Cabin Fever (2002)

The recipient of an inordinate amount of hype after a bidding war made it one of the hot buys at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, Eli Roth's quickie horror comedy may be a notch sicker than the average studio shocker -- and righteously so -- but don't mistake its lame stabs at humor for anything resembling actual wit. Cabin Fever seems less like an homage to Night of the Living Dead and The Evil Dead -- as some critics have suggested -- and more like a facsimile of those films' many rip-offs. Although the laughs don't come from the Scream school of self-aware in-jokes, Roth still indulges in facile ironies. He can't zero in on what his script's horrific flesh-eating virus is supposed to represent: Fever's coed campers are sex-obsessed, but the film isn't about hormonal horror; and though the main characters are full of anti-outsider, anti-rural-bumpkin vitriol, the movie shares their classist, myopic point-of view. Of course, subtext wouldn't matter if the film were genuinely scary, but Roth consistently undercuts the suspense with disingenuous splatter and throwaway ethnic gags that would have seemed dated in 1981. As far as 2003 virus pictures go, there's no question Roth's is better than the big-budget debacle Dreamcatcher, but one need only look to Danny Boyle's shot-on-the-cheap offering 28 Days Later for proof of Cabin Fever's inadequacies. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide