it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Cabin Fever is a bloated corpse filled with various ideas and mistakes.The premise simply follows a group of college students partaking a vacation within the woodlands to unknowingly have contact with a biological virus. They're far from proper medical attention, or any safety in this regard, but this gives them and the film enough time to risk being greater. Unfortunately, the film doesn't properly risk enough when it constantly relies on weird humor, disjointed pacing, and middling storytelling with a severe identity crisis. Throughout the film's time introducing characters, and other strange subplots, audiences learn how limited they are by either not appearing enough, being disposable and tedious, or serving nothing special. However, aside its flaws, it's fairly tolerable when it finally descends into madness and less characters survive the premise's gruesome focus. It's not just an original idea ahead of its time, created at the wrong time, but one of its own kind that unfortunately couldn't become better if a reenactment followed its similar middling direction.It's a nasty virus film that's not very infectious as an actual viral infection.

Eli Roth's debut film as director shares some of the queasiness and disturbing atmosphere of his later HOSTEL horrors, albeit on a lower budget and with less intensity. Saying that, it's a darn sight better than HOSTEL PART II and even if it does share inevitable comparisons with the likes of THE EVIL DEAD and other set-in-the-woods shockers, that's not necessarily a negative. In fact I found CABIN FEVER to be a well-made film, focusing a little more on character than you'd expect from a teen movie and offering plenty of scares and tension during the running time. Okay, things fall apart twenty minutes before the end, and the film finishes on a silly joke rather than on anything more substantial, but nevertheless this is a thoroughly effective effort which definitely isn't for the faint-hearted! Essentially the old teenagers-in-peril plot is utilised once more yet despite this, there aren't many clichés to be seen. Instead the film has an ambiance of '70s grindhouse flicks or genuinely frightening early '80s terror tales. The acting from the various cast members is decent throughout and one of the main reasons to keep watching, and the camera-work is great, with some really inventive moments. Being an Eli Roth film, there are the inevitable gore effects, all of which are sickeningly convincing. Roth goes for the gross-out on occasion, offering a cringeworthy and infamous leg-shaving scene and a woman's face missing, and eventually body parts are strewn around the landscape in full-blown gore movie mode. Yet the idea of having a flesh-eating virus as the villain is a pleasingly fresh one, and it makes for many paranoid moments as the characters (and viewers) attempt to figure out who's infected and who's clean. If the cheap, anything-goes climax had been more inspiring, this would have been a top-notch genre offering; as it is, it's a worthwhile and decent effort.

I liked this, granted it had its moments of weirdness. A real mix of horror, comedy and gross-out gore but it worked for me. Its a bit of a throwback film to the chillers of the 1970's, cliché in its initial set up following a group of college friends who embark on a last hurrah after college vacation deep into the mountains to spend a week at a remote cabin.They meet several strange/bizarre townsfolk along the way and then on their first night encounter a man who is "sick" his flesh literally melting off his face as he vomits blood all over their vehicle. In trying to get rid of the man they accidentally set him on fire and he runs off into the bushes. Before long our group starts to show signs of a horrible flesh eating disease, with the fear of contagion driving them to turn on each other.This didn't receive great reviews but I had helluva fun watching it. It was disgusting, disturbing, funny, full of WTF moments, bizarre characters and left me afraid to drink the water as well as seriously wondering about the motivation of (the director) and Kung-Fu kid yelling 'PANCAKE". 11/1/15

During the additional features option on the DVD of Cabin Fever, Eli Roth's (rich) Dad explains that Eli was "destined to make horror movies" because as a child he vomited during the gross-out scene in Ridley Scotts movie "Alien". Play that backwards, symbolically, and you get the impetus for every reason Eli Roth shouldn't make movies.This film is, really, bargain basement trash - almost like a 1987 straight-to-video slasher in so many ways; the young adults look like extras, or amateurs, complete with bland TV-hairstyling (in the remote wilderness, for some reason?), and the foul mouthed and generally unlikeable young adults get in trouble when a hideous disease, sort of a scabby, zombified necrotising fasciitis breaks out and starts turning the characters into gore covered corpses. The solution? There isn't one - the movie has a premise and no plot development whatsoever.Worse still, the film has a "comic relief" character thats supposedly a sleazy, sexist policeman, who IS weird, but ISN'T funny. Numerous scenes are dedicated to the pretty young female cast members appearing semi-naked or having chaste porn sex on screen, usually to be revealed later to be covered in massive, pus filled sores, their skin literally peeling off from a devastating virus.The worst, and I mean, easily the worst thing about this film is its use of "uneasy racial humour"; a local redneck in Cabin Fever refers to some black kids as "niggers", which the city folk take as shockingly intolerable, but later on, its all, like "hey, my niggaz, wassup??" as if, supposedly, the redneck kook that fixes rifles at a small rural community store is so in with local black community that he affectionately calls them "niggers". In all honesty, a lot of viewers won't get to the end of the movie, so they won't see this quick turn around into a type of black comedy that betrays Eli Roth's inept sense of humour and poor taste as a filmmaker.Lastly, there is a bizarre, slow motion kung-fu segment featuring a disturbed hillbilly kid that feels, perhaps unintentionally, like a homage to Claudio Fragasso's Troll 2.Cabin Fever is utter crap, as I stated above, but ultimately, its very cheap filmmaking, meaning that its nominal profit margin will allow for sequels, same as the garbage 80s slasher movies that Eli Roth is "paying tribute" to. Essentially, this is a cheap 80s-style slasher without an actual bad guy in sight.