The Substance

A Woman Of...

The Substance
Directed by Coralie Fargeat
UK/France 2024
MUBI
UK cinema release print

Warning: Yeah, it’s almost impossible to talk about this one without some significant spoilerage so... I’m not even going to try.

The Substance is the second feature length film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, following on from her tremendous first feature, Revenge (reviewed by me here). Now, if it comes down to it, I’d have to say I preferred her first movie to this one but, there’s no doubt that this is an outstanding piece.

Put it this way, there’s body horror cinema done right, such as when written and directed by the Cronenbergs (David and his son Brandon) and there’s body horror which, just seems a bit tame and unrelentingly pretentious... such as those directed by people like Brian Yuzna or Clark Baker. So I can’t be down on The Substance because this one definitely falls into the former camp and I certainly had a good time with it. Also, it seems like a lot of the special effects are practically done so... yeah, can’t complain, for sure.

The film follows Demi Moore in a truly outstanding performance as main protagonist(s) Elisabeth Sparkle, a former Hollywood oscar winner and fitness queen of TV ratings who is fired by her boss, played by Dennis Quaid, for being ‘past it’. However, after she survives a gnarly car accident, she is given a heads up and enters into the world of The Substance. This... well... substance, basically births a younger version of the person out of the spinal column of the first... in this case called Sue and played with equal relish by Margaret Qualley. Once the thing is birthed, she has to look after the comatose, older one by feeding her certain nutrients for seven days and then switching back to the old ‘matrix’ version for seven days, who will be doing the same for the new gal in town. Both are the same person and seem to share the same memories but.... both have different perspectives on their respective life, obviously. 

Anyway, Sue gets Elisabeth’s old TV job and takes the ratings higher than they’ve ever gone (going home to look after her ‘sick mother’ every other week is the excuse she uses for her use and eventual abuse of the titular concoction) and, as the two continue their stuttered co-existence... jealousy and rejection of each other’s lifestyle choices turn them into enemies. But, as they both find to their detriment, there are consequences for breaking the rules of use of The Substance.

Okay, that’s the set up in a nutshell and, I have to say, for the first three quarters of the movie I was loving it. It starts off with a demo of the substance on an egg yolk which then sets up the next shot which ends up bookending, somewhat, the intervening movie. And it’s a wonderful opening. A close up shot of the construction of Elisabeth Sparkle’s Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star followed by how it gets cracked and aged over the years... which is the first of, a fair few quite blatant metaphors the film uses to talk about the central issue... why are people, especially the female of the species, so enchanted with youth and so afraid of ageing?

Okay, now before I go any further, I just want to remind you that I thought the film was great... and it’s certainly one I will be buying when it gets a Blu Ray release, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Now, there’s been a lot of talk that the film is a remake of various films over the years. Sure, it certainly leans into various literary concepts and their collective cinematic legacy over the years but, nope, this is clearly it’s own film in that, if anything, it’s a mish mash of various ideas. Ideas such as The Picture Of Dorian Gray... not to mention various films where antagonists have deliberately stolen the life force of others to keep themselves going such as The Night Strangler (reviewed here)... I might even mention the body swap genre to a degree and it certainly has stylistic surface borrowings from things such as The Elephant Man and, I dunno if this was a deliberate thing or not but, certain things which start to happen in the final act reminded me just a little of the ending of the movie adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme (reviewed here). So to blatantly call it an unofficial remake of something else is to do the director and her art an injustice, I think.

My only problems stem from the final half an hour or so of the film. Some of them are credibility things which, bearing in mind the fantasy nature of the film, seem a little puzzling within the built world of the film... such as a certain character being let back stage for her all important New Year’s Eve live broadcast when, in real life, she would have been kicked off the lot. Also, since when did they have topless dancers on prime time New Years shows in the US? Is that a thing now? But my main issue with the movie is that I thought the denouement of the story, no matter how well done... and it is stylishly rendered, for sure... seemed a little unsatisfying. I was waiting for Demi Moore’s version of the character to start doing something which was being done to her by her alter ego at some point but, alas, the narrative didn’t touch that idea, which is kind of a shame.

However, it really doesn’t matter because, even in the final segment of the film, it had me smiling. There are a fair few mirror scenes in this movie, since it’s basically dealing with the idea of female beauty and there’s one near the end which is scored by a piece of Bernard Herrmann’s music from Vertigo (one of my favourite films) and, if you remember the scene it was originally written for, well... it’s a wonderful musical joke that really perked me up in my seat.

