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.

I rented this movie today mostly because I loved Hostel movies directed and written by Eli Roth. I thought it would be interesting to see his earlier stuff. But funnily enough the most interesting thing about the whole thing is that it's listed as both "comedy" and "horror". Watching the film I had no idea it was supposed to be a comedy as well. Sure, it's slightly absurd, but not so much I'd see right away that it's comedy. There are jokes there, of course, but there are in several horror films, and they aren't automatically comedies. Well, you can always learn more about movies...The music in this film is completely unnerving. The soundtrack of this film is magnificent, and a good score always gives a horror film something extra. There are genres where it doesn't matter so much, but in horror it's surprisingly important. It keeps you on your toes. And even the lack of soundtrack is extremely effective in horror movies. But in Cabin Fever there is a soundtrack, and it works.The thing about Cabin Fever is that there's no serial killer hunting the young characters. The "bad guy" of the film is a disease. And what's the thing about that? You can't outsmart it. But still, the characters are idiots. That is of course a typical trope in horror, but sometimes someone does something so obvious you want to punch them. Someone is infected and you decide go touch them? Yeah that's definitely a great idea!Cabin Fever is thrilling, yet there's something about it that makes it slightly annoying. I enjoyed watching it this first time, when I have no clue what's going to happen, but I doubt I'm going to see it again.

I am a huge horror movie fan. I go to 24-hr film festivals, conventions, you name it. However, I just cannot stand this movie. I first saw it when it was released in theaters and HATED it, avoiding it and its sequels like the plague depicted therein. Tonight, 13 years after its release, I decided to give it another go.And I still just DO NOT get the appeal. Unlikable characters who garner no sympathy from me, intentionally weird supporting characters who seem to serve no real purpose other than to be inexplicably weird, and a plodding pointless story that has no real mystery to be explained or suspense as to what might happen. It reminds me of something a student might put together in an attempt to make a sloppy, unappealing homage to true pioneers of the strange in film like Lynch, Cronenberg, or even Tarantino. The difference is that those three (and others I'm not going to take the time to list) had a POINT to the oddities and strange, obnoxious weirdos they wrote and put out there for consumption. This film, like many of Zombie's films, feels like a cheap ripoff of much greater freak-shows on film.

The first thing I expected with Cabin Fever was that it would be all blood and no body. But to my pleasant surprise, Cabin Fever is almost quite intelligent, fun and quite a good movie. It is completely expecting, unpredictable and even quite funny at times. If you don't understand the horror parameters, this movie may fly under your radar, but a seasoned horror fan will appreciate everything in this film. A nod to B-Grade horror movies like The Evil Dead, Cabin Fever is surprisingly original and fun to watch. Unlike reviews that I have seen for this film, Cabin Fever is probably one of the most underrated and most under appreciated films ever made. Eli Roth really does know how to make a good movie.