Cabin Fever - Really enjoyed it (in the end)

I remember watching ‘Cabin Fever’ in the cinema when it first came out.  If you’d asked me what I thought of it after my initial viewing, I’d have said, “Yeah, it was okay,” and left it at that.  It wasn’t until after I saw it did I keep hearing how it was a ‘homage to 'Evil Dead.’' Now, I’m a big fan of the 'Evil Dead' trilogy (excluding remake!) and I didn’t remember much in 'Cabin Fever' that could be considered a ‘homage.’ So I watched it again when it came out on DVD and I guess I saw what I’d missed the first time round.

Basically, 'Cabin Fever' is hardly original – five college friends go to a remote cabin in the woods and meet a sticky end.  However, it’s done just differently enough to make it worth watching.  It’s not perfect by any means – there are still a couple of ‘plot points’ which I always objected to – namely because I felt that I could see them coming a mile off and I could tell that the writers were trying to make what happened a surprise.

However, despite the odd wrong turn, the narrative is pretty good.  It’s worth noting that the man responsible for some of the musical soundtrack to (the brilliantly-weird) 'Twin Peaks' did the music for this, too.  And, like each other, they have more than their fair share of ‘weird/surreal’ moments which makes the whole thing stand out.


The five characters aren’t that nice.  You won’t really like them, but that doesn’t really mean that you won’t root for them.  Even the annoying one with the really bad haircut is stupidly-annoying enough for you to enjoy watching him, but special kudos to ‘Bert’ who is a total wally and yet he’s still quite entertaining to watch.

I won’t go into too much detail as to what happens to our five, daft teens as you probably already know or, if you don’t, it’ll hopefully be a bit of a surprise.  But, I will say that it is a definite horror movie, therefore you’ll get more than you money's worth of gore from this outing.

After all these years I’ve now watched 'Cabin Fever' a number of times and I seem to enjoy it more and more each time.  Like I say, it’s not perfect, but if you’re looking for a nice little tongue-in-cheek film with plenty of gore and sets out not to take itself seriously, then this is it.  And, yes, there were a fair few nods to Evil Dead which completely went over my head the first time round (just don’t ask me for ‘pancakes’ after this film).

8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one