Rabid

The second big-screen feature from Canadian horror genius David Cronenberg was this twisted well-done low budgeter.

Following a motorcycle wreck, a young woman receives skin grafts that cause her to have a murderous thrust for blood - which leads to a deadly plague.

Rabid is one nicely done little shocker. It has a clever storyline that's a unique take on the vampire/zombie genres. The makeup work is gruesomely good, the atmosphere cold and fitting, and the low-budget ambiguously well used to create a horror film that was a bit ahead of its time. In addition the cast isn't bad. Star Marylin Chambers, though better known as a porn actress, does a decent performance as the victim of the strange infection. Frank Moore is also good as Chambers' boyfriend who must save her before disaster strikes.

While granted that Rabid isn't as great as the films that Cronenberg would later unleash (The Brood, Videodrome, Dead Zone etc.) it is never the less a solid sophomore effort that well-foreshadowed the greatness Cronenberg would achieve in his later films.

*** out of ****

Two bikers careen and crash in the Canadian countryside very close to a cosmetology clinic. The girl biker has received serious injuries and needs lots of surgery involving skin grafts. After that there is virtually no scientific or general explanation for how this young lady develops a blood-sucking mouth in her armpit, that after having bitten its victims transfers the same desire for blood; thus creating a plague in Montreal of all places. Now, the story has some obvious holes that needed to be filled and were not, but writer/director David Cronenberg can make even the most absurd stuff seem real and scary. This was his real second feature after Shivers, and he delivers the goods with some artful direction, more than ample suspense, and a pervasive mood of uneasiness in a city being besieged by a viral plague. Money constraints seem obvious as well. Whatever happened to the French detective? I found his character rather interesting.

Cronenberg made me jump from my seat more than a few times, and his style really absorbs all elements of the film even when you know what is going to happen - the shock is still there. A lot of people haven't ever been fond of Cronenberg's work, but I think that in the world of horror he is definitely one of the underestimated craftsmen. As a final note it would be remiss of me not to mention Marilyn Chambers. She does a pretty good job acting here. I found her very believable and beautiful. After all I guess there are worse ways to go then being sensuously cradled in Ms. Chambers arms as she caresses your hair and her carnivorous armpit dweller locks into your bloodstream. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I don't know - guess I'll chew on it a bit.

I really enjoy gritty, low-key horror films like this one. The story revolves around Hart (Frank Moore) and Rose (porn queen Marilyn Chambers), a young couple involved in a motorcycle accident. Rose undergoes an emergency experimental skin graft operation and emerges as a plague-spreading pseudo-vampire who extracts blood via a syringe-style growth that has developed on her body. It's an interesting, original take of vampirism, especially the aspect that her victims get sick and turn homicidal ("Rabid," I guess).

In my opinion, this is Cronenberg's best 70s movie (I enjoyed it more than THEY CAME FROM WITHIN/SHIVERS and THE BROOD, also good horror films). The story is intelligent, very well thought out and full of political and social context if you want it. The horror scenes are creepy and effective. Chambers is beautiful and has a killer body, for sure, but she also delivers a surprisingly good performance. You can tell she was savoring this non-hardcore role and probably hoped for more of the same after this, but it just wasn't in the cards for her. Too bad. The rest of the cast was acceptable.

I wish they made more films like this nowadays!

David Cronenberg perhaps maybe didn't get too ambitious as he forged ahead in the 70s as a low-budget director of bloody, outrageous horror films in Canada, but it was probably a good chance to learn tricks of the trade he'd know for the rest of his career. And somehow, while watching it, despite the fact that it is not masterpiece, it has all the makings of being a real influential work. Like another film that it's obviously been inspired by, Night of the Living Dead (albeit the Crazies might be in there too), Rabid seems to have given rise (no pun intended) to films like Species (hot woman out on the prowl for beings to fulfill her), 28 Days Later (obvious), and even Planet Terror (outbreak in a hospital). It's rough and with a terribly bleak ending, and it's got a certain pizazz that should keep it humming on genre fans shelves in the years to come.

Marilyn Chambers is one of the reasons the film got made- Ivan Reitman chose her over Cronenberg's (more interesting) choice of Sissy Spacek- though it is and isn't her exactly that makes Rabid a little sleazier for some reason that it might be without her. To be sure, she's the catalyst for the outbreak of the not-quite-rabies that spreads out in Montreal after a freak skin-grafting operation following a motorcycle accident (very well filmed that is, by the way). But seeing her after she gets out of the hospital and for the bulk of the picture until she reunites with Hart is a little predictable, and adds an air to the film of being too exploitive of expectations as opposed to exploiting the primitive tools of storytelling Cronenberg has. A scene like when Chambers goes into the movie theater should be freaky, but it's just sort of ho-hum.

It's not even that she lacks a certain screen presence, though at the same time, as the protagonist, she's not even really all that interesting in context with what else is going on around her. The best parts of Rabid are the side scenes, the little moments like when Joe Silver watches TV with the baby, or when the mall cop accidentally shoots the Santa Claus and mutters "Christ!", or when we see the sudden moments of the characters like the truck driver out for BBQ chicken or the random dude at night jumping on Hart's car. Those are when Cronenberg strikes it best as a pure genre director, not going too deep into theme (aside from that of the unawareness of disease and infection, a theme that would grow stronger in the 80s to be sure), plus in the shock value of the actual creature that sprouts out of Chambers mouth, which is probably even *better* concealed and revealed than with the parasites in Shivers.

At the end of it all, Rabid only really gets profound towards the very end, as a tragic scene occurs, but by then it doesn't amount to a whole lot. Rabid is a warped little blood-soaked flesh-eater flick, and it's happy with being simple and dark in its low budget.

After a nasty motorcycle accident, a young couple, Hart (Frank Moore) and Rose (porn star Marilyn Chambers), are taken to a nearby plastic surgery clinic, where Rose undergoes a revolutionary skin grafting technique that results in the growth of a bloodsucking tumour. Driven by the lust for plasma, Rose flees the clinic and embarks on a series of attacks which leave her victims alive, but infected with a strain of rabies that causes them to react in a violent manner. As the disease rapidly turns into a city-wide epidemic and martial law is imposed, Hart attempts to locate his missing girlfriend, unaware that she is the carrier of the disease.

With crisper cinematography and more confident direction from David Cronenberg, Rabid is a technically superior effort to his 1975 film Shivers, but doesn't manage to be as satisfying an experience thanks to a script that becomes a tad too repetitive at times, strays a little to close to George Romero's The Crazies (1973) for comfort, and perhaps most importantly, fails to answer burning questions about the nature of Rose's condition: the needle tipped, phallic mutation, which emerges from a sphincter-like orifice from under Rose's arm, is as grotesque and unsettling as anything Cronenberg has conjured up since, but it's existence is never adequately explained, most likely because no amount of in-depth exposition could ever be convincing enough.

On a more positive note, Chambers does reasonably well in her first non-porn lead role, there are some genuinely nasty moments for which makeup guy Joe Blasco provides some pretty decent effects work (I particularly enjoyed the 'finger snipping' moment, and the impressive use of a pneumatic drill by one of the infected), and Cronenberg occasionally ditches his sober approach for the odd spot of delightfully twisted humour, such as the scene in which a mall Santa Claus gets accidentally machine-gunned by a trigger happy cop (well, I found it funny!).

Whilst Rabid certainly doesn't qualify as essential Cronenberg, it is still worth a look if you're a fan of the man's work and merits a reasonable 6.5 out of 10 from this viewer (generously rounded up to 7 for IMDb).