Cabin Fever

Directed By Eli Roth
Starring Jordan Ladd, Rider Strong, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent, Joey Kern

While the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t publicize the amount it pays Hollywood to make films that ensure our forests remain free of hormonally crazed youngsters, one can only conclude that it runs into the millions. Indeed, from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead through this summer’s Wrong Turn, Tinseltown’s message has been clear: If there’s a teddy bears’ picnic in the woods today, it won’t be too long before the poor furry bastards are being hideously tortured, butchered or, at best, anally assaulted by toothless, inbred hicks (“Squeal, little stuffed animal, squeal!”).

Rarely, however, has the kids-in-the-woods genre been attacked with the sheer insane gusto demonstrated by Eli Roth, whose debut feature, Cabin Fever, asks how five college kids would cope if they came across a horribly diseased, psycho-looking dude in the middle of nowhere. The answer — and we’re not really giving anything away here — is badly.

First, they set fire to the guy. Then, when one of them also becomes infected with his disease (it turns out to be an Ebola-like flesh-eating virus), they freak out and lock her up. Sadly, by then, the corpse of the fried dude has fallen into the local drinking reservoir, with fairly predictable consequences vis-à-vis anyone getting home in time for The Bachelor.

The result, which was midwifed by an uncredited David Lynch, does betray Roth’s inexperience, with sequences of farcical humor often sitting uneasily amid the relentless gore. But the same could be said of The Evil Dead — a film that was clearly a huge influence on Roth, but one he often trumps with Cabin Fever’s pure schlock horror.

Certainly, any gore-phobes who are uninterested in seeing what happens when a woman suffering from a flesh-eating virus attempts to shave her legs would be well-advised to follow the example of at least one appalled Blender staffer and leave well before the halfway mark. But horror fans should start getting in line now for a film that redefines the term skin-crawling in more ways than even they might care to imagine.