Cabin Fever

What's the Plot?

With college finally over, a group of friends embark on a celebrational trip to the mountains, not realising that it could be their last. The group consists of Paul (Rider Strong), who's always liked Karen (Jordan Ladd) but never acted upon it, Jeff (Joey Kern) who's dating Marcy (Cerina Vincent) and Bert (James DeBello) who's just not altogether there it seems. Upon his exploring, Bert comes across a very sick local in the woods but his fear prevents him from helping and instead runs away and doesn't tell the rest of his friends. When the local finds his way to their cabin, a disastrous chain of events unfolds which leaves the kids in a state of shock and no fit car to return back to civilization in. As Karen begins to become very sick indeed, some of the groups true colours are unveiled as panic amongst them sets in. Leaving her body in an outside shed to prevent the risk of infection, paranoia plagues them all to the extent that friendships, and even lives will be lost.

The Review

First time director Eli Roth has been very vocal on the decline of horror pictures and states that he has gone back to the style that made horror successful in the 70's, moving away from the teen-slasher style that dragged the genre down in the 80's and 90's. It's quite strange then that his Cabin Fever is about a bunch of teen's that are going to die horribly whilst having a very liberal dose of comedy running through it's core.

Sound kinda familiar anyone ? What it has going for it though is for once there's no villain as such. Just the dark side of humanity that rarely gets seen upon the screen in scary movies. Part of it's effective uneasiness is the way the group begins to treat each other when self preservation becomes paramount. Seeing a group of individuals carry one of their friends out to a shed and padlock them inside to keep them away from themselves definitely hits a raw nerve amongst the audience.

The actual horror within the film brings nothing new to the screen - rabid dogs let loose; people being snuck up from behind; graphic gun shot wounds etc - but the real skin-crawling stuff is brought about by the flesh-eating killer in the woods. If you do not squirm at least as one of the girls tries to shave her legs in the bath then you have been TOTALLY desensitised by years of bad horror flicks. Good, but not not good enough to revitalise the genre.

STEVE'S SCORE