Cabin Fever
This horror film is horribly horrible

This review is written a year or more after having seen the film on DVD.

Mercifully, I have forgotten most of the film, but what I do remember is just how much I hated it. That shouldn't constitute a legitimate review, but I am not inclined to waste another hour and a half of my life rewatching the film just to get the pointless details needed to properly give the film the evisceration it deserves.

It's just bad.

I probably have only spent the time I have on this film because it irks me that director Eli Roth — based on the image he presented in the DVD extras — seems to think that in this film he has tapped in to some dark unpleasant truths about "Human Nature." Additionally, there is also an unspoken assertion that if anyone responds with an "Oh, piffle!" it can only be laid down to the fact that they are not deep enough to admit to the "truth."

I want to discourage him, as gently as possible, from continuing to think this way, for he is just so very wrong. I say to him, "Oh, piffle!" and raise him a "stuff and nonsense." If there was any truth to be found here, I'd be the first to trumpet the fact. I like to seem like I'm smart that way.

Here is the story of the film, to the best of my recollection:

A hermit in the woods gets some kind of killer flesh-eating virus from his dog, meanwhile some college students are preparing to head to the woods where they hope to have sex and stuff, and they drive to the woods, where they will be staying in an isolated cabin, and they stop at a roadside store where a bunch of weird backwoods types live, though the point of their weirdness will forever be a mystery; and the kids get to the "isolated cabin" and the hermit shows up and gives everyone the virus, though they don’t know it yet, and then one of the students starts to get sick, and the others turn on that person instantly and with extreme viciousness, even the guy who has been desperately looking for a way to prove his love, and certainly this would be the perfect opportunity to prove it by sticking up for her, but he doesn't do anything; and the students race around the isolated lake looking for help, and they come upon other "isolated cabins" but nothing ever comes of any of it, and... and... and a bunch of other stuff happens, and at the end everyone is dead, and we go back to the weird guys, and what the heck is the point anyway? The entire thing is just a jumbled up mess, swelling with exploding pustules.

I suppose Roth is trying to say that the veneer of civilization is thin to the point of being non-existent, that when the pustules break out, the "truth" of humans will be revealed in a snapping flash of snarled teeth. That view of humanity is grossly disgusting and insulting and dishonors all those who routinely put their life on the line to help others. Even as I write this, the 11 p.m. news is on and I just watched a report about a young man who died attempting, with other friends, to rescue some women who were in trouble in a swift moving river.

The other theory about "Cabin Fever" is that it is a comedy or a spoof of such movies. Well, I don't know about that. All I know is that when the film is not choking and retching on its dull cliches, it seems to believe it is daringly original. Yawn.

And so, summing up, the theme of "Cabin Fever" would seem to be that humans are just no good at all, that when a test of loyalty comes, humans will not be able to turn on their friends soon enough.

Well, I’m truly sorry if Roth’s view of his friends is that they would abandon him — and he would abandon them — at the first sign of trouble, but his poor choice of friends does not a doomed species make.