Cabin Fever

A flesh-eating virus munches its way through five white-bread American teens vacationing in a remote Blair Witch forest. There are gruesome moments in this comedy/horror, but the emphasis is more on gross-out laughs, horror buff in-jokes and surreal sight gags. This first feature is visibly the work of a lifelong horror freak who can hardly believe he's been entrusted with a movie camera. The script is a wildly uneven, unapologetic grab-bag from countless earlier, better, scarier pictures - most blatantly Night of the Living Dead, The Thing, The Evil Dead and Last House on the Left. But the fact that Roth bothered to re-record the incongruously lyrical songs from the last indicates he's more than just another gore geek. Working as David Lynch's assistant for five years clearly did no harm at all - and explains the presence of Angelo Badalamenti's moody themes on the soundtrack. Roth even chucks in a distinctly Lynchian weirdo cop, a move typical of the freewheeling, anything-goes attitude that proves almost as infectious as the titular bacillus.