001, dir. David Lynch)

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

What a mess it is trying to narrow down David Lynch music videos. If it isn’t undocumented, then it’s mis-credited to Lynch.

BlueBOB was a group composed of John Neff and David Lynch. The video has Naomi Watts, David Lynch, and John Neff in it. It also has Eli Roth. On that note, I’m not dignifying this with anymore than that. I will just include the remake of Cabin Fever if it were made by Dingo Pictures that Phelan Porteous and Allison Pregler put together for April Fools’ Day.