Other than that, I think the other thing I wanted to say was, I thought Fargeat’s Revenge was a really solid, feminist, girl power movie so I am surprised to be reporting back that, this film seems to be as much about the ‘male gaze’ as it is about the improbable standards of beauty that self-same gaze spawns as a shared expectation of society. Which astonished me but, yeah, this is full of lingering close ups on the female body... in various fitness costumes that don’t leave much to the imagination and certainly in the lengthy, numerous sequences of the two lead actresses being completely naked. So... yeah, not so much disappointed by Fargeat’s seeming slant to this (I may have misunderstood something, I reckon) as much as finding myself being caught unawares, so to speak.

But, all that aside, I have to say I still really liked The Substance, even though it has lots of scenes which would have been completely cut out by the BFFC even twenty years ago (which is always puzzling to me but I’m glad they didn’t mutilate this one and said institution should be put down like a rabid animal anyway). This is a nicely put together, charming variant on the body horror narrative and fans of that sub-genre should embrace the film with open arms and legs. Certainly it’s a good example of modern cinematic spectacle, for sure... it’s just annoying that the striking score by Raffertie is not available on a proper CD... I would have liked to have given that one a listen.

Test Screening

 

Screen And
Screen Again

Test Screening
Directed by Clark Baker
USA 2024
Parallax Ventures
World Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

Okay, so this year marks the 25th anniversary of one of London’s most beloved film festivals, FrightFest and, my first screening this year (of four... I can’t really afford a weekend pass and don’t understand the complicated booking process involved with those anyway) is Clark Baker’s Test Screening which, well it looked to be right up my street when I read the programme guide synopsis but, I have to say I was a little underwhelmed with it, to be honest.

One of the reasons I thought I’d be into this one is because it uses a preview screening at a cinema as its delivery method of the horror content into the story. And if that sounds like a typically 1980s horror movie kind of plot, well that’s fine because the film is set in 1982 which, as most genre enthusiasts will tell you, was a really good year for movie releases at the cinema. Some of which flopped on their original releases but have now paid dividends (and had sequels ands reboots) as they finally reached their audiences in the ensuing decade. So, yeah, great genre movies such as John Carpenter’s The Thing (reviewed by me here) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here) all get more than one shout out and so, in terms of running the checklist, it’s the perfect movie for people of my age and a little older. However, one of the bigger influences on this (I suspect) put the dampeners on it for me... along with some other things.

So Test Screening tells the story of four friends played by Chloë Kerwin, Drew Scheid, Rain Spencer and Johnny Berchtold, three of whom go to the test screening of a new movie in their home town. A town which has been cut off from the rest of the world by the government, via the only bridge in and out of it, under the guise of road repairs. Now, Kerwin’s character Penny, who is in love with Spencer’s character Mia, doesn’t go because her priest father won’t let her attend an unrated movie they know nothing about. But the others go... and like the rest of the people there, fall under the thrall of some bizarre test signals which changes their DNA and turns them into far sinister beings... apart from Drew Scheid’s Reels (the local projectionist), who has an epileptic fit triggered by the screening and survives the experience unaffected by ‘the sinister wave’. Before long, the town is being taken over almost body-snatcher style and it’s up to Penny and Reels to try and find a solution to the problem or, you know, even just escape from both the results of this experiment and the government agents who are running it.

And... it’s got a strong first half an hour, I reckon. One of the things that surprised me about it is that it takes itself very seriously and so the various characters and their families are really well built up as believable entities. It’s very slow paced in this way and it certainly takes time to do the things a lot of other films wouldn’t. Penny is especially well drawn and I have to say that Chloë Kerwin’s performance is easily the best thing about this movie. Well, that and the pulsing, electronic scoring which is deliberately evocative of those early John Carpenter films.

Alas, once things do start happening it falls quite quickly into the ‘seen it all before and can easily predict the final shot of the movie’ category. Now, sometimes that kind of element can be done quite well and works in spite of the familiarity with the content but, in this case for me (and possibly some other people... I’ve not seen this many walk outs at a FrightFest screening before), it just got fairly dull after what was an especially good set up. I think the problem for me was that this film was so obviously influenced by Brian Yuzna’s 1989 movie Society, which I saw back in the day and found equally dull and unoriginal (perhaps because it wasn’t on the level of the gloopy horror paperbacks we were all reading in the 70s and 80s) and so this particular influence really didn’t hit the mark for me. And, yeah, that final shot/reveal at the end of the movie is surely something any genre fan will be able to predict before it happens so... not such a great denouement either, I reckon.

