Avoid This Film Like A Flesh-Eating Plague (Cabin Fever (DVD))

Member Name: Splend42

Product:	Cabin Fever (DVD)
Date:	23/08/09 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One creepy scene. One laugh. Disc makes a good coaster?

Disadvantages: Puerile, boring, predictable, stupid, It's an Eli Roth film.

Cabin Fever is Eli Roth's film debut, and I wish he'd never bothered. It's truly dire in almost every single way.

This pitiful excuse for a horror film seems to aim to disgust rather than scare its viewers, a trend Roth would continue to pursue with his Hostel films. The plot is no more complex than your simple 'teenagers go to a cabin in the woods and bad stuff happens' archetype; this would be forgiveable if the film brought something new to the genre. It does not.

The characters are all loathsome, the directing is bland, the story is dull. I found it impossible to care about what was going on beyond vaguely hoping that the flesh-eating virus would kill everyone nice and quickly so the end of the film could come. There is one genuinely unsettling scene, in which a girl afflicted with the afore-mentioned virus attempts to shave her legs... I'm sure you see where that's going. Which is another problem the film has, predictability.

Though unintentionally laughable for the most part ("PAAANCAAAAKES!"), all but one of the jokes that were intended to be funny were simply puerile or offensive. The funny joke was to do with an old man and his purposes for keeping a rifle (it seems offensive when brought up at the beginning of the film, but in the last scene there's a great twist that actually had me laughing out loud). All the other 'jokes' of this calibre: "Why do you want to to shoot squirrels?" asks one character. "Because they're gay," quips the comic-relief character. Oh such hilarity. Truly Roth is a great comedy genius.

Admittedly, comedy isn't what the film is about, but when your horror film fails to inspire horror, you could really do with having something to fall back on. This film fails on almost every count - it wasn't scary, it wasn't funny and crucially it wasn't entertaining. Avoid.

I did not check out the special features, as I thoroughly loathed the film and gave the DVD away as fast as physically possible.

Summary: It gets one star because I don't think I can give 0 stars