Publication Date: 05-02-2026

Cabin Fever (2016) review

Dir. Travis Z

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★½

What could’ve motivated a director, or a studio for that matter, to take Eli Roth’s barely 14-year-old horror film and remake it using largely the same script and only changing minor details? IE: Deputy Winston is now a female officer. Roth’s directorial debut was far from perfect, yet it built a sturdy bridge between ribald situational comedy and gross-out gore. It never needed a remake, much less one so quickly. I was still under the impression we were building off Roth’s original with cheap spinoffs disguised as direct sequels, but apparently, somewhere along the line, that whole idea was scrapped too.

Get ready for this. The story concerns a group of college kids who go out in the middle of the woods for closer bonding time. After a run-in with a man sick with a flesh-eating virus, they begin contracting the same sort of vicious disease by way of their water-supply. With the original film, Roth, who for some mystifying reason serves as a producer on this particular film, embraced a grungy aesthetic that captured the dirtiness of the woods extremely well. His focus on murky waters, unkempt wildlife, and a slew of other visual eyesores set the tone for an unpleasant stay in the middle of nowhere. Here, everything feels conventional, right down to the look of the forest and the surroundings. There’s little atmosphere and even less of an environment.

Rider Strong’s charisma, Giuseppe Andrews’ hilariously memorable performance as a deputy, and even the strange old woman who is seen slicing up the bowels of a contaminated hog are less-enthusiastic caricatures that give the entire film the look and feel of a high school play version of Roth’s original chiller. The effects are fine, the cinematography is whatever, and the vibe is competency as opposed to creativity.

Because it’s so unambitiously tethered to following the original’s plotting, this Cabin Fever never justifies why it should exist, nor does it make any sort of noble strides to be its own movie. The script feels largely comprised of the same plot-points and even dialog of the original film, to the point where the goal was ostensibly make the same film twice In its current form, Travis Z’s Cabin Fever could be a great example in an analysis determining what is a film remake and defining what exactly should be the purpose of one, as well. It’s a complete waste of time.

My review of Cabin Fever (2002)

Starring: Samuel Davis, Gage Golightly, Matthew Daddario, and Louise Linton. Directed by: Travis Z.