That being said, Test Screening is well acted by pretty much everyone in it and it’s competently and professionally put together. It could easily play well with a bunch of similar horrors on a themed all nighter, I think.. and hold its head up high doing so. I suspect it’s just me (and possibly some walk out people) who found it a little on the dull side and  had a slightly harder time with it. So it wil be interesting to see if this gets a cinema release (and physical media release, for that matter) at some point soon. I hope it does well because the director can obviously handle himself well.

The Seed

Be Seeding You

The Seed
UK 2021
Directed by Sam Walker
Hardman Pictures

Warning: Some spoilerage occurs.

Okay, so this might be a short review because I’m really torn as to how I feel about The Seed, truth be told. This is definitely a modern day B-movie and it feels like something Norman J. Warren might have directed back in the 1970s, in that it’s low budget and contained in a very small set of environments and with a very small cast (six in total, although it’s only the three leads acting alongside a special effect for the most part). It wears a few influences on its sleeve and so the film feels a little like an amalgam of movies the director may (or may not) have seen and been swayed by at some point, it has to be said.

And usually that’s enough to get me hooked and on board with a movie. After all, it’s nicely lensed with some bright colours and some nice use of vertical and horizontal architectural details, used to split the frame up into nice compositions, for some of the scenes. But it just wasn’t enough to pull it up and make it a great movie I could recommend to my friends. I think one of the reasons for this is because the film may be too reminiscent of the plots and budgets of a bygone era of cheap horror cinema but, it’s shot from a very contemporary viewpoint and so any nostalgia value, which is part and parcel of what makes those movies great to watch now, is not in evidence. Of course, if I was watching this thirty years from now and picking up on the ‘classic 2020s feel of the film’, I’d probably fall in love with this one but, yeah, something just feels off about it. Another reason I had trouble with this is because of the three lead protagonist/antagonists in the film, played by Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge and Sophie Vavasseur... who were mostly unlikeable.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the actresses, they’re all fine. It’s more about the characters and how they’re written. The film takes place in the Mojave desert and as it sets us up with shots of the exteriors and interiors of the house before any humans are even seen, we can hear the girls in voice over on the soundtrack long before we see them, as various static shots of the house which plays host to 95% of the movie are set up to give the audience some idea of the layout (it’s actually a little like the house which features in Revenge, which I reviewed here). The three girls are staying at one of their father’s luxury houses in the middle of nowhere, to have a break from city life and watch a meteor shower which is due to fall from the sky that night. The trouble is, they’re all pretty much airheads in terms of the way their characters are written and it’s like each one is just a little more stupid than the next.

Also, one of them who is a model, has a vlog so she’s constantly recording on her phone (until the ‘meteor shower’ knocks out all the cell phones) and it’s pretty much a thinly disguised plot element to fill the audience in on what’s happening and shorthand the dynamics of the characters. But they did not have my sympathy throughout the film and, when a little Gamera-looking alien turns up and they try to get rid of it before, eventually, in the case of two of the girls, it takes over their minds and violates their bodies... I honestly didn’t care whether this little alien succeeded in putting stage one of his world conquering plans into action or not.

The film starts to get vaguely sexual in a modern Hollywood way, in terms of not actually showing much flesh while almost harkening back, stylistically, to something like The Man Who Fell To Earth in these particular sequences, where something that looks like a mixture of red intestines and canvass merges and covers the girls in a writhy, sexual way, impregnating them with... yeah, you guessed it... ‘its seed’, with lots of little embryos waiting to burst forth after a very short labour. It feels quite surreal in these sections (and, talking of the surreal, when the creature is swaddled in clothes, it certainly recalls the baby from Eraserhead and, I would guess that’s quite deliberate) and, it’s competently done but, yeah, the film seems a little like a one trick pony and, after a while and one hallucinatory (in the aliens’ sex head space) dream sequence too far... it’s just a little repetitive by a point in the movie where I couldn’t care less if any of the human characters lived or died in this.

