Cast:
Marilyn Chambers (Rose Miller), Frank Moore (Hart Read), Joe Silver (Murray Cypher), Howard Ryshpan (Dan Keloid), Patricia Gage (Roxanne Keloid), Susan Roman (Mindy Kent), J. Roger Periard (Lloyd Walsh), Lynne Deragon (Nurse Louise), Terry Schonblum (Judy Glasberg), Victor Désy (Claude LaPointe), Julie Anna (Nurse Rita), and Gary McKeehan (Smooth Eddy) Written and Directed by David Cronenberg (#816 - Crimes of the Future, #1127 - eXistenZ, #1220 - A History of Violence, #1239 - Stereo, #1624 - Shivers, #1712 - The Fly [1986], #2132 - Crimes of the Future [2022])
Review:
"So, it's inevitable then, if you consider yourself an artist, that you are going to bother people. That you're going to disturb people, and that you're going to knock over a few walls. And I think, even if that's not your main delight-As it is not really with me. I mean, my main delight-I think I am very playful; I think playfulness is the main thing I do. I play with the concepts, with the images, with the connections between things, the metaphors, and so I think I'm playful, not sort of hostile and nasty. But nonetheless, there's an urge to get under the surface of things. Sometimes I do that literally. I mean, I 'm doing scenes in autopsy and dissection and surgery, and yeah, you want to get under the surface to see what's really going on and how things really work. That does upset a lot of people. And to me, then it's an inevitable consequence of being a serious artist."
There seems to be this weird revulsion about movies that happen to have a bit of violence within a good ol' vampire story. Of course, maybe they were the same people that were too wimpy for Shivers (1975). Sure, it had attracted journalists (read: hacks like Robert Fulford) complaining that tax dollars of the Canadian Film Development Corporation had been used to make the movie. Of course, most importantly, it made money that Cinépix (a distributor Cronenberg affectionally described as "sleazy") liked. Older readers would recognize that this is not the most notable performance of Chambers, who had appeared in Behind the Green Door (1972); Ivan Reitman suggested casting her for a certain type of appeal, although Cronenberg hadn't seen the aforementioned Door film (he thought about Sissy Spacek for the lead but was overruled by higher-ups that thought about her accent and freckles). The CFDC did help fund the film, which I would hope made certain people seethe and others rejoice. Cronenberg has stated the movie, when compared to the aforementioned Shivers, was essentially "painted on a bigger canvas" when it came to similar premises involving infection. The movie did relatively well on its $500,000 budget and Cronenberg would continue to make films of varying notice, with his next two films each coming out in 1979 with Fast Company (one of Cronenberg's unique films not involving horror) and The Brood (1979). In 2019, a remake of the film (filmed by the Soska Sisters in Canada) was released.
Imagine if you will, a movie that decides to have a monstrous thing in one's armpit that spreads disease that leads to people getting sick and scared. Now imagine a scene in the film where one attempts to stop an attack by one of the sick in the Christmas season by shooting at the sick man in front of children waiting in line for Santa Claus...and hitting both the sick guy and Santa! The movie may be weird, it may be cyclical, but it sure is never boring in the overall result, that much is for sure. For me, there is plenty of amusement in the very fact that the perversions of the flesh really can be a killer without falling prey to a lack of execution in effects or non-commitment from the person involved. Violent and repulsive to certain tastes, Cronenberg made a solid movie detailing both terror that can arise in watching fear and aggression play out on TV and also the terror of losing one's body and even the soul to the unknown. Chambers doesn't have too much to say in her journey as the source of body terror, but she does an efficient job in basically playing a modern "Typhoid Mary" (that refers to a woman who apparently had typhoid fever and infected dozens of people in the early 1900s before dealing with forced quarantine twice). Her plight (one where she is penetrating people with a thing in her armpit) is a curious one that she approaches with relative calm for such an alluring presence that really does make one wonder how this was her one noted mainstream role. Consider the fact that she first wakes up screaming after the appendage is on her and she quickly finds someone curious to see her skin. The others do relatively fine in carrying terror in the ordinary fading away into churning fear, which mainly involves trying to make sense of it all. This is a clinically drawn-out type of movie, one that comes and goes for 91 minutes in a chilly manner that I appreciate. I particularly like the ending. After a series of wanderings, finally one gets to see the characters figure out just where this all started and get a confrontation not so much filled with gore and bombast but instead one of straight-toned truth: a garbage pile, suffice to say. After a carefully controlled film of chaos within the horrors of flesh that looks and feels like a cheap but ambitious time, one leaves Rabid as they would hope to leave it: satisfactorily unsettled.
Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.
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