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91 out of 120 people found the following review useful: I Honestly think the Hype Killed this Film., 18 October 2005 Author: sunset-at-night from New York
Before Cabin Fever came out.. the word in the horror world was that Cabin Fever is one of the most gruesome, bloodiest, scariest, funniest, craziest horror movie ever. So when it opened in theaters, everyone's expectation was sky high ..even mine. Yes, I was kind of disappointed with Cabin Fever because it was hyped so much. I mean you had Peter Jackson the director of Lord of the Rings saying in the trailer this is one of best horror movie he's ever seen. Now if I did not go in with such huge expectations, I could had enjoyed it for what it was. I really started enjoying Cabin Fever once it started playing on cable. Every time it comes on I watch it and I begin to love this film a lot more.Cabin Fever is directed by up and comer Eli Roth. He's a guy that loves horror films and mentioned in several articles this movie pay homage to his favorites like Evil Dead.Cabin Fever is about 5 college kids who had just finish test finals and are enjoying some relaxation and fun in a cabin in the woods but the fun is cut short when they learn a flesh eating bacteria disease is around. The main character Paul is played by Boy Meets World actor Rider Strong. Rider was surprisingly good in this movie and Paul is the character you root for the most to not get the disease.The movie is funny. The funniest movie ever? Hell no! This movie is scary. The scariest movie ever? Hell no! This movie is bloody. The bloodiest? Hell no! So I'm finally enjoying the movie for what it's worth and it is and has a potential to end up being a horror movie classic. There are tons of films that people hated when it first came out and then come to love it semi years later. Cabin Fever I believe is one of them.
104 out of 163 people found the following review useful: An unfairly judged cult flick, 14 October 2005 Author: ReelSplatter (ReelSplatter@Comcast.net) from East Petersburg, PA
This film has been unfairly judged! It is in fact a very good 80's style, Splatter, B-movie. It shys away from the self referencing humor plague that Scream started and succeeds in being a very strange splatter/comedy. Several reviews have been posted that say the characters are unlikable and do illogical things through the course of the movie. The characters are very good representations of the youth of the late 90's. The hunting squirrels joke is a perfect example. When asked why he is hunting the squirrels, the character replies, "Cause their gay". How many times have you heard a teen respond to a question in such a manner? Eli Roth has captured very well the essence of of being a teenager in this very cynical society.The actions the characters take are, in context, very believable. Ask yourself, if you were in a situation where you had to deal with the very likely possibility of becoming infected with a horrible flesh-eating disease, would you be the first to lend a helping hand to the infected? Another thing that has been trashed by many reviews is the strange sense of humor the film has. The pancakes scene in particular. The humor in the film is the strange sort you would more likely find in a Troma film (not the sex/toilet variety, though)While it's not for everyone, the sense of fun the movie has about itself is more suited to hardcore B-movie fans than mainstream audiences. Eli Roth hearkens back to a time when movies weren't always about psychological thrills,bad twist endings, and pretentious artistic "meanings", when they were about fun. It's a great movie to sit around with some friends and watch. So please, don't judge it so harshly, just because it's a movie to be taken straight with no shocking hidden meanings or twists. Hopefully this film will find it's audience with the cult movie crowd. Highly recommended to anyone with a love of B-Movie cinema.
55 out of 87 people found the following review useful: Horrid *spoilers*, 31 October 2004 Author: MissSatan from Sydney, Australia
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I'd like to start this review off by noting I am a fan of horror, not only that, I am a fan of b grade horror also. I am therefore of sound mind and body when I pronounce this movie a pile of crap.As we all know, there's different types of good horror. There's bad acting+poor gore+boobs+ 80's=unintentional hilarity (eg: bloody pom poms) there's faux b grade indie low budget homage to the classics horror (eg. Undead, peter jacksons first movie). There's genuine comedy+gore (shaun of the dead, dawn of the dead) then there's trying to be indie, using the actor from Boy Meets World, bad script writing, poor direction, indecisive drivel. (that's Cabin Fever)I don't know, I should have known from the DVD cover of the 'forest scene/look closer and it's a spooky scull!! OooOOoO' that it was going to be rubbish. First off the hackneyed teen group is established (don't forget the horny couple) Neither the actors or the script give you any reason to get attached to the characters so prepare to not give a crap when they get infected with the mystery 'suddenly I'm projectile vomiting blood' virusWhat you can count on is dozens of unnecessary characters. Watch as they pointlessly drift in and out of the movie like so many dead fish in a pond (or a RESERVIOUR?! Oops, hope I didn't spoil anything original and clever. Groan.) As a side note on that, please note the dramatic music every time there is a shot of a glass of water, cup of tea, empty glass, someone sipping from a glass etc, just in case we didn't get it when we saw the dead body rotting in the river and the extended scene of the pipes going from said river to the cabin where our teens are staying and enjoying glasses of tap water. The mistake this movie made was trying to be horror quirky and actual horror, and failing miserably at both. Even the gore was overdone and uninspired. The quirk just wasn't happening, as it came in odd spots through the movie, usually in places where you were baffled by some random 'crazy