So, yeah, I was unimpressed with the film as something either surprising or at least engaging on a story level... but I was impressed with how the whole thing had been put together and, although it’s obviously low budget, The Seed doesn’t ever really look cheap and it certainly puts its ideas up on the screen in an easily translatable and competent manner. Looking at the IMDB, I discovered that this is the writer/director’s first feature length movie and, honestly, this shows a huge amount of potential and I believe, if this guy is allowed to make more movies, he’ll find his voice and really start delivering a notable body of work. It just doesn’t feel like he’s quite there yet and, I just hope this film doesn’t do badly and that he gets to work on some more stuff. For all its post-modernistic referencing, it does feel like its trying to be somewhat original in its direction, even if it doesn’t always get there. So yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing some more of this director’s work in the future.

So, that’s me very done with The Seed but I would maybe urge people to take a look at it, especially those who aren’t usually watching sci-fi/horror genre crossovers because, I suspect, those less initiated into the various tropes may get a lot more out of it than those more accustomed to the genre. The film certainly wasn’t dull, though and, yeah, some people will probably like this one a lot more than I did, for sure.

Crimes Of The Future & Shorts

The Way
Of All Flesh

Transfer
Canada 1966
Directed by David Cronenberg

From The Drain
Canada 1967
Directed by David Cronenberg

Stereo
Canada 1969
Directed by David Cronenberg

Crimes Of The Future
Canada 1970
Directed by David Cronenberg
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers that come, hatching from within your body to assault your subconscious mind.

With the imminent release of David Cronenberg’s new feature film Crimes Of The Future, a film which has already had walk outs at Cannes due to its allegedly extreme nature (always a sign of a good movie and a great, unpaid advertisement for it), I though I would take a look at the director’s early short films, made before he was more famous for introducing his trademark body horror into the world (pretty much inventing the sub-genre, I suspect or, rather, putting it on the map as something belonging to a definable collective). Now I remember recording these off the old UK cable network Bravo when it showed them maybe 30 years ago but I started watching for a few minutes and then kinda turned off to them, not revisiting them for a proper look, despite my admiration for this legendary director. But I thought I’d look at them now as a good subject for a tie in review and, as luck would have it, I have a nice Blu Ray edition of these in a special, limited edition Blu Ray disc set of Videodrome, released by Arrow sometime over the last decade (it’s a very nice, out of print package... I believe the disc with these shorts on is still available* as a stand alone release direct from Arrow although, judging from the three figure sums it’s going for on Amazon, you might want to hurry onto Arrow’s web store sometime soon if you want these).

Looking at them now, while there are early twinges of DNA strands which connect them to the groundbreaking films which would immediately follow, I’d have to say that I was fairly disappointed with these films in that, I did catch myself nodding off and having to rewind a number of times over the course of watching these due to their failure to adequately stimulate my mind on a lazy, Sunday afternoon. Now, as much as I love the majority of Cronenberg’s output, there are always a few movies which I find are definitely miss rather than hit for me, such as Spider and Cosmopolis... and so I want to remind people that, as dull as I found these particular films, I am very much a supporter of Cronenberg’s work... it’s just that these ones mostly didn’t click with me.

Transfer and From The Drain are both very short, running at just under and over ten minutes respectively. There’s a strong shot of humour running through these two... as I guess there kind of is in the other two (to a lesser degree and, to be fair, I wasn’t laughing at any of them)... but ultimately these were less comedies to me (as they are classified) and more experimental works (which again, could also be said for the latter two, at least in terms of the techniques employed to present them). So Transfer is a dialogue in a snow covered part of Canada where a reclusive psychiatrist, self exiled to a place far from the rest of humanity, is tracked down by a naive patient. Said Doctor shuns the patient and the job, verbalising that “communication was the original sin” and letting the camera wander away from these two, who have been carrying out one of those continuing conversations at different locations pasted together by an aggressive edit, to fade to black just after the director’s voice can be heard yelling “Cut!”

From The Drain shows two fully clothed men sitting in an empty bathtub in, we are told, the Disabled Veteran’s Recreation Centre. One of them, when he finally decides to engage the other’s attempts at conversation, is frightened about the ‘tendrils’ that come out of the drain and urges the other to plug it up... obviously foreshadowing Cronenberg’s brilliant Shivers (aka The Parasite Murders aka They Came From Within and reviewed by me here). At the end, the nervous one is deliberately exposed to what the other claims is a non existent parasite and he is strangled. The shot where one of the two collects the other's shoes and throws them into a cupboard onto a pile of similar footwear, signals that this is not the first time this has happened. The innapropriate Bagpuss-like guitar soundtrack on this short overwhelmed me and drove me nuts, it has to be said.

