![]() That night, Harry wrote up his Toronto prefestival report, and it began by telling buyers not to leave before the end. Harry called me right away, and even though Harry hadn’t seen the film, we were clearly kindred spirits and bonded right away. Howard said it was the best horror movie he’d worked on since Evil Dead 2, and he called Harry Knowles at Ain’t It Cool News to tell him. I showed the edit of the film to Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero, who kindly had come in and done the makeup effects for next to nothing just to help me out. I remember the fear that all the buyers were going to go home after the first week of the festival and that no one would be left to see Cabin Fever at the day 10 press screening. It was a wild introduction to world genre cinema, which at the time was very hard to find in the U.S. I met directors like Vincenzo Natali ( Cube) and Ryuhei Kitamura ( Midnight Meat Train). The films were insane - exactly my taste. 9 - the day before our press screening.Īt the time, Midnight Madness was considered some strange sidebar to a very prestigious festival. We mixed the film, and I watched the print at the lab then took it with me on the plane to Toronto. It turns out one of the investors was showing the VHS tape to his 12-year-old son, who, 95 minutes later, looked at his dad and said, “This is better than American Pie.” My career was literally in the hands of a 12-year-old, who, thankfully, liked horror movies. I was on the phone with the investors, saying: “We’re in Toronto! We’re not gonna get another chance like this!” We sat there for two hours waiting - until finally they agreed to wire the money. ![]() I was sitting on the mixing stage, with the mixer looking at me, waiting for the deposit to hit the account so that we could start. My producers and I found a group of investors who said they would put in the last $400,000 to finish the movie, but they hadn’t wired the funds yet. Not only did this give us the time we needed to finish the movie, we now had a real shot at selling the film if buyers stuck around till the last day. We were so dead-last that the closing-night party was scheduled to end before our film began. Apparently the main festival had rejected the film, but someone said, “This seems more like Colin’s thing.” Colin loved the film and put us in the festival - dead last. But then something happened where a guy named Colin Geddes (the Midnight Madness programmer) got hold of the tape (yes, the VHS tape of my AVID edit) and played it. I had submitted the movie to the Toronto Film Festival, and we were told it was rejected. ![]() Cabin Fever was not finished, and we needed another $400,000 to mix and make prints. This dreck is nearly unwatchable.I was an unknown filmmaker with an unfinished film, borrowing money from my parents to pay my $700-a-month rent for a studio apartment on Beachwood Drive. This movie’s bootleg, low budget version of the Pancakes! Kid is not even worth wasting time writing about.įinal Verdict: CABIN FEVER may be the most pointless remake that there has ever been as it does nothing to improve on the mediocre movie that came before it. The direction was sloppy, the acting was bad, the effects are no better now than they were in 2002, there was even a scene of a dead body where you could very visibly see the actor still breathing! This movie is just a mess.Īnd much like with the original film, the decision to treat the locals as some sort of inbred neanderthals still confuses the hell out of me. It was like everyone had been given lobotomies and then dropped off at a cabin in the woods. I understand that people in horror movies have to be kinda stupid in order to make the terrible choices that almost always end up in their deaths but the characters in CABIN FEVER were beyond idiotic. Aside from having one of the best names in the biz, she was really good in the MTV TEEN WOLF series and in the Amazon Prime series RED OAKS (check it out if you haven’t see it before)…she should really have declined this clunker though.
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