Filled with coarse comedy, flesh-eating contagion and backwoods mayhem, this impressively icky, witty scare pic from director Eli Roth combines the hillbilly-country horror of "The Blair Witch Project" with the viral decimation and paranoia of "28 Days Later." It doesn't have the is-this-real gimmick of the former, and it's not as good as the latter. But "Cabin Fever's" let's-throw-these-kids-in-a-cabin-and-freak-them-out scenario would make Sam Raimi — who threw five friends in a cabin in the original "Evil Dead" — proud.

The premise is simple enough: Final exams are over and five college students are ready for a frolic in the country. They drive to the middle of nowhere — stopping at a general store to load up on beer and junk food, and to get weirded out by the towheaded youth on the front porch who likes to bite people, hard.

(The doofus of the gang, Bert, played with frat-brother earnestness by James DeBello, pockets a candy bar from the store — and gets caught by one of the locals. "Give me one good reason why you would steal a Snickers bar!" the yokel yells at the baseball-capped thief. "The nougat?" Bert replies, meekly. The movie is full of such goofball jocularity.)

Then it's off to the cabin, which, at first, is pretty idyllic. There are scary stories to tell around the campfire, and puffy marshmallows to roast. And while Bert is entertaining himself chasing woodchucks around with a gun, Jeff and Marcy (Joey Kern and Cerina Vincent) have already coupled off with horny purposefulness, and mild-mannered Paul (Rider Strong) and pretty Karen (Jordan Ladd) are sunning themselves out at the lake, trying to figure out if they're hot for each other or just friends.

Then Karen gets sick.

Boy, does she ever.

A creepy hermit has shown up, bleeding and oozing, and the infection — and the fear that comes with it — spreads, turning the quintet of college pals into a screaming band of psychos.

One could argue that "Cabin Fever" — a first film from Roth (who appears in a funny cameo as a stoner dude with a dog) — is gratuitously gruesome. And gratuitous in other ways, too, like showing naked coeds, like toying with politically incorrect subject matter (homophobia, racism). But Roth, who has taken more than a few cues from Raimi, David Lynch (whom Roth has worked with) and George Romero ("Night of the Living Dead"), is working in a horror tradition that goes way back — and he's working it with nasty glee.