And then, quite suddenly, the hunters become the hunted, redefining the expectations in a lively fashion that remains ambiguous all the way through the final shot. Virtually the entire movie, in which a couple of young guys head into the forest on a hunting trip, involves long takes where nothing happens. Whereas some directors might want to expand their scope with each subsequent film, West boldly reined it in with this minimalist work, a woodsy thriller that infuriated and delighted audiences in equal measures. WHERE CAN I WATCH IT? Available on DVD and streaming on Netflix Instant, where it maintains a respectable two-and-a-half star rating. Dumped on DVD, “Cabin Fever 2” is rarely discussed by West or fans of his work, but remains an interesting footnote in his career. More intent on making an outlandish gore-based comedy than a conventional horror follow-up, West surprised the studio to the extent that they took control of the film and re-edited it - eliciting a very different kind of shock from the film’s director, who insisted (to no avail) that Lionsgate take his name off the film.
On the recommendation of Eli Roth, fresh from the success of “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel,” West was hired by Lionsgate to helm this ill-fated sequel. Emulating the classic “Tales from the Crypt” format, West acknowledges the inherent silliness of his premise while turning it inside out.
On another, it’s a smart commentary on the very formula it indulges: West routinely cuts to black-and-white segments in which a spooky narrator comments on the main story. On one layer, it’s a by-the-numbers B-movie survival tale about a group of young people stranded on a farm and dealing with bloodsucking, virus-stricken zombie bats. West’s first feature, produced by Glass Eye Pix horror guru Larry Fessenden (whom West worked for straight out of film school), provides the ideal introduction to his work. “It’s very hard for a film stay one step ahead.” On the brink of another shot at stepping up his production budget with the Liv Tyler vehicle “The Side Effect,” West continues to innovate as a filmmaker while making each scare count. “We’ve become very postmodern as an audience,” West told Mekado Murphy in the New York Times last weekend. “The Innkeepers” opens with a throwaway gag about the superficiality of easy jump scares before settling into something much different. “Trigger Man” is downright experimental in its slow-burn approach, which makes its run-and-gun climax far more satisfying than a conventional build-up would allow, while “Devil” similarly takes its time before exploding into chaos. That is to say, while West knows the conventions of horror, he also turns them inside out. “From the first shot,” Amy Taubin wrote of “Devil” in a Film Comment article, “you know you are in the hands of a purposeful, sophisticated genre director.” While these incidents may come with territory of any obsessive filmmaker, in West’s case they also reflect his dedication to controlling every minute detail of his work, and it shows. An ill-fated attempt to step up his scale of production, “Cabin Fever 2,” ended with the studio recutting the film and West attempting to take his name off the project he also publicly complained about minor changes to a cut of his “ The House of the Devil.” More recently, he penned an open letter about the unappreciated value of a VOD release. As a result, West has retained a cult following comprised of devout horror fans.