Okay, so Stereo is shot in black and white on location in a truly interesting building... and completely set both within and, occasionally, just outside said building. On the print itself, the film is called Stereo - Tile 3B of CAEE Educational Mosaic. An interesting set of establishing shots of a helicopter landing and then depositing a passenger is done in total silence and, it turns out, the whole film is shot with no audio and added voice over narration... and this is true of Crimes Of The Future too, which seems closely related to this and maybe shot in the same location (except in colour). After a while, the first of a series of different but mostly clinical, science gobbledy gook couched voices tells us about the experiment in the building of eight patients who have brain surgery to promote a telepathic response in the subjects, which is then further propagated by emotional and sexual of bonding between two or three or all eight of them to increase the rate of thought flow and dependability in their mutual mind sharing. By the end of the film, three have killed themselves and one has drilled a hole in his head to let the voices out (all done off screen and narrated after the fact). This, of course, strongly foreshadow’s Cronenberg’s Scanners (reviewed here) both in terms of telekinetic people being nurtured in a clinical environment away from the rest of the world population and in terms of the back story of the Michael Ironside villain of Scanners having once resorted to trepanning due to similar conditions.

Crimes Of The Future is similarly set in a series of clinical institutions, starting off with lead voice over by Adrian Tripod, director of the House Of Skin and detailing various homosexual overtones as the male survivors of a world where women have mostly died out due to a curious virus called Rouge’s Malady (foreshadowing AIDS and which effects both sexes, although women are much more susceptible to it). There’s lots of foot fetish imagery in this and also, the film culminates in the broached impregnation of a five or six year old girl who probably hasn’t succumbed to the disease yet, as Tripod becomes involved in an organised gang of paedophiles attempting to save the future population of the planet in this manner. The last shot of the film where Tripod almost but, doesn’t quite make good on this, instead succumbing to something which causes a blue liquid to weep from one eye, is mostly confusing and doesn’t really help things. I don’t know if Cronenberg’s new film, which has a very strong female cast and so is obviously not a straight remake of this (and probably isn’t connected at all), shares any of the ideas explored in this one but the child molestation angle would certainly, in my book at least, explain the walk outs in Cannes (yeah, I could do without the implication of that kind of mental erosion in films I watch too, thanks)... but I’m still happy to give the new movie a go because, well, I kind of trust Cronenberg now (I maybe wouldn’t have, had I seen these movies when they were fresh and of their time, before I'd seen his fantastic early features, I suspect... so it’s a good job I didn’t).

Stereo (which I assume gets its title in a reference to two people synching their minds to each others’ frequency), to me, is definitely the stand out movie on this set and both that and Crimes Of The Future are just over an hour long. They both utilise slow, languid camera movements for the most part but Stereo will be the one that sticks in my mind. There’s a moment where Croneneberg, when one of his characters walks into a room, montages lots of quick fire cuts of each and every object in the room as a kind of mini exploration/assault on the minds eye in terms of what is there. It’s not made relevant why he does this and I suspect he was just experimenting with techniques but it’s an interesting thing I don’t’ remember seeing him do on any of his other films. There’s also a nice visual moment in Stereo where one of the baby’s dummies, which each subject is seemingly issued with, is visually compared in terms of the shape in profile to the Omega symbol found on the back of a pack of Tarot cards. It’s spelled out quite specifically by way of the visual comparison while not once referring to it in the narrative. Again, I don’t know the significance of the metaphor (if there is one) but, well, at least it was interesting.

And that’s me done with the early works of David Croneneberg, collectively as Transfer, From The Drain, Stereo and Crimes Of The Future... and I have to say that I am still very much in the Cronenberg camp but, yeah, I did find these early works a bit of a dull, hard watch, to tell the truth. Still, I’m very glad I saw them and also very glad that I got the limited Videodrome edition with these on extra discs... because now I can go and read the little hard bound booklet which comes as part of the set and which talks about these and the main feature. If you are a fan of the director and tend to grab everything he does, then you should probably try and track these down. If not, I would suggest your life may not be all that much richer for having seen them anyway.

