Starring: Jordan Ladd, Rider Strong, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent, Joey Kern

Cabin Fever is the perfect drive-in movie, if there are any of those fine establishments left. It's a rough, meandering, and bloody film, like a picture from 1977 that might have been billed with The Hills Have Eyes, Motel Hell, The Evil Dead, and Last House on the Left. That's not accidental; director Eli Roth knows what he's doing and what he's paying homage to. It takes a lot of talent to make crap this good.

What's important to remember, however, is that unless you're sitting on the tailgate of pickup truck with smuggled beer in a cooler, Fever is a calling-card movie; it's meant more as a curriculum vitae than a deft horror film. The buzz swirling around this movie has suggested much more than that, which is why it's called buzz. It's largely wrong and expectations should be lowered, that way you'll be surprised and probably pleased.

In Fever, five college kids, finished with finals, head off into the woods for a weekend of sex and drinking. There's the good kids: Paul (the beefcake-named Rider Strong) and Karen (Jordan Ladd, Cheryl Ladd's daughter). There's the naughty kids: Jeff (Joey Kern) and Marcy (Cerina Vincent, the naked foreign exchange student from Not Another Teen Movie). And then there's the stupid fraternity boy, Bert, played by James DeBello. They're having a grand time until a backwoodsman (Arie Verveen--a fine character actor who has gone from the scalding heartthrob of camp classic Caught to scuzzy hermit) appears at their door. He's been infected with some kind of virus which causes the victims to slough flesh and bleed a lot from open sores. Seeing that he's contaminated with something and is also in an elevated state of panic, (the barbaric Bert shot the man earlier and never acknowledged the event) the kids slam the door on him, and are debating what to do when they hear their Blazer start up. The hermit attempts to commandeer the vehicle, vomiting blood all over the cab in the process, but the kids scare him out and end up setting him on fire. He runs off screaming into the woods. The virus, however, has not been contained and comes back to the cabin in various forms, setting the friends against one another in a bid to survive uninfected.

Roth knows all of the conventions and our expectations of horror films and plays with them successfully. He infuses the proceedings with bizarre non-sequiturs and characters who appear solely to unnerve us. There's the proprietors of the local grocery store, including a strange boy named Dennis who likes to bite people (this is the kind of movie where Dennis's screech of "Pancakes! Pancakes!" ends up a memorable quote). There's the eerie Deputy Winston (played by Giuseppe Andrews, quite good in Detroit Rock City and worth watching) and the stoner guy out from the woods whose dog later, for no particular reason, turns into the "devil-dog" from The Hills Have Eyes.

This is not a great horror film; it's not even particularly that frightening. It is, however, a great drive-in movie. That's a compliment.