MOVIE REVIEW
Title: Rabid
Director: David Cronenberg
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Rating: 7.5 / 10
Marilyn Chambers (Rose)
Frank Moore (Hart)
Joe Silver (Murray Cypher)
Howard Ryshpan (Dan Keloid)
Susan Roman (Mindy)
Patricia Gage (Roxanne Keloid)
Roger Periard (Lloyd)
Brief Plot Outline (NO spoilers!):
Rose and Hart have a motorcycle crash on a Canadian back road where the closest medical facility that can help them is an experimental plastic surgery clinic where they treat the comatose Rose with a new and never before attempted skin grafting procedure. Hart is bandaged up for a few semi-serious sprains and sent home, while a month later, Rose awakes from her coma with an intense craving for human blood. She screams in the night, a fellow patient comes to her, and she bites him, with a bizarre new organ mutated into a grafting in one of her armpits. He bleeds from his wound, which becomes an area where a scab won't form, then later leaves the clinic and becomes rabid - green foam dripping from his mouth, face freakishly discolored pink and purple. Rose bites more people at the clinic, they go rabid and bite others who become rabid, and soon the city of Montreal (Canada) faces an outbreak epidemic of what they assume is rabies. Meanwhile, Rose leaves the clinic and begins to agonize over how her insatiable hunger is making her inhuman.
Review:
Director David Cronenberg is a sort of human-science fiction horror filmmaker. He started his feature film career making very low budget horror films about bodily mutations and then made bizarre statements about how they changed a group of people. You mostly saw the victims raging through more victims, to the point where you thought you were watching something like Night of the Living Dead or The Crazies (both directed by George A. Romero). So in a way, Cronenberg was the Canadian director doing what other people had already done. What set him apart are the mutations themselves and the horrific, very extreme imagery that always outdid Romero and took things a step further. The mutations are always very private and intimate, involve sex or procreation, and create a lot of body discomfort. Or, as Guilermo Del Toro (director of the Blade and Hellboy films) said- "he knows that we are not at peace with our bodies," so he shows us just how much we can be disgusted by them.
The thing that makes Rabid special among his first 4 features is that now he pays special attention to character and has some genuine emotion in the film. People are not just objects and the body is not just a thing which is demolished over and over again. Of course, the emotion is not really the point. But when compared to his other films at the time, especially Scanners and They Came from Within (aka- Shivers), there are characters and the circumstances in the story affect real people, not just faceless bodies. For instance, there's a sequence in which people are being pushed around on a city street and needled by the gun barrels of national guards, and a young woman is quick to defend a man she thinks has been pushed too far. Not to mention there are moments when the main character, also the source for all the death and horror in the film, is treated with sympathy- we are meant to feel sympathy for her though there are also moments when she is a cold-blooded killer.
When you see a Cronenberg movie from this period, you just know it is distinctly Cronenberg. This was more than less established when 79's The Brood got an authentic American distribution deal and set a standard for how Cronenberg's dirty low budget films would become polished and more technically graceful. But as for content- his earlier films are mostly mutants run amok, steamrolling over dozens of innocent people, to stop only for a realization of new developments in the state of the mutations. Which means, there was a scientific point, but people didn't matter. We were blank slates Cronenberg used like sheep herding to show us something really nasty. Which is exactly why Rabid rises far above the pack. It doesn't strictly follow that formula. And what's more, but since this film bares a striking resemblance to Romero's Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies, I'm proud to say that in many ways, Rabid eclipses both Romero films.
