Weird shit happens in Portland, Oregon all the time. But this week, something weirder than usual is happening. They’re making Cabin Fever… again.
Deadline and several other sources are reporting that the remake, helmed by filmmaker/production designer Travis Zariwny, will use the same shooting script that Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein wrote for the 2002 original. Yes, really. Here’s what Roth has to say about that:
“Travis had an amazing vision for my original script, and as a scary movie fan I really wanted to see it. I almost see this like re-staging a play, and I’m excited to see what ideas Travis and the cast bring to it. They’re all fans of the original and want to make a film that’s a new classic and I believe they will.”
I’m of two minds here. The first one is the knee-jerk movie nerd mind, which tells me this is a bad idea. You can’t just take Cabin Fever and re-shoot it with different actors twelve years later. I haven’t seen Cabin Fever in years, but I fondly remember reading a lot about it in Fangoria, and I remember enjoying my time with the film and its multitude of DVD commentaries. The second mind is this: I’ve always wanted to see how two directors shoot the same exact screenplay. It’ll be a fun experiment. It might be a completely soulless rehash, but that would almost be more interesting. I’m the kind of curious obsessive who compared sequences from Let The Right One In and Let Me In side by side on my computer monitor. I can see myself doing that here, too. Whatever the result of this experiment is, I don’t think it’ll be uninteresting.
The remake’s cast is full of people I’ve never heard of: Gage Golightly, Dustin Ingram, Samuel Davis, Matthew Daddario, and Nadine Crocker. Roth is in the executive producer’s chair. I guess we’ll see how this goes.