Review – Cabin Fever

Once again a decent premise is ruined by squandering it on a juvenile splatter movie. Ever since reading The Hot Zone I’ve wondered if a flesh-eating virus could be spun out into a decent horror flick (and not some big-budget Robin Cook medical thriller, but a real genre piece). But if this effort is any indication then the answer is “no.” Of course by the time you’ve stirred in a handful of annoying 20-somethings, just about any premise is doomed from the start. Indeed, the acting and script here succeed only in causing me to lose interest in whether any of the characters live or die, and that makes it hard to get into the story at all. Thus I hope more skillful filmmakers will be willing to take a stab at making the premise work in the future. Flesh-eating viruses have a lot of potential, but not when they’re coupled with a run-of-the-mill slasher movie production. Oh, and the almost constant animal violence didn’t help. Wish I’d skipped it