CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO

TAKE TWO SPOILERS AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING

Yet another miserable little horror flick in which a quartet of odious morons get what's coming to them and die horribly: a remarkably not dissimilar premise to director Kaare Andrew's previous film Altitude. Just as you spent most of that movie hoping the plane will smack into the side of a mountain, here you look forward to them being eaten by a Kraken or torpedoes by a passing U-boat. I've never understood why it's so difficult to create reasonably interesting, well-rounded characters you don't actually object to spending ninety minutes with.

Cabin Fever: Patient Zero also cheats with its irrelevant title: this has no more connection with either Eli Roth's original (or Ti West's unrelated "sequel") than it does with Jurassic Park or Day Of The Dead. A team of doctors on a small uninhabited island somewhere off the coast of the Dominican Republic are attempting to isolate a cure for a potential pandemic by forcible experimentation on the disease's sole carrier (Sean Astin). Meanwhile three enormous bellends and a Hot Bikini Chick arrive on the other side of the island for a stag night of beer, weed and partying. Bellend #2 and the Hot Bikini Chick immediately get contaminated by some kind of underwater chemical outflow, and start metamorphosing into decomposing pseudozombies, leaving Bellends #1 and #3 to trek through the jungle to find help....

The medical ethics arguments between the increasingly battle-weary doctors are pretty basic, but they're still more interesting than the teen soap operatics which amount to nothing deeper than bros before hoes, I humped your girlfriend and let's get thoroughly stoned. Frankly it's easier to cheer on the flesh-rotting virus that could lead to the eradication of the entire human race. Sure, the film racks up some impressively revolting make-up effects with its disintegrating zombie monsters, including a grisly catfight on the beach, and the ending is pleasantly grim. But for far too much of the time I didn't give a hoot about any of these people, I was frequently bored and couldn't wait for the misery to end. Rubbish.

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