Five attractive, newly minted college graduates rent a cabin in the woods and very bad things happen in writer-director Eli Roth's sharp homage to low-budget thrillers of the 1970s and '80s. The set up is EVIL DEAD meets DELIVERANCE: Callow friends Jeff (Joey Kern), Marcy (Cerina Vincent), Paul (Rider Strong, of TV's Boy Meets World), Karen (Jordan Ladd) and Bert (James DeBello) — the group's token unregenerate jerk — decide to vacation in an isolated cabin deep in redneck country. After offending the proprietors of the nearest business, a down-home general store, the snotty city slickers prepare for a week of drinking, doping and horseplay. Jeff and Marcy immediately get to heating up the sheets, Paul shyly puts the moves on Karen, his friend since childhood, and boorish Bert heads into the woods with a beer and a bb gun to shoot squirrels. He instead accidentally shoots a hermit (Arie Verveen) whose face and hands are covered with a bloody rash; afraid of catching something, the selfish Bert ignores the man's pleas for help and flees. Later that night, the desperate hermit makes his way to the cabin and tries to take the car while the callow friends squabble about what to do. Panicked and more than a little drunk and high, they attack him. When the chaos subsides, the unfortunate interloper has been beaten and burned half to death and the car is trashed. And their troubles have only begun: The hermit was infected with a virulent strain of necrotizing fasciitis — flesh-eating virus — and one by one, they get it too. Without a working car or a phone (Roth carefully dots the i's and crosses the t's — their cell phones are out of range) they're thrown on their own resources, which prove painfully inadequate to dealing with the rapidly escalating crisis. Given Roth's enthusiasm for the early Sam Raimi school of no-holds-barred horror filmmaking, the most surprising thing about his debut feature is its restraint. Bloody effects notwithstanding, Roth's focus is the degeneration of relationships under pressure — it's more STRAW DOGS than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), the film's twist-of-the-knife penultimate sequence notwithstanding. While many films of this kind are undermined by amateurish performances, the main cast is solid and some of the supporting performances (many from non-professionals) are small gems. --Maitland McDonagh