local' character or script anomaly. Note: a random guy in a bunny suit isn't quirky. It serves only to suggest someone going mad, which opens up all these 'maybe its all just some psychological hallucination' questions. But no, its just some stupid goddamn guy in a bunny suit put there because they thought it would be CLEVER.So after trudging through an hour or so of infection spreading and vicious dog attacks, (blurry and in the background it looks more like a dog licking food off a mannequin) you're treated with the main character going on a random killing spree? For no apparent reason? Someone then forcibly swallows a harmonica, which is I guess..supposed to be funny. Except that its not too obvious he was playing a harmonica in the first place, or why he was still playing it minutes after being approached by a blood soaked Rider Strong plus harmonica swallowing seems to involve a spray of mouth blood a'la the viruses projectile blood vomiting, so it's all a little confusing. But it doesn't matter, by this time, you're just praying it ends soon.In heated conclusion, this movie is horrendous! Do yourself a favour and stay away, ignore anyone who says its 'kool d00d' Its not even so bad it's good. And if you didn't feel homicidal tendencies toward that Boy Meets World prat before seeing Cabin Fever, you certainly will now.
47 out of 74 people found the following review useful: Enjoyable with reasonable delivery despite the usual teen clichés and an increasingly stupid half hour, 16 May 2004 Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK
Five friends finish their exams at college and decide to relax by taking a break in the woods. They arrive at their rented cabin and begin to party – a party that is broken by a sick man who stumbles into their midst. They try to fend him off but accidentally kill him. With their car wrecked and their mobile phones not working, they try to get help but their plans dramatically change when one of their number starts to show signs of having the same flesh eating virus that the stranger appeared to have.I remembered this film getting reasonable reviews when it came out so I decided to give it a try on DVD to see for myself. The film opens with a group of teenagers going to a cabin where they encounter 'something' and then slowly turn on one another as the tension mounts up. So far, so genre.However the film does well to overcome the fact that we can't see (or fight) the assailant and still manages to mount up the tension pretty well for the majority of the film. It is in the last 30 minutes where it goes to pot – where the film opens up the sheer apocalyptic potential the virus has, it chooses to focus on mad deer crashing through windscreen etc and starts to get quite silly. The lack of emotional involvement between the characters means that it is not quite as gripping as it should be – instead they turn on each other really quickly and only once do you feel for them.The movie borrows heavily from other films (Evil Dead, teen movies, Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead) and in some ways it is not a problem, but in others it is a weakness – for example the climax of the action is obvious because it is clear what it is referencing. Roth does OK as director and generally manages to keep the tension up regardless of the slightly daffy script. Like I say – he loses it a bit in the final 30 minutes and I have mixed feelings about his final scene. He throws in a quite funny joke about perceptions but also tries to mix it with the horror of an impending outbreak around the US. Generally it isn't that great a film but it is one of the better of the 'teen slasher' genre that I think it more or less fits into.The teen cast are too basic and they are only average – par for the course, if you will. DeBello is OK, Strong is quite enjoyable even if Kern got on my nerves bit. The two female leads are not as well used and a more cynical reviewer may suggest that the film makes lazy use of their naked bodies – again another genre cliché. The support cast are pretty country and do what is expected of them – none of them really do that well and the blame for that should be shared between the cast and the script, which doesn't give them more than cliché to really work with.Overall I thought this was an OK film. Compared to the genre it is better than some of the other teen horrors that have been around recently although it isn't really that good. The first hour is pretty solid but the final half hour doesn't quite deliver on the potential that had been suggested up till this point. An enjoyable genre picture – nothing more, nothing less.
28 out of 42 people found the following review useful: This movie makes me want to puke and then puke again., 28 April 2006 Author: Gums4588 from United States
When I saw the previews for this movie, I didn't expect much to begin with - around a second rate teen horror movie. But wow, this movie was absolutely awful. And that's being generous.First of all, the casting for the movie was terrible. You feel no sympathy (or for that matter any morbid feeling) for the characters. The acting was so terrible that I was just simply waiting and hoping for the God-awful thing to end.Secondly, there are points in the movie that had absolutely no relation to the plot whatsoever. Can somebody please explain to me why the girlish-looking boy starts screaming "PANCAKES!!!" at the top of his lungs while going into Jackie Chan moves I've never seen before, and even further biting the guy who has the virus? Why does the father of the kid proceed to get angry with the virus-infected guy, and go on a redneck hunting spree to find him? I was left with a feeling of such confusion and utter disbelief that I literally said out loud, "Where the hell did that come from?"I just simply couldn't believe what I had seen. I really thought I had seen some bad movies, but I have to say that Cabin Fever tops them all. This movie made me want to puke and then puke again. Then blow my brains out.Please, save yourself an hour and a half and do something more productive. Watching grass grow, perhaps, is a proper alternative.
