Cabin Fever
If you're a serious horror movie fan -- meaning that you regularly read Fangoria magazine, know who directed ''Blood Feast,'' and bow down daily in the direction of makeup maestro Tom Savini -- ''Cabin Fever'' will probably strike you as a delightfully old-school teen splatter romp. If the above references mean nothing to you, the feature debut from Newton's own Eli Roth may seem more retread than homage. The movie is well shot and decently acted for its genre, but it lacks the distinctive vision to make it of value to anyone not already convinced of the inherent entertainment value in flying body parts. The setup has the purity of a catechism: Five deeply annoying college students, one cabin in the woods, a handful of inbred country folk, and a nasty flesh-eating virus that starts like the flu and ends in internal liquefaction. The infection is passed to the main characters by a blood-spewing local who appears on the front porch and is promptly killed off in a frenzied melee. ''He asked us for help, Paul,'' wails one of the girls, ''and we lit him on fire.''
Paul (Rider Strong) is sensitive and, compared to his friends, not entirely loathsome -- that makes him the hero in a movie like this. His unrequited flame, Karen (Jordan Ladd), is the first to come down with the virus, and ''Cabin Fever'' briefly achieves a genuine sense of gnawing unease when the other four quarantine her in a tool shed. As if things weren't bad enough, a rabid dog is prowling the premises, giving literal heft to the notion of overkill.
The other characters include Jeff (Joey Kern), the handsome, cowardly stud; Marcy (Cerina Vincent), the sexually active lunchmeat; and Bert (James DeBello), a frat-boy jerk of the kind who likes to shoot squirrels with a BB gun ''because they're gay.'' If that line alone makes you guffaw, you're on this movie's wavelength. Like the doomed kids of ''The Blair Witch Project'' and countless other horror films -- and perhaps like the filmmaker -- they're young and suburban enough to consider a sparse second-growth forest primeval wilderness.
''Cabin Fever'' has its moments of gleeful ickiness (note to Marcy: never shave your legs when they're decaying), and it gets goofier as it goes along: Roth is more amused by than concerned about his characters, their predicament, or the whole kids-on-a-pitchfork genre. That much is made clear in the scene in which a deer comes randomly crashing through the windshield of Paul's truck, as well as in the director's cameo as a stoner dude who appears out of nowhere and to no discernible purpose.
What's missing is the pacing or the raw-knuckled intensity that can make a low-budget horror movie great, and whether that intensity is fueled by laughter or screams makes no difference -- at a certain point, they're two sides of the same coin. ''Cabin Fever'' doesn't have the gonzo wit of ''Re-Animator'' or ''Evil Dead 2,'' nor is it flat-out terrifying like ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' or even a zombie-come-lately like this year's ''28 Days Later.''
It's happy, instead, to quote other gore films with a knowingness that borders on the smug. If there are more important things in life or the movies than figuring out what a human heart thrown down a bowling alley sounds like, Roth isn't interested in them.
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