Cabin Fever

I wanted to like this movie. It has the recipe to be a campy classic, but to me its a painful mess. All of the characters suck. The dialogue is awkward and clunky. It almost feels like it was written by a teenager. The ending is especially frustrating. The movie tries to throw everything at the wall and nothing sticks. The deer flailing through the windshield was just cringe. The whole final chase was awkward and abrupt. To me, its more proof that Roth movies offer nothing more than gross out horror. The special effects makeup was pretty amazing. Especially considering the buget and when it was made. There are moments in this movie that were effective. The bathtub scene was tense. As was the first run in with patient zero. Unfortunately that doesnt do much to save this mess of a horror.

Director Eli Roth's CABIN FEVER starts out as if we're in for yet another story about killer hillbillies in the deep woods. Fortunately, Roth is just setting us up for a foray into hemorrhagic horror of the first order! The use of an Ebola-like, flesh-eating disease is both disgusting and innovative.

The main characters are college kids out to party in the titular structure. As such, they range from annoying, to highly unlikable, to utterly detestable. In spite of this, one actually feels a bit of empathy toward them, once the sickening stuff begins.

Love it or hate it, this movie is original...

A group of college students head up to a remote cabin for a weekend of alcohol and sex, but when one of them becomes sick; they begin to turn on each other.

Cabin Fever is funnier than it is scary, in fact it is questionable whether it is in fact scary at all, but it is certainly entertaining and it's packed with gruesome gore and corny lines. The humour is not present because it's a low budget production or the acting is wooden, the effects are actually pretty good and so are the cast. Cabin Fever was funny because it was meant to be, it never takes itself seriously for a moment and the script is deliberately loaded with cheesy lines.

As a pure comedy its not great, as a horror movie its not great, but as an entertaining comedy horror flick is hits the spot, and it may well become a cult movie in years to come.

6/10

Cabin Fever was better than I expected but there were some things that weren't that good. For the most part the movie was a well made horror film that tells the story of five college friends on vacation at a remote mountain cabin when one of them contacts a flesh-eating virus. The movie is a somewhat realistic look at how people would react to such a situation. The movie stars Rider Strong (from Boy Meets World), Jordan Ladd (Broken Lizard Club Dread), Cierina Vincent (whose "spolier" featured in two steamy sex scenes one of which is good and another is okay at first then it gets weird. For those of you who have seen it. You know what I mean), James DeBello (from Detriot Rock City), Joey Kern, and the rest of the cast of unknowns are believable in their roles. I didn't really like the ending which could've been better and the dialogue wasn't the greatest at times but overall Cabin Fever is an effective horror thriller better than others that have come out recently from writer/director Eli Roth the man behind Hostel and Hostel Part 2 which at least to me weren't as good as this one. So if you're in the mood for a decent horror thriller you can go wrong with Cabin Fever. It (for the most part) delivers on whats expected from these kind of movies.

A group of horrible teens arrive at a small town the residents of which are even more horrible, and there's also superaids in the water supply. The superaids is incidental, and I'd argue it's even a red herring of a threat. The real threat is obviously how a supernaturally horrible human being everybody is.

In the universe of Cabin Fever, no problem ever gets solved since it is always someone else's problem, until it becomes everyone's problem at which point no one has the power to solve it. It is a downward spiral, a representation of entropy that we are all very familiar with in real life and we know from our real life experience that any and every problem the characters in this film face will result in a major catastrophe due to people's unwillingness to deal with it at any of its stages.

Although there are a few intolerably disgusting frames that might get to you, it's more comedy than horror. Because you can't really feel too bad for anyone dying in agony when they kind of all deserve it. I'd argue we shouldn't feel bad, neither for the characters nor for their reflections in real life. Just keep selling the superaids lemonade like the good "BUSINESSMEN" we all are and get over it.