Cabin Fever Movie Review

Director Eli Roth's Cabin Fever is pretty much a standard slasher movie. In reading about it beforehand I got the impression it maybe had a little more wit and creativity to it, like Night of the Living Dead, or was one of those spoof/homage-to-a-genre type movies. Maybe a little, but really it seems pretty conventional and formulaic.

The set up is the usual group of arrogant, partying teenagers in the middle of nowhere, in this case a cabin they're renting out in woods they're unfamiliar with (where of course cell phones don't work). Their interaction never rises above the mundane. For mild titillation purposes you get to see a couple of the cute girls semi-naked briefly, but it's all just filler while you wait to see people get hacked up.

The local people are predictably colorful and creepy hillbillies.

So as I say, very much the usual stuff. Though I admit I did find the halfwit "sheriff" with his obsession with partying to be an amusing character.

The kids are confronted by a staggering, bloody stranger imploring them for help. They want to assist him, or at least go for help, but their higher priority is avoiding any contact with him, since at best it looks like he's suffering from some grotesque flesh-eating disease that could be contagious, and at worst he might be some kind of dangerous criminal and this could be a ruse.

But he's only semi-coherent and insists on blundering into them despite their attempts to ward him off, setting off panicky self-defense violence.

And that pretty much becomes the theme of the movie. People contract this gruesome disease that causes them to wander around in delirium puking up blood, and whoever they encounter is a little more scared by them than sympathetic, certainly in the case of strangers, but to some extent even with these people who know each other.

And being a horror movie, you don't know if it's really a disease, or these people are actually dying and then reanimating as zombies, or some other such supernatural hypothesis.

All-in-all this film is not particularly scary, it's not noticeably clever and funny, and there's not a lot going on to think about on a deeper level. I suppose it's OK for this genre, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement. It is superficially entertaining enough to have held my interest throughout, but I can't say I recommend this movie.