*At time of writing this review.

Brand New Cherry Flavour

Once Kitten, Twice Shy

Brand New Cherry Flavour
Season 1 August 2021 - 8 episodes
Canada/USA

Warning: Very minor spoilers to give a flavour.

Okay, so Brand New Cherry Flavour is a series based on a novel of the same name by Todd Grimson. Once again, I have to forewarn you that I haven’t read the novel in question... yet, so I don’t know how good of an adaptation it is... I suspect there might have been some elements which were toned down for TV but that’s just a gut feeling.

The story set up is of main protagonist Lisa Nova, played here by the wonderful Rose Salazar... who also co-produced this show. It’s the early 1990s and she returns to Los Angeles to crash at her ex-boyfriends place while she tries to pitch her first feature film, based on the short movie she’s just made of horrific things going on in the woods. Erik Lange plays film producer Lou, who buys her movie, with her agreeing to that on the condition she gets to direct it. However, after she refuses to let Lou sleaze his way into her panties as part of the deal, he steals her movie and employs another person to direct. Lisa is so infuriated that she hires the services of a local witch, Boro, played by Catherine Keener, to put a curse on him to ‘set his life on fire’ and get her movie back. However, there’s more to things than meets the eye and it’s a long and twisted road until the end game is in sight.

And it’s a fairly okay TV show to be honest. It’s not as weird, dark or sexy as I’d been informed when I got interested in it but it is fairly entertaining. There are a lot of different ingredients to the show which includes the main witch, a faceless lady who may or may not be related to someone in Lisa’s past, the bitter ‘actress with one eye’ who starred in the original short, more traditional zombies, hired assassins, a trail of bloody corpses, sex spells, blood spells and a heck of a lot of vomiting up kittens... Lisa’s price for Boro’s services.

However, with all these elements which go into the show, it manages to not go through any tonal shifts throughout the eight episodes and that’s a double edged sword. It’s great that the show is so focused but the story arc gets a little over explored by about episode five and, although Salazar and a whole bunch of other actors... such as Jeff Ward and Siena Werber... are really great in this, it does get a bit monotone on occasion. Not to say it gets dull but, yeah, the odd tonal shift or two might well have been a way of ramping it up a little towards the end, to be honest.

However, coupled with the great acting are some good special effects (there’s a fair amount of blood and gore on display here), some nice shot designs with some bright washes of Mario Bava style lightning on occasion (especially in the early episodes) and a fair few surprises here and there. I especially liked episode four, which delves deeply into the world of David Cronenberg at one point, even pushing the sexuality in that one a little further than Cronenberg might have gotten away with in his day (there’s some fairly unusual fisting going on in a sex scene but I don’t want to say too much about why it’s unique here because it would be a spoiler) and, for me, this was the high point of the series. Although, on the down side, who the heck takes a bath wearing their knickers?

There’s some great dialogue in here too. I didn’t think of this thing as a horror show to begin with but, after I’d watched the first six episodes, I was describing the plot to somebody and, yeah, they’re right, it absolutely is part of the horror genre. There’s even a scene where you can glimpse George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead playing on a TV set in the corner of a room. And there are also some very fan pleasing genre references such as, when Lisa is trying to coax a good performance out of her lead actress when making the short (something we see later in flashback), telling her, “I need you full on Isabelle Adjani Possession level!”... which is going to bring smiles to a lot of faces of people who remember the ‘milk scene’ from that movie, I suspect. And, also, there are some unusual, epically quotable lines scattered throughout the show such as, “That bitch just puked a cat!”

The series is actually left a little open ended, in a way, although I’m not sure you’d really want to see a sequel to this and I can’t believe there’s a heck of a lot of the book left to adapt, to be honest. That being said, I would be curious as to seeing what the few surviving characters get up to next. There’s also the odd plot point left unresolved which, I suspect, might well have been something shot (and it’s too late to work it in now even if it was, because the specific plot point I’m thinking of had an expiry date in terms of the continuing mortality of one of the characters) but I guess that’s one we’re not going to see cleared up anytime soon. Either way, Brand New Cherry Flavour, while not as ‘out there’ as I’d been set up to expect, is still a fun watch and Rose Salazar, who I’d loved in Alita: Battle Angel (reviewed here) is definitely someone to keep an eye on. This one is worth checking out for Keener’s sense of Baba Yaga too, for sure.

