CABIN FEVER 2: SPRING FEVER (2009)

CABIN FEVER 2: SPRING FEVER (2009)

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever is such a mess of a movie that it's almost difficult to review.
The 'plot' involves the flesh-eating virus from the first movie getting transferred (via bottled water) to a local high-school prom.

First a little background: Cabin Fever 2 is of course a sequel to Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, a movie that not everybody loved, but I personally thought was excellent. It was unconventional, suspenseful, fairly unpredictable and was populated with pretty likable characters.
Because it was moderately successful, Lionsgate wanted a sequel. Two drafts of a sequel script (one by Eli Roth himself and one by Hatchet/Frozen creator Adam Green) were submitted and rejected. I have no idea why Lionsgate didn't like Roth's and Green's scripts, but I certainly cannot imagine they were much worse than the script that the studio finally agreed on (by somebody named Joshua Malkin)!
So...they hired up-and-coming genre director Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers) to direct. That seems fitting, seeing as how the first Cabin Fever put Roth on the map, so another promising newbie should take on the sequel.

Flash-forward to the present: Cabin Fever 2 was completed in 2007 and sat on the shelf for two years until it was finally released straight-to-DVD in 2009. And director Ti West apparently hates the final product and actually wanted his name removed from the movie (Lionsgate wouldn't allow him to).

So the movie must be pretty bad, right? Well, YES!   It is!
First of all, the movie reeks of studio tampering. Scenes feel out-of-place, as if the movie was re-edited and scenes aren't in the order they were supposed to be in (which is probably really the case). And it feels like some scenes are missing completely - when the prom starts in the movie, there's a long scene with two characters who were not previously introduced. It seems like we're already supposed to be familiar with these two, making me suspect that they were originally in the movie earlier but their scenes got left on the cutting room floor.
Which is not to say that any deleted footage should've remained in the movie - Cabin Fever 2 already feels overlong as it is (not a good sign when it's actually only about 80 minutes long), and I find it difficult to believe any amount of deleted character interaction would've improved the movie.

Speaking of the characters, they're awful!
In fact, the main problem with Cabin Fever 2 is the characters. Because this is a 'horror-at-the-prom' movie, all the characters are teens. We get the likable everyday guy as our protagonist, his 'funny fat guy' best friend, the cute girl the guy likes (and she IS gorgeous I might add), and of course her stupid jock boyfriend who doesn't want the protagonist "messing with his girl".
It's pretty obvious that the movie was going for a Superbad kind of vibe with these high-schoolers. The problem is, NONE of them is engaging or likable. At all. Early in the movie, there are endless scenes between the teen characters, and I found it literally impossible to pay attention or care about what they were talking about or doing. To be clear, I actually had to try to MAKE myself pay attention to their interactions, but I found it almost impossible simply because they were so unfunny, unlikable, and unengaging.

There is one scene in particular where the nice-guy protagonist declares his undying, teenage angst-filled affection for the female lead that is just AWFUL. Seriously, he stands there in the parking lot of the high-school and yells in his whiny voice, "I LOVE you! Can't you see that? I LOVE you SO MUCH! Why can't you just love me too!" This scene wouldn't have passed in a bad TV teen melodrama, let alone here.

The teen actors aren't worth mentioning, so I won't bother.
Rider Strong (the main actor from the first movie) is given top billing, but please DO NOT rent this movie if you're a fan of his, because he's in the movie for about 3 minutes, tops. And he has NO dialogue, not even one line.   SPOILER:  He wakes up in the woods, staggers around a little, and walks out into the street where he is immediately splattered by a bus.

Giuseppe Andrews as the bizarre Deputy Winston is the only other returning cast member from the first film. Unlike Rider Strong, Andrews actually gets a fair amount of screentime in the sequel. In fact, I think he's in the sequel more than he was in the original. But unfortunately his character has kind of changed. Deputy Winston was funny in the first movie, but his scenes here just kind of seem like a half-heated attempt to mimic his weirdness from the original. Also the movie can't seem to decide what kind of a role Winston is playing in the sequel. Is he a complete idiot who can't figure out what's going on? Is he the unlikely idiot-savant hero, who actually decides to do something about the infected water? Or is he a jerk who only cares about saving himself? We're never really sure, and I don't think that was supposed to be the intent. The movie keeps cutting from the action at the prom to the side-story with Winston, but I was never sure why, and in the end Winston's character doesn't have any impact on the "story" at all. He may as well have not been in the movie.

When the shit finally hits the fan at the prom, there are some okay gross-out effects, but I challenge you to care enough about what is going on to actually appreciate them.
There are references to the first movie (pancakes, guy in a rabbit suit) and references to other prom-based horror movies (Carrie, Prom Night).
Oh and another thing: in the first Cabin Fever, when somebody got the virus it slowly crept up on them and got worse and worse gradually. In Cabin Fever 2, everyone at the prom suddenly starts vomiting blood and so forth at exactly the same time!
So...the police barricade everyone inside the prom to keep the virus from spreading....the male & female leads try to escape...meh, whatever. I didn't care while watching it, and you won't care while reading about it.

The ending feels completely tacked-on and doesn't match the rest of the movie (probably a result of the studio tinkering).
Oh and there's animated opening & closing credits sequences that are actually kind of cool.

And...that's about all there is to say about Cabin Fever 2. Fans of the first movie won't like it, and neither will anyone else. Great job, Lionsgate! I wouldn't even recommend watching it out of curiosity.