Some critics said "Cabin Fever" suffered from genre and tone inconsistencies, with Roger Ebert in the "Chicago Sun-Times" comparing the flaw to "kids on those arcade games where the target lights up and you have to stomp on it". Ebert was critical that the film alternates between horror and "weird humor", getting nowhere; he said it "could develop its plague story in a serious way, like a George Romero picture or "28 Days Later"". Owen Gleiberman in "Entertainment Weekly" said, ""Cabin Fever" is what "28 Days Later" would have looked like had it been made without style, subtlety, grunge-of-night video photography, or fashionable apocalyptic pretensions." Ebert gave "Cabin Fever" one-and-a-half stars out of four, and Gleiberman said it was "a big, dumb, crude, noisy, goose-the-audience bash and proud of it".