Five kids are planning for a holiday of party in a cool remote cabin up in the woods. Soon they are visited by a drooling bum, who's seemingly a carrier of some grim flesheating virus, apparently caused by something fishy in the water. They tell the bum to leave but he won't, so they put him on fire and the very next day one of the girls soon becomes sick. The rest of the kids becomes paranoid. Who will be infected next? Is anyone already infected? Since the bum has demolished their car two of the guys walk away trying to find someone with a phone. Then there's a crazy rabid dog, a kung-fu fighting kid sitting on a porch screaming for pancakes and couple of rednecks (what's the deal with that fat guy and the kit, by the way?) down at the country store who doesn't like having sick kids around (and who obviously don't drink or use the water) and decides to go up to the cabin and kill'em all ("We got to care of the problem"). Back at the cabin another girl shaves the skin off her legs in the bath while the coolest guy runs away and hides in a cave.

The problem with Cabin Fever is that you can't take it seriously. It's just a fun little film, and with the risk of having people throwing rocks at me, not really that different. It's a bit different from recent downhome horror movies such as Wrong Turn perhaps, but if you've seen a couple of the films director Eli Roth pays tribute to here, Cabin Fever will play like a damn greatest hits package, with bits from everything and anything. It's as if there's at least a dozen of different films in here, all with a different tone, all rolled together into one big "old school" horror movie of the kind Roth used to watch as a kid, complete with gratuitous nude scenes (though all tastefully done) and gross splatter effects. There's so many homages to genre classics that there's no point in counting. There's the cabin straight out of The Evil Dead, the campfire tales from any old slasher you can remember (like Madman), the screwdriver in the ear from Dawn of the Dead, and there's the thing from The Thing where the first victim is locked up in a solitary storage shed so she won't infect the others. There's even the songs from Last House On the Left on the soundtrack. All this is cool and often very funny, if you're a fan, but also a bit confusing and distracting as if the film doesn't know which leg to stand on. Yet director Roth seem to know exactly what he wants to achieve in the end. He wants to entertain and he wants do scare. He wants do it all. The first half is mostly a classic horror movie, dark and atmospheric for most of the time, but about midway through the plot the tone shifts, the black comedy becomes more upfront and the story becomes way too crowded by weird characters, transforming the film into the old wicked hillbilly movie. The last reel almost plays like a Troma movie (I just can't stop thinking of Redneck Zombies, though such comparison is probably unfair), complete with a bearded jug-band cheerfully playing "Sweet Chariot" under the credits. And Giuseppe Andrews as Deputy Winston acts as if he's in some totally different movie and accidentally stumbled onto the set of Cabin Fever instead. He is very funny, with that bizarre voice especially ("Hey man, I bet you like to party, this is a major party town"), and he all but steals the show.

All high and slightly dashed expectations aside, Cabin Fever is still enough of a good ride, though. It won't save any genre and it's not a completely satisfying viewing experience, but that's not the point either. It's just a fun little movie. Entertaining, bloody and gritty and not too predictable. A real crowd pleaser. All fans of "old school" horror movies should see it at least once, but probably have already at least twice.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.