After a near-fatal motorbike accident, Rose (Marilyn Chambers) undergoes experimental skin-graft surgery to help her recover from the horrific wounds she had inflicted. Luckily for her, and surprising to most of her doctors, her body takes to the transplants and starts an immediate recovery. However, the surgery has left her with a strange orifice under her armpit which contains a stringer. She is soon seducing men and infecting them, leaving her victims in a shocked state and unable to remember anything. An outbreak is soon on the cards as the infected go on a biting rampage, spreading a strange disease which causing the host to turn rabid and zombie-like.
Only his fourth feature, and only his second horror after Shivers (1975), this is not Canadian director David Cronenberg's finest achievement. But thankfully, a bulk Cronenberg's filmography is outstanding and Rabid is still an extremely effective little horror film. The infected are a mixture of zombies and vampires, although they aren't really either by definition, but Cronenberg uses them as well as anyone could hope for. The film is little more than a series of set-pieces, but one in particular, involving a woman on a packed trained slowly coming to the realisation that one of the infected is on board, is as good a scene depicting sheer terror and panic as I've ever seen.
Of course, this being Cronenberg, undertones of psychosexuality run throughout. It's no coincidence that the orifice underneath Rose's armpit looks like a vagina, and no surprise that it attacks with a phallic stinger. Rose's sexuality is her real weapon, as it lures her victims close enough for the attack. Whether it be a fear of women or a warning about progressive plastic surgery that her character is trying to articulate, ex-porn star Marilyn Chambers handles her role extremely well. Though she is naked for the most part, she convinces as a seemingly nice girl turned sexual predator. Cronenberg would translate similar themes into better films and he would go on to develop body horror into a true art-form, but Rabid is an accomplished early effort.
Throughout the 1980's and 90's, there seemed to be a Stephen King adaptation released every other week. Although his output is undeniably prolific, I've always found King's work, for the most part, formulaic and lacking originality, and many of the big screen adaptations fair far worse. There are exceptions, of course, namely genre classics Carrie (1976) and The Shining (1980). The great directors Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick managed to turn King's often plodding narrative into a gripping visual spectacle. Canadian auteur David Cronenberg does something similar with The Dead Zone, and although it lacks the greatness of the aforementioned masterpieces, it is a wonderfully made and solidly-acted film.
It follows Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), a happy schoolteacher who is madly in love with girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams). After suffering a headache on a rollercoaster, he declines Sarah's invitation to stay the night and drives home. On his way, he has a car accident which leaves him in a coma. When he wakes up, he discovers he's lost 5 years of his life and Sarah is now married with a child. After touching a nurse's hand, he sees her daughter trapped in a burning house and warns her. It turns out the coma has left Johnny with the ability to see people's past, present and future, and also the power to change the future with foresight. News of his new gift spreads, and his abilities are called upon by local sheriff Bannerman (Tom Skerritt), who asks Johnny to assist in solving a series of murders.
That is only half of the plot. Characters seem to come and go and eventually the film switches focus to corrupt Senatorial candidate Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen). Cronenberg and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam do their best to streamline King's sprawling plot, but without a focused narrative, the film can sometimes be as sketchy as King's novel. But Walken is great, helping create a character to really care about, and the supporting actors just as good. Rather than offer lazy jump-shocks, Cronenberg is patient and careful to drum up an atmosphere which makes the supernatural themes feel oddly naturalistic. It's far from the Canadian's best, but The Dead Zone is finely made and greatly entertaining.
Although he is better known for his 'body horror' work and scenes of squirm-inducing gore, the most prominent theme that runs throughout the career of David Cronenberg is the idea of finding an extra stream of consciousness through sexual release. From his serial-raping zombies in Shivers (1975), to his portrayal of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabrina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method (2011), he has adopted a psychoanalytical aesthetic between scenes of exploding heads and killer tots. His début, Stereo, is his student film that is an early reflection of his fascination with psychology, made on an obviously shoe-stringed budget, shot in one location.
The film begins with the arrival at what looks like a research facility of a man wearing a black coat. As the narration begins to explain, the man is a telepath, a product of a social experiment to observe behavioural patterns between three telepaths in a closed environment. Having had their ability to speak removed, they must communicate only via telepathy, and through this telepathic bonding, begin sexual experimentation. The experiment is being carried out by the unseen Dr. Luther Stringfellow, who hopes that the powerful relationships which are forged through the telepaths - that evolve to deem such things as sex or physical attraction irrelevant - will come to replace and stabilise the traditional family unit.
