Cabin Fever received praise from the likes of Peter Jackson and Stephen King, an enthusiastic reception at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival and an avalanche of raving reviews. Influenced by genre classics like Dead Alive, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead, David Lynch’s protégé Eli Roth made his directorial debut with his homage to his favorite horror films. It’s a disquieting mix of bizarre humor, gore and paranoia, all centered on an unexplained flesh-eating virus.

It’s the story of five college graduates on holiday at an isolated cabin celebrating the end of school and their last bit of freedom before becoming working members of society. The first night there, they encounter a bleeding virus-ravaged hermit and after accidentally setting him on fire, one of them becomes infected with the same flesh-eating virus. The rest of them have to battle time and each other to survive.

The movie was shot in North Carolina on a small budget giving some of the locals the opportunity to their fifteen minutes of fame. Composers Angelo Badalamenti and Nathan Barr were hired to score the film for Roth who was after a 70's-like sound, but with adequate scariness. He even approached sleaze king David Hess to get his permission to use some of his songs from Last House On The Left in Cabin Fever. Lensed in wide screen by Scott Kevan, the film manages to capture the 70’s look Roth wanted without the low-budget feel.

The movie opens rather awkwardly –- it’s hard to tell if the old trapper warning the group from venturing into the woods is mocking a genre convention or not, and the kids themselves are characters we’ve seen a hundred times before. But the film quickly finds its groove, and Roth wastes little time in getting his unlucky campers into gruesome contact with the contagion.

Acting performances vary from acceptable to pretty good, and Roth manages to convey a creeping sense of claustrophobic unease. Naturally, the director has to come up with a handful of contrivances to keep his victims from doing the only sensible thing: just leave the woods –- a rabid dog on the loose, a broken-down truck, no reception on cell phones. They are completely blatant, however forgivable, devices. The true star of the movie is special effects and make-up artist Garrett Immel. He does a superb job transforming attractive kids into bleeding towers of rotting flesh.

Roth throws in a load of sundry characters, with mixed results. Giuseppe Andrews’ party-loving idiot deputy is hilarious, but the trio of gun-toting rednecks only seems to be there to up the body count. The movie never quite seems to find the right tone -– serious body horror on one end, quirky spoof on the other.

It’s confusing for the average moviegoer who doesn't know that all the sick and twisted humor is intentional. The gore factor is high but, unless that’s your horror movie prerequisite, it isn't enough to constitute a really good movie. At times, Roth’s homage seems a wild potpourri of spoofed key scenes from famous cult movies from the 70’s. Horror-zealots will be pleased in a Shaun Of The Dead kind of way with its nods to anything from Deliverance to any of the movies I mentioned above. But the average viewer will be pulled in and pushed away again by Roth’s indulgences.

Cabin Fever holds a potentially great premise and if Roth had narrowed his focus, it could have been a great movie. Still a decent rental, it doesn’t live up to its hype.