26 out of 41 people found the following review useful: 5 star nonsense - 1 star movie, 21 April 2006 Author: mike_deprado from United States
OK let's get right to the point. We have five recent college grads (must have majored in the F word) going out on a weekend camping trip. They run into someone who is in need of help, but instead of trying to assist him, they decide to set him on fire instead. Nice bunch of people. Next some of them start go get sick - must be something in the water at the cabin they are staying at. However the neighbors seem to be OK. Oh well, when things start getting really bad, they lock up one their companions instead of getting help (try the neighbor by the way). Some locals don't take a liking to them. They chase one on a high speed romp through the woods for many miles, until the truck breaks down. Somehow ten minutes later he shows up at the cabin (how he could find it and how he could travel at the speed of light to get there is a mystery). Another of the brain surgeon type at the cabin realizes something is amiss so he hides out in a cave to let this blow over. He then decides the next day to return to the cabin believing it must be some type of shrine. He is giddy with relief that he survived (he must have thought it was a 24 hour bug). Unfortuneatley he is met by some not so friendly police officers. Another couple decide to have sex while the flesh eating bug is working its magic, and then the women realizes she needs to shave her legs (taking a lot of the diseased skin with shaving cream). Anyway you get the idea. Nothing makes sense here. These are five people I would not want to be friends with. I was rooting for the flesh eating bacteria. Other characters were introduced who were also somewhat amusing but utterly unlikeable as well. Ninety minutes of good life wasted here.
26 out of 42 people found the following review useful: Doesn't even warrant a 1 star rating!, 14 May 2006 Author: Phantasm01 from Somewhere
Anyone who has read my review for Uwe Boll's "Alone In The Dark" will remember that I compared the unenviable task of sitting through that piece of human waste to having each and every hair on your arm pulled out. Well, take that analogy a step further with this irredeemable gutter trash and try to imagine the pain of getting your teeth extracted without novacaine. Do that, and you'll have a general idea of what Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever" is all about.I never believed any one film was capable of topping the sheer agonizing dreck that Uwe Boll cranks out as the "worst film ever made." But, in all honesty, I have to say "Cabin Fever" comes very close. This is yet another sad excuse for a motion picture that had absolutely no valid reason to meet with any form of theatrical release. For somebody who claims to love the horror genre as much as Eli Roth does, he has created the single most annoying and convoluted patchwork of a movie I think I have ever seen in my entire life. How do you screw up a story like this? Think of the potential this plot would have had without the poorly written characters, without the bad writing, and without all that unnecessary and unfunny comedy. A movie dealing with a grotesque flesh-eating virus could and should have been so much better than what Roth dished out for us here. This script failed on so many levels with me. And, while I do not doubt the evident talent this director possesses, I do know that he fumbled the ball big time on an idea that could very well have redefined the horror genre.To say this was a production of missed opportunities would indeed be a gross play on words. A generous amount of blood and unsettling special effects can't even save it, and that is one element I normally go for. There really was nothing about "Cabin Fever" that I could easily recommend to anybody. When three quarters of the crowd walks out of the theater halfway through, you know the movie is sinking fast. My best advice to those reading this would be to simply rent before purchasing. One viewing was more than enough for me to know that I will most likely never bother with it again.
