Rabid

Value Rabid Attacks

Rabid
Canada 1977
Directed by David Cronenberg
Arrow Blu Ray Zone 2

As I said in my review of Cronenberg’s Shivers the other day (you can read that review here), I’ve been wanting to rewatch Rabid because I have a ticket to the world premiere of the new remake by the Soskia Sisters in just under two weeks and wanted this to be fresh in my mind. Having rewatched it now on a nice Arrow Blu Ray (although, I understand there’s a brand new, even more super duper restoration out later this month from 101 Films) it’s easy to see why I always get Shivers and Rabid confused. They’re both concerned with the spreading of a virus... by parasites in Shivers and, arguably, a kind of parasite in Rabid... and they both have the juxtaposition of hard violence and sex appeal to them. I’ll expand on that statement a little down the page.

The very first shot of the film introduces us to the person who is both the main protagonist and antagonist in the film, Rose, played by the late, great Marilyn Chambers. I’ll get back to her in a little while too but the opening credits start as she is waiting for the film’s other main protagonist... her boyfriend Hart, played by Frank Moore... her impressive figure leaning against his motorcycle. Hart soon picks her up and a lot of the titles pay out to various dynamic shots of the two of them on his motorcycle, whizzing around on a road trip...

Then, right bang smack in the middle of these credits, the cycle zooms past a building and instead of following the vehicle as we have in all the shots prior to this, we stay with the shot of the exterior of the building, The Keloid Clinic... because the director is now using this held moment as an establishing shot... followed by the interior of one of the offices where Dr. Keloid, his wife and his business partner Murray Cypher, played by Joe Silver (who also has a similar kind of role in Shivers) are discussing the future of his business, which is a cosmetic hospital specialising in modern techniques of plastic surgery. This is a great way of quickly filling in the audience about the hospital prior to the next series of shots which, when the titles resume, show a vehicle in the road blocking it after a man has an argument about directions with his wife and the motorcycle swerving to miss it but going up and over the edge of the highway. Hart is thrown clear but Rose lands underneath the motorcycle which then explodes on top of her.

However, this action has been witnessed by one of the cosmetic patients at the clinic through their binoculars and it’s not long before Dr. Keloid is racing to the scene of the accident with an ambulance and rushing the two patients back to his hospital where he has to perform an emergency operation on Rose which is an experimental form of surgery he is trying out, to do with using internal skin grafts. As he explains to his team while he cuts some skin from Rose’s thigh, he is going to be using “unusual skin grafts treated so they become morphogenetically neutral.’ Neutral field grafts which grow with the patient like an embryo. Now, I don’t pretend to completely understand the scientific lingo here but it’s the only explanation we get to a possible reason as to what happens next in the film... which truly continues Cronenberg’s obsession with ‘body horror’ that he was responsible for popularising around this time.

What does happen next is that, Rose wakes up and, mostly using her natural sexual attraction, starts drinking people’s blood by biting them with a kind of proboscis which retracts from a new orifice in her armpit. When she tries the same trick on a cow or tries to eat normal food, it just makes her throw up so very quickly the ‘half Rose-half beast’ she has become learns that she needs to drink the blood of humans to survive. Unfortunately, this also gives her victims a kind of untreatable super-rabies which causes them to attack others and spread the virus before dying themselves. Soon after Rose ‘escapes’ from the hospital, the new rabies spreads like wildfire and it’s not long before Canada is under martial law. And so the plot of the movie becomes Rose trying to find safe haven in between sexually enticing various human snacks while both Hart and Murray are out on the streets looking for her.

It’s business as usual for Cronenberg then... or at least what would become business as usual during this cycle of the writer/director’s career and I have to say, he has the added bonus of having more money (it seems to me) to make his wonderful shot compositions sparkle... he tends to gravitate to the centre or just slightly off-centre of the screen with some of his designs in this one, as he sets up vertical blocks of colour and texture to compartmentalise the screen.

There’s also the fact that many of the performances seem somehow more professional than some of those in his previous feature, not least of all Marilyn Chambers’ turn which really does stand out here in comparison to the expectations of her more famous career. And if you don’t know who Chambers is... or rather was, she died ten years ago.... she was the wholesome face of the Ivory Snow commercials in America. Yep, the famous Ivory Soap girl with her “99 & 44/100% pure” catch line. Well, she was the Ivory Soap girl until she started appearing, simultaneous to her advertising career with Ivory Soap, as the leading porn star in such, perhaps fondly remembered, pornographic films as the notorious Behind The Green Door, Resurrection Of Eve and Insatiable. This caused a scandal within the advertising industry at the time but, in the very rare crossovers she did, she really showed that she was more than up to the task of doing some good (and in this case somewhat ‘out there’... in the best Cronenbergian sense) performances and could hold her own with much more experienced commercial actors. I think this also shows how good porn actresses can be in general and that they shouldn’t necessarily be typecast in the genre of films with which they are most famously associated. An argument for a different article perhaps but, one wonders if Brian DePalma’s pursuit of porn actress Annette Haven for the lead in his film Body Double (which she ended up not starring in after all) was inspired by the casting of Marilyn Chambers in this.

It’s interesting that, although the method of viral contamination in Rabid is not a sex based one like it is in Shivers, the film seems somewhat more sexualised because there are a fair few nude shots of Chambers, who would have been totally comfortable doing those kinds of scenes anyway. It gives the film possibly a little more of an erotic edge to proceedings than in the previous movie where the theme of sexuality was more pushed to the foreground while remaining discretely in the background at the same time.

As well as the usual horror effects... which are done quite well with the proboscis that lurks within a sphincter under the armpit being particular well done, as sophisticated as anything in Cronenberg’s later ‘body horror’ movies... he also injects a more overt, almost slapstick sense of humour, into things at times. The moment in the shopping mall, for instance, where a policeman armed with a machine gun sprays a rabid attacker with lead and inadvertently also kills the Santa Claus in the Christmas Grotto is a particularly humorous swipe at establishment values, it seems to me.

Also... and perhaps I’m being a little unkind here but... whoever picked out the needle-dropped cues from a music library on this one (it may have been Cronenberg himself) did not do nearly as good a job as was done in Shivers. The over the top 1950s B-music style stings are lovely but totally out of place with the scenes they are scored with here and certainly give an unintentional humour vibe in places when it’s more than likely that the opposite effect is probably what was required.

Asides from that minor gripe though, Rabid is another early winner from the mind of David Cronenberg and I can’t really decide which, between Rabid and Shivers, I like more. I’d certainly recommend the movie as another good jumping on point to this writer/director’s cinema for those who haven’t seen his work before and now, all that’s left for me to do, is to go and see the new Soskia Sisters reboot at the London Frighfest this coming Bank Holiday Monday, so I can watch it with the original template in mind. And, hopefully, unless anything happens to me, a review will follow soon.