If you could label Stereo as anything, it would have to be ambitious. Although the subject is purely psychoanalytical, the approach is very sci-fi. The film is black-and-white, featuring no sound at all apart from the near-constant narration, which is spoken in the same dreary tone as you would expect from a student vocalising an essay. It's quite clear than Cronenberg was held back by budget constraints and equipment, and although you could forgive the film's narrative flaws, the lack of visual appeal combined with the monotonous, jargon-heavy, quasi-intellectual narration, make the film a struggle to get through, even at only 62 minutes. It would be harsh to say Stereo is for Cronenberg die-hard's only as it is often intriguing, but the film ultimately feels like struggling to stay awake during a University lecture.
In the opening credits of David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, the bottom half of the screen gets increasing doused with "action" art, the Jackson Pollack drippings of various coloured paints, an American artistic icon, whose paintings fetch millions of dollars at auction, are the symbols of opulence, and social status, to that one percent of the West's population who are inconceivably rich - those financial elite that the worlds ninety-nine percent aim their contemporary anger at. Whilst this topical subject matter could well have been wholly conceived after the 2008 economic crash, but it is in fact adapted (by Cronenberg himself) from the 2003 novel by Dom DeLillo. (But then, these suited elites have been targeted hate figures for some time, but with the crash came hard evidence of their financial greed - and crimes for that matter.) In Cosmopolis, the protagonist is Eric (Robert Pattinson), a billionaire asset manager, whose cold, detachment from reality, his alienation a product of his corporate exclusivity, operates his working life (and extra-curricula) from the inside of his technologically advanced limousine.
To the outside world, Eric is extraneous, but his interior world, the back of the limo, with its screens, curves and luminous sheen, reflect that consumerist fetishisation of technology - reminiscent of those chrome engines, erotically cleaned and poured over in Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos (1970). Eric occupies this space for much of the film, a hermetically sealed protector from the real world (customised so no sound can enter), where he lets in colleagues, friends, and a doctor for one-on-one conversation. It is this erotic space, where he communicates, fucks, and destroys lives, a space gleaming with technical-sexuality, is like a womb, the ultimate space of protection. In the few scenes exterior to the limo, - such as his encounters with his wife in eating establishments - the occupants are rarely heard, their insignificance obvious for the character.
But, like Joseph Conrad's Charles Marlow in 'Heart of Darkness', Eric is on an odyssey into the dark, and an apocalyptic journey into destruction and madness. But unlike Marlow, Eric's is a self inflicted destruction. This duality manifests itself symbolically, he is skewed, divided and unbalanced; his hair is only cut on one side, he shoots a hole in his left hand, and the visiting doctor advises Eric that his prostate is asymmetrical. The odyssey - his literal journey across Manhatten - is held up in traffic, a busy day that sees the President of the United States visiting the city, the funeral of a rap star, and an anti-capitalist "riot". Parallel to the increasing binary characteristics, Eric's detached wishes are often denied. In one scene he is informed of the death of his favourite rap star, but is disappointed that he died of natural causes, instead of a gun shot - a media-friendly representation. Juliette Binoche, Eric's art consultant, turns down a request (whilst copulating) to purchase an entire collection of Mark Rothko paintings, along with the space they occupy - an arrogance of ownership. Throughout the passage of Eric's car, he loses billions of dollars, his advisers philosophically, but dispassionately discussing these complex calculations and consequences.
In an early scene (and a quote from Zbigniew Herbert's poem 'Report from the Besieged City' at the start of the film), Eric proposes a fantasy future of finance where the rat becomes the worlds currency. In a restaurant, two anarchist protesters storm in holding rats by their tales, declaring "A spectre is haunting the world", before hurtling the rats at the patrons. That spectre is of course capitalism; the limo is grafittied by the protesters, Eric cocooned in perfect anonymity, but this is simply another pseudo-delight to the destructive dimensions of Eric. He knows he walks to danger, - he created it himself - a manifestation of possible psychosomatic invention? like American Psycho's (2000) Patrick Bateman, another satire on the financial elite, but one in which he is internally, mentally imploding, instead of externalising violence into a fantasy of psychotic whim. Here, Paul Giamatti's disgruntled forgotten work colleague, becomes a potential source of ultimate destruction, or he may simply be a manifestation of his deteriorating psyche.
However, unlike the sharp satirical whit of American Psycho, Cosmopolis is simply too cold, it's characters without depth. But then this could also be a purposeful emptiness. For Cronenberg, it is a return to that clinical aesthetic, and gaunt characterisation of Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999), but is too surreal in terms of its non-narrative structure to fundamentally clarify the sardonic elements that could have been so much more interesting. It is a very well made film, as you would expect from Cronenberg, his compositions and its movements and segues are beautifully constructed, but this odyssey into quasi-madness simply didn't enlighten me, or excite me in the way its central idea could well have, and simply is not cohesive enough to produce any major dramatic tension. As with the vacuous, clinical aesthetic of the film, it left me a little cold.