Scanners

 
Head Pops
And Boom Tricks

Scanners
Canada 1981 Directed by David Cronenberg
Second Sight Blu Ray Zone B

The last and only time I saw Scanners prior to now I would have been about 16, a couple of years past its cinema release date, as a rented VHS cassette from my local off licence (the off licence is still there but... alas... they no longer rent movies). I remember liking it at the time (well, who doesn’t like Cronenberg?) but I remember being a little disappointed in the gore quotient, which I was more into as a kid as opposed to nowadays, I guess. I’ve been meaning to re-watch this for years though because, well, Cronenberg has been a consistently great director throughout his career and I always felt that when I first watched this, I wasn’t looking at the thing properly and appreciating it as much as I should.

Cronenberg himself cites this as one of his most chaotic and problematic films to make because it was rushed into production without a finished script, which he would have to write some of it each morning before trying to deal with whatever set or location they were using etc. I have to say that, looking at this movie now, I would never have known there were any production troubles. It’s an astonishingly good psychokinetic thriller with, despite the year of its release, a real 1970s vibe to it which groups it, in my mind, with the most popular of his earlier works Shivers (reviewed here), Rabid (reviewed here) and The Brood. I’d remembered hardly any of this film when I sat down to watch it but, right from the opening scene, I was drawn right in.

The film starts with the main protagonist, Cameron Vale (played by Stephen Lack) who is depicted as a down and out drifter, entering a mall and eating an absent customer’s food. We see him listening in on an old lady’s thoughts and, before he can control himself, his mind has entered hers and she’s taking a lot of internal damage and having a fit while he is trying to ‘turn off’ his powers, accidentally triggered by her negative thoughts. However, two men who have been watching him, shoot him with a tranquilizing dart and then give chase when he runs. The chase through the mall is quite well done and, though it’s vigorously edited, it’s got some nice, fluid camera motion in it and it feels quite coherent.

When Cameron awakens he is befriended by Dr. Paul Ruth (played by Number Six himself, Patrick McGoohan) who works for a company called CONSEC and who is a specialist in people with powerful psychokinetic abilities such as those possessed by Cameron. These people, in this movie, are called Scanners.

Then comes the films first big and, possibly, most spectacular set piece. When CONSEC try to unveil the existence of Scanners to the public in a live demonstration of mind reading, the subject they pick on from the audience of executives, Darryl Revok (played by everybody’s favourite 1980s US American movie villain Michael Ironside) volunteers and lets the Scanner in the room read him. However, he pushes back with his own, very powerful scanning ability and causes the other man’s head to explode in front of the audience in what, to me, is still an iconic piece of 1980s gory imagery (I think it probably started a bit of a trend). Turns out Revok is a psychic assassin who is trying to recruit Scanners and build a powerful army to, more or less, take over the world (wouldn’t you know it?).

From here on, Cameron is given the job of trying to infiltrate this section of recruited Scanners to find out what’s really going on and kill Revok. He becomes involved, to the extent that anyone in an early Cronenberg film becomes involved with anyone, with another ‘outsider’ Scanner who is at the peripheral of this group called Kim Obrist (played by Jennifer O'Neill, who genre fans might remember from Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic aka Seven Notes In Noir). From here on it’s all thriller shenanigans as various people are ‘scanned up good’ and a bunch of dead bodies is left in Revok’s wake as Cameron tries to both get close to him and also find out who the mysterious traitor is at the heart of CONSEC.

More revelations happen towards the end but it’s a thrilling ride and the usual, lovely Cronenberg’s eye for nicely designed compositions in interestingly lit shots certainly helps things along. For instance, when Dr. Ruth is showing Cameron a video of the young Revok, who has drilled a hole in his own head to let the pressure out... he carries the scar of this like a third eye throughout the film (which, I’m pretty sure is a deliberate reference to the third or inner eye)... there’s some wonderful blue lighting hitting both actors on the left hand side of their faces (or right hand, as we see it). Later on, when Cameron is infiltrating what he thinks is a rival chemical firm headed up by Revok, there’s a nice dirty, pale, yellow wash on some of the shots. There’s another great scene where Cameron gets out of a car near a forest but it’s taken from the other side of a spindly network of tree branches between the camera and the actor... which kind of gives another wash or webbed effect to the shot. It’s all good stuff and, like all Cronenberg films, is always visually interesting.

