THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO (2014) **

Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever is one of the great horror-comedies of the new millennium.  Ti West’s messy, but fun Cabin Fever 2:  Spring Fever is as good as you could hope for from a modern DTV horror sequel.  Kaare Andrews’ Cabin Fever:  Patient Zero is an adequate, yet thoroughly uninspired prequel that has a handful of good ideas, but never figures out a way to properly do them justice.

A group of friends take a cruise to the islands as part of their bachelor party festivities.  Meanwhile, on a nearby island, scientists are performing experiments on Patient Zero (the film’s lone star, Sean Astin), the cause of the flesh-eating disease in the first film.  Naturally, that’s the island where the partygoers decide to drop anchor.  It doesn’t take long before they become infected and try to fight their way off the island.

The scenes of the boating bachelor party bros are OK, but they lack the dark humor and outrageousness of the other films in the series.  Likewise, the scenes inside the laboratory are played far too seriously for their own good, which takes much of the fun out of it.  Maybe I would’ve felt different about the film if it hadn’t carried the Cabin Fever label.  I guess it’s a matter of expectations.  Shifts in tone within a particular series happen occasionally (Return of the Living Dead 3 is a good example), but this is a case where the more serious tone doesn’t quite work.  (Although I guess the fact that the women scientists all look like models and have plunging necklines is a clue that we shouldn’t take any of this seriously.)  

The laboratory setting is just novel enough to sustain your interest.  At least there was an attempt to try to take the horror out of the cabin and do something fresh with the concept.  It’s just a shame that Andrews doesn’t have the same touch Roth and West do when it comes to balancing the yuks with the yucks.

The good news is Patient Zero delivers on the gore.  Granted, that’s about the only department in which it delivers in (aside from some occasional gratuitous T & A), but we’ve got to take what we can get.  The inevitable escalation of the “finger bang” scene from the original is the obvious highlight and one of the rare moments where the film comes close to matching its predecessors in terms of melding gore and comedy.  Other notable gory goodies:  Blood puking, a skin-peeling catfight, and the deadly aftermath of a pistol’s recoil.  While some of the effects start to look like something out of a Troma movie by the end, you can at least say this for Andrews:  He isn’t afraid to toss the red stuff around.