Cabin Fever: Unrated Director's Cut

A great collection
Lionsgate deserves plaudits for their excellent four film collection series on DVD. I usually buy only blu rays now, but at this great price this was too good an offer to pass up. Even with international shipping, it was highly affordable.

I was surprised to find that the four films came in four separate discs, instead of two-fers or flippers. Disc art is minimal though. Lionsgate has not skimped on the extras either, with a decent amount of valuable supplemental material. One of the films had four commentaries, in fact. Again, I did not expect any extras or even SDH subtitles at this low price for all four films. Lionsgate has somehow managed to fit in all four discs in one standard DVD case, so do not worry about shelf space.

As for the movies themselves, the price of admission is worth for Cabin Fever and Descent alone, both excellent movies. The fact that their not-so-well-known sequels are included is a real bonus. Again, don't expect the sequels to live up...

Cabin Fever 2
CABIN FEVER 2 first broke Horror news with a number of controversies prior to the film's release. Ti West, director of the cult favorite HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, disassociated himself with the project, citing numerous difficulties in the production process. Anyone that has seen the final product can understand why, but this straight-to-video sequel isn't the complete disaster it has been made out to be. Students at the local high school are in for a big surprise when the flesh-eating virus from the previous film finds its way into the prom care of a case of infected spring water. Though the teen-edgy script is wholly idiotic, it is equally entertaining with its low-brow humor and gooey gross-outs. Even the stock characters and empty plotting are outweighed by the exploding bodies, projectile vomit, bloody water sports, and countless other repulsive gags. Following Roth's lead, Ti West also includes a number of references to genre classics, most noticeably in the reprisal of the PROM NIGHT...

Redefining the genre? No, but a treat for horror buffs.
One of the things that makes Cabin Fever a genuinely fun outing for horror fans is the cast and crew's obvious enthusiasm for what they're doing. Even without viewing the entertaining (if rather short on substance) "Making of" featurette, you can easily tell that the film was a labor of love with a game cast. While the extras don't shed much light on the film's progress from unsellable script to most-hyped horror film of 2003-- which would undoubtedly have made for a fascinating story-- the movie is (almost) enough of a delight to make up for it.

Cabin Fever takes pretty much every convention of "classic" drive-in horror films of the 70's, and manages to make them look new again. Curmudgeons may say that it's nothing more than a Scream-esque parody of horror movie chestnuts, but the approach is really quite different. Instead of self-conscious winks to the audience, the walking cliches of Cabin Fever seem to enjoy playing their roles to the hilt, with performances that are as...

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