Review of Cabin Fever (2003) by Jason H — 28 Feb 2010

After graduating college, five long-time friends, including Rider Strong (Boy Meets World), Cerina Vincent (Not Another Teen Movie), Joey Kern (Grind), James DeBello (Detroit Rock City), and Jordan Ladd (Club Dread), take a vacation deep in the wooded forests at a remote cabin.

As the beer-guzzling, pot-smoking, and sex-having adventures begin, the group is met with terror as a strange flesh-eating disease begins taking over. The group makes every effort to try and avoid the disease, but their ignorance to it being spread through their water source has each and every one suffering at the hands of this disease.

A lot of people unjustifiably crap on this movie and I've learned that it's usually idiots who do so. Many people do not realize that then-ambitious, debuting director Eli Roth was an understudy of the GREAT David Lynch, who helped to craft Roth into the director he is today.

Roth, understandably, takes tried and true material and creates a very different and unique spin with Cabin Fever. It's more than a film about flesh-eating virus; it's a real character-driven experience that goes off in incredibly odd and humorous tangents.

Rather than going with nobodies or first timers, Roth manages to enlist decent actors within the film to help drive this eccentric story, with Roth even chiming in as the hiker Grim (another funny scene).

With a really spectacular Angelo Badalamenti (a frequenter of David Lynch films) music, mass amounts of gore, laughs (the infamous Pancakes scene comes to mind), and a unique, off the wall plot, Cabin Fever manages to become a modern classic.

Does anyone ever notice that the disease actually never kills anyone? Anyways, awesome horror film.