Details Acting: It may be a tribute to areas of Cronenberg's talent (talent which would eventually lead him to become a director of great acclaim, going on to direct Hollywood dramas with movie stars like Naomi Watts, Jude Law, and Viggo Mortensen) but, he has always known how to direct an actor. This entire cast, mostly of nobodies as far as Americans are concerned, deliver exactly what they're called for. The acting tone in the movie is something almost no other low budget horror film ends up achieving. The actors here act like real, ordinary people in honest, day-to-day activities. There's no demand in this movie for long, dramatic dialogue readings, but amazingly for a low budget film- the actors feel like real people, their lines don't come off spoken as screechy, and the styles never go over the top. No overacting or underacting here. These actors are good at making real people seem like real people. Which helps us feel like this is about as real as it could get. Although it's a vampire / zombie film hybrid, the movie never feels supernatural. But also, all the actors are on the same level. Nobody is better or more important than anyone else.
Marilyn Chambers is the most important member of the cast, and her part calls for seduction, but she also has to feel creepy. She does both astoundingly well. When she lurches toward a victim (especially in the movie's somewhat cult-famous hot tub scene), she is just about the creepiest woman put on film in an actual horror movie (the jury's still out on whether or not Mommie Dearest, Chamber's only true competition, qualifies). In fact, all of the actors Cronenberg uses as the rabid zombies look really scary (one of the main credits I give this over Night of the Living Dead). At least the ones whose faces you see onscreen the longest. Most famously for the movie- a middle-aged woman on a subway car. And some interesting physical (method, perhaps) acting from a mouth-foaming crazed doctor in an armored police wagon. In the film's most disturbing scene, that actor's face is covered and we just see his eyes. The kind of eye acting that would make Christopher Lee shiver.
Technical Effects: Special / Make-Up - There is no gore in Rabid. Though it is violent enough to the point where you'll believe after it's over that it was gory, it's the power of editing that suggests the film is gory. It's not. We see a bit of blood in some scenes (which looks good and red) but nothing cut open and nothing squishy. The quality of all make-up effects look great, but not much is shown directly to the camera. During all attack scenes, the film cuts to and away quickly. The movie mostly features the skin mutation on Rose's body, and it is gross to look at. Like a mutilated anus with a pointed digit sticking out. Then, there's the actual vampire's-tooth organ, which we see closeup several times. It looks convincing enough. No complaints here. Then, there's the face make-up on all the rabid zombies. They look great and creepy.
Music - There isn't much music in Rabid. What little there is feels like a combination of library tracks (a regular habit for Romero as well) and new music. There are maybe 3 actual themes in the movie. The more exciting, militant one is not impressive. Then there are two more. The dramatic one that plays as we see Rose grabbing her trademark fur coat in the movie's finale, which I was impressed with. It sort of recalled a certain piece of music Lucio Fulci used in his 1981 classic, The Beyond. And then, the standard creepy one. If you're a horror fan, you'll get a kick out of this: this piece of music was later used in the radio spots for Phantasm when it was released in America 2 years later.
Camerawork - Not much to tell you in this department. Cronenberg, as far as I know, is not known for his ambitious camera trickery and elaborate movements. Most everything here is shot straight-ahead and full-on.
After-Dark Content: No real nudity. If you're interested, Marilyn Chambers shows her nude breasts once or twice. But the focus of the film is kept on what she does to people and not being the famous porno star (in Canada, I believe) that she was at the time the movie was made. People are not shown to be very attractive in this movie. They're mostly shown as ordinary working folk.
Movie Flaws (if any) / Conclusions Some people find the movie to be boring. But if you look past the sensationalism of the sex freaks in They Came from Within, the massacres on innocents in Scanners, and the unbelievably nasty ending of The Brood... If you look at direct filmmaking quality, Rabid is Cronenberg's best feature from 1974 up to 1982. The story / plot features his most interesting concepts (including one that just sprang to mind during this review- private experiments of the privilaged upper class getting out of control and invading the rest of the population). If nothing else, this is miles ahead of Romero's now cult-beloved The Crazies. This is The Crazies that Romero (secretly) wishes he could have made. This film is a more successful attempt on body horror becoming invasion horror than the voraciously overrated They Came from Within, and since that film was so experimental and unique, Rabid is that much more of a success.