Five friends, just finished with college finals, head for a cabin in the woods
to party and embrace their newfound freedom. There's the cute but
uptight Paul, who yearns for pretty lifelong platonic friend Karen;
the attractive, but slightly stupid couple Jeff and Marcy;
and the brute jock, Bert. While shooting squirrels
in the woods, Bert accidentally nicks a man, who appears to be
suffering from a disgusting disease. Unlike most horror films which
make the horror gruesomely visible, the evil in Cabin Fever is
invisible--and highly contagious. And when Karen begins to show
signs of contamination, the bond between these close friends begins
to unravel. Roth's blackly comic directorial debut shows clear
influence from the early films of Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) and
Peter Jackson (Dead Alive).
"Five college friends (none of them particularly likeable) are struck down at their forest cabin retreat by a deadly flesh-eating virus in Eli Roth's cultish, gory exploitation flick. Designed as an all-out gratuitous splatter-fest in the video nasty tradition, and borrowing heavily (too much so, in fact) from such genre staples as Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left, this delights in delivering toe-curling shocks involving masturbation, rotting faces and flashbacks to a bowling alley massacre. Roth's direction of the action is assured, but it's hard to know if this is a parody or a straight horror, or a mixture of both. This is really one for genuine horror aficionados." - Radio Times Review
"Five college friends (none of them particularly likeable) are struck down at their forest cabin retreat by a deadly flesh-eating virus in Eli Roth's cultish, gory exploitation flick. Designed as an all-out gratuitous splatter-fest in the video nasty tradition, and borrowing heavily (too much so, in fact) from such genre staples as Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left, this delights in delivering toe-curling shocks involving masturbation, rotting faces and flashbacks to a bowling alley massacre. Roth's direction of the action is assured, but it's hard to know if this is a parody or a straight horror, or a mixture of both. This is really one for genuine horror aficionados." - Radio Times Review