But the gore elements are really what get the best treatment in HD. The colors are muted – largely because the film is set in the woods – and the clarity is to be expected from a Blu-ray transfer. The grit and grain of the 1970s are skillfully replicated without ever making the image appear overly flawed. Video and Presentation Cabin Fever sports a rather nice transfer in high-definition Blu-ray. The releases of the last few years owe a lot to Cabin Fever and Hostel, even if the latter film holds up while the former film continues to show its flaws. Overall, Cabin Fever isn't a home run for the genre, but it is both significant and celebrated within the history of horror. There's no added gore or substantial arcs to really differentiate this version from the theatrical. There's a very small amount of new footage in this unrated release, looping back in a handful of rather meaningless, throwaway character beats. The gore is well executed without ever being excessive or over the top, and the directorial style – while never quite making up for failings in the script – sufficiently nails the horror elements. That said, given its relatively low budget, the film is still quite an accomplishment for the time, despite being somewhat hit or miss. In fact, the film's referential quality is both its key strength and most obvious weakness, creating an uneven tone that can often fail to tow the line between silly and clever. There's no denying that Cabin Fever is brimming with horror movie references, but The Evil Dead is omni-present throughout the run time. From there, things only escalate further as the sickness spreads, paranoia rises and the blood begins to flow. Not long after they arrive at the cabin, the skin-liquefying disease shows up on their doorstop in the form of a mentally unstable, grotesquely disfigured vagabond…who gets summarily set on fire. Suave, Jeff (Joey Kern), his hottie girlfriend Marcy (Cerina Vincent), the sweet girl Karen (Jordan Ladd), the dork with an unrequited crush on her, Paul (Rider Strong) and the knucklehead, Bert (James DeBello). The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.Five college students head deep into the woods away from the city for a weekend filled with sex, drugs, beer and flesh-eating bacteria. There are truly horrible scenes (guy finds corpse in reservoir, falls onto it), over-the-top horrible scenes (dogs have eaten skin off good girl's face, but she is still alive), and just plain inexplicable scenes (Dennis, the little boy at the general store, bites people). But the director and co-author, Eli Roth, is too clever for his own good, and impatiently switches among genres, tones and intentions. If some of this material had been harnessed and channeled into a disciplined screenplay with a goal in mind, the movie might have worked. The nature of the disease is inexplicable it seems to involve enormous quantities of blood appearing on the surface of the skin without visible wounds, and then spreading in wholesale amounts to every nearby surface. The drama mostly involves the characters locking the door against dogs, the locals and one another running into the woods in search of escape or help trying to start the truck (which, like all vehicles in horror films, runs only when the plot requires it to) and having sex, lots of sex. There's a deputy sheriff named Winston ( Giuseppe Andrews) who is a seriously counterproductive character the movie grinds to an incredulous halt every time he's onscreen. Everyone at the corner general store seems seriously demented, and the bearded old coot behind the counter seems like a racist (when at the end we discover that he isn't, the payoff is more offensive than his original offense). The film could develop its plague story in a serious way, like a George Romero picture or " 28 Days Later," but it keeps breaking the mood with weird humor involving the locals.
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