Dr. Hobbes (Fred Doederlin) has been using unorthodox methods upon his transplant patients, placing large, penis-shaped worms in their bodies to act in place of the missing organ. He has placed one in his under-age patient, whom he strangles at the beginning of the film, only to slit his own throat with a razor blade. Nicholas Tudor (Allan Kolman) is a former patient and, after a violent episode, coughs up a worm off his balcony, and it sets about infecting others. Soon enough, the community (a sort of isolated holiday tower block) is overrun with sex-crazed zombies, and it's up to the resident doctor Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton) to get to the bottom of it.
Shivers is David Cronenberg's first full-length feature film, and he offers an insight into a subject that would remain prominent throughout his career. That is the human psyche mixed with the sexual; whether it be sexual promiscuity or inner perversions, it is here wrapped up as a schlock horror. The bland inhabitants of the tower block appear bored and resigned to their positions in the social order. That is, until the parasite quickly spreads and their suppressed sexual desires come to the fore and they are soon fucking everything in sight and slavering at the mouth. The distinction between sex and horror are blurred to the point where it's difficult to ascertain who is being killed and who is being raped. Cronenberg took huge risks with the censors, exploring and mixing themes such as paedophilia, rape, medical experimentation and sexual disease. With the explosion of AIDS just round the corner, Shivers becomes almost prophetic.
This being Cronenberg's first 'proper' film, it is rough around the edges. The horror is manic to the point of ridiculous, as we are treated to an orgy of flesh and blood that is almost non-stop in the last 30 minutes. Cronenberg would soon learn that such gratuitousness is not needed to compliment his social and sexual commentary, and would refine it rather quickly, leading to such great films such as The Brood (1979) and Videodrome (1983). Not to say this ruins the film, after all, it is a Grindhouse favourite, so a bit of over-the-top exploitation is expected. Far from his best work, but a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the greatest horror directors of all time (although lately he has moved away from the genre).
Psychotherapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) has founded a breakthrough technique called 'psychoplasmics'. This unconventional new technique involves sessions where deep rooted anxieties and memories manifest themselves in a kind of hypnotic state where the patient and doctor can play different roles. This causes the patient's bodies to change as a result of these sessions. Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) discovers bruises on his daughter's body, and knows that it is the doing of his mentally unstable wife Nola (Samantha Eggar), who is under Raglan's care. As Frank tries to form a case against Raglan, various people begin to be murdered by disfigured children who seem to be protective of his daughter.
It's a glowing testament to Canadian director David Cronenberg that a film such as The Brood, a relatively low-budget, silly-sounding horror, can get itself made, let alone avoid being a catastrophe. For a film about killer-children that appear out of nowhere that butcher people in various and inventive ways, the film is remarkable. It's not scary like I would imagine it once was, but it is certainly unnerving. But this isn't just a great horror film, this is simply a brilliant piece of film-making. This simply should not work. But it does. And it is possibly his finest work to date.
Cronenberg's style is unmistakable. His distinct style of character-building before unleashing shocking pieces of crazy horror is usually backed-up by a great script and genuinely brilliant film-making. It is a style that he would hone and develop into other great films of this era - Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) - all fantastic films, all memorable pieces of horror. The Brood really comes alive in the exchanges between Raglan and his patients. Opening with a long scene in which Raglan and an emotionally damaged patient with some serious father issues interact in front of an audience, the scene is blandly shot with a black background. Yet for what is just a long conversation becomes immediately engrossing thanks to some fantastically complex dialogue, and builds a tense atmosphere that would prevail throughout the film.
The film is amazing throughout, but nothing prepared me for the ending. Obviously I won't reveal it, but it's a divine mixture of the truly inspired, the sickening, and the outright ridiculous. No other film-maker could make such a scene so horrifying and effective, yet not make you question what you are seeing. I'm not sure what was happening in this era, but there was definitely a fear of women and their capabilities when it comes to birth, and this was reflected in some films of the time - Larry Cohen's It's Alive (1974), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Xtro (1983). Directors seemed to have a fascination with the gruesomeness of birth and the power that it holds. Cronenberg has calmed down of late, making dramas such as A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). Both are solid films but his true legacy lies in the films made between 1975 and 1988, where he made some of the best horror films ever made.
Only his fourth feature, and only his second horror after Shivers (1975), this is not Canadian director David Cronenberg's finest achievement. But thankfully, a bulk Cronenberg's filmography is outstanding and Rabid is still an extremely effective little horror film. The infected are a mixture of zombies and vampires, although they aren't really either by definition, but Cronenberg uses them as well as anyone could hope for. The film is little more than a series of set-pieces, but one in particular, involving a woman on a packed trained slowly coming to the realisation that one of the infected is on board, is as good a scene depicting sheer terror and panic as I've ever seen.
