Cabin Fever DVD: Review By justincase

I had heard a lot of great stuff about this movie. Many people sang its praises and receommended that I see it. So... the day it's released -- I go buy it (blindly).

DAMMIT!

I guess I had hight expectations for the film and that is why I feel horribly let down. The premise is a good one. I mean... let's face it. We all drink bottled water. Why? Because we're affraid of all the impurities and the germs and bacteria that can find a way into our bodies and eat the flesh right off our bones. Well maybe we're not all that paranoid, but you get the idea.

This movie follows a group of college kids escaping after finals and heading to the hills for some well-earned R&R. They arrive in the woods only to be accosted by a creepy woods-dweller with some disease that has caused the skin to rot right off his bones and blood to spew forth with every cough. Of course, the kids end up infected and waste away -- rotting in real-time. As the kids perish, the woods-folk all prove to be terribly bizarre and most troubling. In the end, the disease kills the kids, the woods-folk are none the smarter for the experience and a sequel (heaven forbid) is perfectly set-up.

Eli Roth (director) was clearly looking for a darkly comic horror film and -- perhaps -- succeeded in finding it. The problem is that this film is so poorly executed and ill conceived that a great premise is horribly wasted.

Don't want them here. Don't have them here. AMEN!

OK. I hated it. Sorry I bought it. You want it? Drop me a note. I'll make you a hell of a good deal.

RENT IT. Don't buy it. If you love it (although I don't know how you could), buy it after you've seen it.

The bottom line is that this film could have done such a great job of scaring the living sh*t out of us all by playing on all the paranoia in our society:

* bacteria in our drinking water;

* people coughing on you;

* inbred hillbillies (well... maybe a stretch)

Instead of a scary ride that could have blended an epidemic with the backwoods splendor of Wrong Turn, we get a miserably campy and terribly UN-frightening slow death.

Drink this in at your own risk.