Cabin Fever
Directed by: Eli Roth
Starring: Jordan Ladd, Joey Kern, Carina Vincent, Rider Strong, James DeBollo
Now playing at: The Esquire

“Cabin Fever” can best be characterized as being made for the well-off, urban, college viewer. Its terror lies in just what us kids are most afraid of, and its effervescent yet most twisted humor is the kind of hilarity one thinks of being limited to the “American Pies” and “Old Schools” of the world. The plot is as wonderfully cliched as the title suggests. It surrounds five college kids fresh off the conclusion of exams who decide to take a trip to a secluded cabin for a week of binge-drinking and intense debauchery. All the pieces are in place. There is the hot-and-heavy couple, Jeff and Marcy (Kern and Vincent); the cute couple-to-be, Paul and Karen (Strong and Ladd); and the quotable, beer guzzlin’, obscenity-laden, squirrel-shootin’ frat boy, Bert (DeBello), who, when asked why he stole a Snickers bar, memorably replies, “The nougat?”

The friends’ journey is first complicated when they stop for beer at a remote store marked by a seemingly racist cashier and a mentally disturbed young boy perched on a bench outside (imagine the kid from “Deliverance,” only without the banjo), who violently bites Paul. Continuing on, they arrive at the cabin only to have their sojourn interrupted when a diseased hermit (Arie Verveen) stumbles onto their campsite, begging for help and spewing blood, his body oozing with everything that can be considered “gore.” The disease he carries is both fatal and contagious, a flesh-eating virus that haunts the woodland area that surrounds them, and it quickly enters the cabin where they are all staying.

Based on the supposed real life experience of writer/director Eli Roth while working in a farm in Iceland, the idea of a “realistic” horror film is an added bonus, taken straight from the success “The Blair Witch Project” saw in terrifying its audience with plausible scenarios. Yet what is it about the premise of the film that terrorizes the fortunate college kid so? To put it simply, two aspects: contagious disease (think meningitis, only more unbelievably painful and gruesome) and backwoods mountain men (i.e. toothless, bearded, gun-toting, uneducated hillbillies). However, beyond the visceral horror found in these two themes, the movie itself is simply a hilarious gore-fest, sure to be placed in history alongside its obvious influences, movies such as Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series and Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive.”

But “Cabin Fever” just might be better. It gracefully straddles the line between wanting to be horrifically violent, but not too bloody to be considered over-the-top ridiculous; the line that lies somewhere in between “Scream” and “Scary Movie,” between the truly scary “The Evil Dead” (also with five vacationing college kids in backwoods), and the more comic and spoof-oriented “Evil Dead 2″. Ultimately, the movie offers the best of both worlds. Will you fling yourself into the arms of your boy/girlfriend in times of terror? Yes. Will you laugh out loud and come back home quoting the movie to all your friends with the same gusto as after “Super Troopers”? Certainly. Together, there is little else to desire from a horror movie. Whatever there is to expect, “Cabin Fever” has all the right symptoms. Grade: A-

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2003 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.