11 out of 14 people found the following review useful: An unfairly criticised debut; it really is not that bad, 16 February 2008 Author: LoneWolfAndCub from Australia
Eli Roth's debut, Cabin Fever, seems to be hated by the majority on IMDb and many other critics. I, however, found this to be a rather enjoyable little film that just falls short of being great. To sum up this movie: take a bit of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a bit of The Evil Dead, a couple of elements from The Thing and Last House on the Left and you have Cabin Fever. A horror movie about five teenagers going to holiday in a cabin in the woods after college where the nearest town is filled with hicks and everything is slowly getting infected by an unknown virus which starts to turn everyone against each other. Roth blends horror with a small amount of comedy which suits this type of movie. The five teens are a mixed bunch (the dumb guy, the horny couple and the innocent couple). Most of them swear, drink, have wild sex and smoke drugs and because of this may seem annoying and clichéd, on the contrary, Roth has captured the attitude of what teenagers were (and still are) like. We do all that they do (well, not so much drugs..) and to me that makes them more realistic. The locals aren't so realistic and seem to be their for comic relief and body count (which isn't a bad thing). There is plenty of gore and plenty of scenes to make you squirm in disgust.The reason I don't give this a really high score is because the pacing seemed jumbled to me. For me, the running time was really short and there were not enough scares throughout. This movie had potential to be more than the final product but I respect what Roth has done and considering it was his first movie it is remarkably good and for that I give it:8/10
22 out of 37 people found the following review useful: What's up with this movie?, 22 September 2003 Author: Sizzle007 from South Bend, IN
I wasted 5.75 to see this crappy movie so I just want to know a few things:What was the point of the dog being split in half at the beginning of the movie, the disease had nothing to do with being split in half.What was the point of dragging Karen into the shed, she already totally infected her room, they could have just locked her in there where she would have been safer.Why would the Hermit be running around the forest asking strangers to help him when he could have just asked his relative, the hog lady, to take him to the hospital?Why didn't any of the characters bother to walk into town to get help when things started getting bad, are they all really that lazy?Even if Paul was threatened by the guy w/ the shotgun for peeping on his wife, Paul could have just sent Jeff or Bert back to the house to ask for help. the girl he loves is deteriorating.What was the point of the box?Why did Jeff go back to the cabin after he left when everyone else was getting infected, if he was that big of a jerk to leave in the first place wouldn't he have just gone back home?If the police went to all the trouble of gathering up the kids and burning them on the fire pit, why did they throw Paul halfway into the river, it wasn't even necessary for the plot because the water was already contaminated.Who makes lemonade out of river water, that crap has dirt leaves and bugs in it. Why couldn't the two kids have just use the tap water, it was contaminated too, so the stupid ending would still work.
18 out of 30 people found the following review useful: Very bad, 5 March 2006 Author: fredducker from France
I don't really know whether Cabin Fever is supposed to be a joke or a film... But as far as I know, it's much closer to being a joke than anything else. A few years ago, the community of horror film makers decided to take a new step and make fun of the genre, thus giving birth to the Scream series. A list was given in Scream, of all the stupid things horror film characters will do that are predictable, and the characters in Scream ended up doing exactly the same things, which added a lot of humor and irony to this analysis of the genre, and led to hope that horror films from now on would show a bit different, either full of irony towards the genre, self-derision towards the film itself, or at least different in their dramatic process than all the "old" films that responded to the same tired criteria. In seeing "Cabin Fever", alas, many will see how unoriginal, serious, pretentious, boring and even not scary some supposedly "scary" films are now, even a few years later. First of all, this film lacks originality in a way few others do. It has been said several times, how little imagination horror directors have today, remaking remakes of foreign sequels, but setting the film in a cabin in the woods just doesn't seem to be an "hommage" to anything, it seems to be, simply, a ripoff. Whoever wishes to be surprised by other factors of the film's story won't be: once again, we are dealing with a film whose characters are all in their early twenties, who won't think rationally when placed in front of a problem, will rather argue for hours and pick up fights than try to think and do something about it. Not much excitement there either. For the umpteenth time in a horror film, they are tempted to kiss, make love and just basically have fun, all sorts of things that don't really make them any different than any other horror film victims seen previously. Secondly, this film is unimaginatively serious. Every situation the characters are in, every dialog, every situation in the film is treated with such seriousness that any viewer with a little sense of derision will be relieved when some characters finally end up dying. Nothing in the way the film is directed, written or acted shows any sign of humor or sarcasm, which is quite amazing considering the film is about an invisible-never-heard-of-before-flesh-eating-virus (no laughs please). I won't even bring up the acting, since there are no actors in this film. The cast was most certainly hired for being friends or neighbors with the director. Thirdly, and this will strike whoever has seen a "good" horror film before, the screenplay is absolutely empty. Nothing really happens, some actions are repeated several times ("let's try to get help!"), nothing makes sense, either in the facts, the psychology of the characters, or even the hilariously lame last sequence of the film, which is probably supposed to be funny according to the director and screenwriters. In the end I will only remark that a horror film is supposed to have something scary in it. Gallons of fake blood, whether they are being vomited, squirted from severed limbs or simply dripping from wounds, never were enough to scare an audience. Such major features as screenplay, ideas, and even cruelty are requested for whoever claims to have shot something scary. If I wasn't considering it to be a total failure, I would agree to reckon that the film has one talent: it is filthy disgusting to watch. Yet being grossed-out and being scared are two very different feelings, let it be known.I would like to encourage anyone a tad curious or interested in seeing this film to check older major horror films first, why not from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, films made by Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Roger Corman, William Lustig, John Carpenter... it might not only give a good definition of what is scary, or self-derisory horror, but also convince viewers that "new" isn't necessarily "better". A good example related to the film is the few tracks composer Angelo Badalamenti provided for this film, even although they are unmistakably close to his previous compositions, they are below anything he has ever done before.
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