He upgrades their first run-in with the creepy rural folks at a general store, by painting the locals in cartoonish, but oddly specific terms, like the feral youngster that swings on the porch, waiting to bite strangers. Roth deviates by making them aggressively unlikable, setting them up as people who will choose the worst possible way to respond to a crisis. Then there’s the rich prick (Joey Kern), his horndog girlfriend (Cerina Vincent), and the frat caliber clown (James DeBello). The lead is the “sweet” guy (Rider Strong) desperate to move out of the friend zone and into the pants of “sweet” girl (Jordan Ladd). The set-up is strictly boilerplate, as a group of college students drives out to a rented cabin in the woods. He’s a competent, sometimes brilliant splatter auteur, who nonetheless prefers to work in crayon. CABIN FEVER actually rejiggered those tropes in interesting ways, not because Eli wanted to correct them, but because he’d have more fun busting those standards to goose the thrills.

It arrived after American horror flicks had been riffing on SCREAM for years, leaving everyone exhausted by references to genre tropes while serving them up to ever-dwindling frights. Back in 2002, I appreciated it for its merciless treatment of its leads, who for once, were as self-indulgent as their real-life counterparts often are. And that led me right to Eli Roth’s CABIN FEVER, a horror-comedy of terrible young adults looking to party in the woods, only to catch a flesh-eating disease instead. Still, it would be nice to see someone face some consequences for their preening selfishness. They may bend over backward to “own a lib” like me, but that doesn’t change the fact that they deserve a living wage, affordable healthcare and an effective response to COVID-19. I do not wish them harm, even now, and never will. And yet it continues, unabated, as folks advertise their worst impulses online, expecting applause. That fellow in the White House has spent his entire term encouraging a diabolical mix of xenophobia, sanctioned cruelty, greed and narcissism that was hard to swallow before this pandemic began. There’s another way, and it’s far less respectable. Others may be distracting themselves with mentally unstable zookeepers and the return of Captain Picard, but that’s just another way to cope through pop culture.

There’s real comfort in watching competent, well-meaning experts struggle to contain a pandemic and letting ourselves give in to our worst fears for a spell. No one should be baffled that people are cozying up to CONTAGION and OUTBREAK. And right now, it’s remarkably satisfying. Eli Roth’s debut about pretty young things catching a nasty bug in the woods is a crude, mean-spirited ride.

Watch cabin fever 2002