Another great thing about the film is the sound design, which is awesome and, it’s just as well because it needs to be. After all, for a lot of the time we’re looking at various people thinking at each other... connecting through each other’s nervous system rather than just the head, is how Dr. Ruth puts it. So you are looking at people pulling all sorts of strange and, frankly, orgasmic facial expressions at each other which really wouldn’t have looked out of place on the poster campaign for Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac movies. However, the sounds used on the soundtrack really make the shots work and you can really feel the implied power behind the intent of these moments.

Ditto for a young Howard Shore, who has stuck with writing music for Cronenberg’s movies right through to the present, starting with The Brood. He’s more famous for scores like The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit movies now, perhaps, but he’s worked on most (possibly all) of Cronenberg’s projects since The Brood and Scanners was only his third score. However, it’s like nothing else he’s done, really. A phenomenal, grinding, sometimes brooding, electronic bludgeon of a score which absolutely pushes the sound design and atonalism, too, in certain sections and helps alert the audience anytime something ‘Scannerish’ is about to happen. Decades ago, Silva Screen released a nice CD compilation of three of Cronenberg’s films which included just over 20 mins from this film but I suspect that’s not the full thing and it would be great to get a complete release of this score one day.

There’s some nice conceptual stuff going on with the film too. Computers (with their green screens and lines of code) were all the rage then and there’s a nice scene where Cameron goes into a phone box and scans his way into a computer system with his mind through the phone, as though he’s some kind of organic modem. The director uses some shots here which, to me, felt like they were inspired a little by the cinema of Dario Argento, as he moves the camera through a close up of a prop (probably built oversize and filmed normally, is my guess) for a few POV shots of the electronic insides of some of the equipment that Cameron is ‘mind hacking’ his way through. When things get a little explosive towards the end of this scene, there’s a nice shot of Cameron holding the telephone receiver which has begun to melt and liquify all over his hand like it’s an escaped convict from a Dali painting. There’s some really interesting stuff here.

My understanding is that the final, mental showdown filmed between Cameron and Revok was originally intended to be a lot more... ‘grand guignol’, shall we say... than just the vein popping, bleeding head with arterial spray and eyeball bursting that made it into the final cut and, this is possibly why it felt a little disappointing to me as a youngster... especially when you compare it to the famous poster painting of Michael Ironside having a full on body meltdown (which I used to pass every day on the way to school when it was released in UK cinemas). That being said, what he did leave in works well enough and I certainly didn’t feel cheated this time around.

The most important thing about Scanners, though, is that is absolutely entertaining and the chemistry between all the actors is very good. If you’re a fan of this kind of science fiction thriller (I’m not sure I’d fully go with it crossing over into the horror genre) then you will probably get a kick out of this one. I’d heartily recommend it to anyone who is into this kind of scientific pulp fiction. That being said, I’ve never seen either the two sequels to this movie, nor indeed the two spin off movies. My understanding is that Cronenberg had nothing to do with those other films but, still, now this movie has whet my appetite I think I’d like to see them so, hopefully I’ll have some reviews up for some or all of those within the next 12 months for you. We’ll see how it goes.

Rabid (2019)

Run, Rabid, Run

Rabid
2019 USA Directed by Jen and Sylvia Soska
World Premiere screening at FrightFest on Monday 26th August

Warning: Some very slight spoilerage here if you’ve not seen Cronenberg’s original.

Wow... just wow. Turns out that the last film I saw at FrightFest this year was also the one that took the cake and really rocked it. And I really wasn’t expecting that. I’d kind of only half appreciated the Soska Sisters’ movie I’d seen prior to this, American Mary (reviewed by me here). I wasn’t all that keen on it and a quick reread of my old review makes me come across as somewhat jaded. So I was quite worried about this film for a couple of reasons.

One thing was the trailer... which really does nothing for me and, I think, almost undersells just how remarkably good this new incarnation inspired by David Cronenberg’s classic (which I recently reviewed here) actually is. I honestly wasn’t sure about shelling out for a ticket for this one on the strength of that but then I remembered the exclusive footage I’d seen from this presented at last year’s Halloween Edition of FrightFest and thinking it was pretty great. And then, of course, I found out The Banana Splits Movie was playing before this and I had to see that (my review of that one is here) and so I figured, what the heck, I’m going to see this new version of Rabid, too.

And I’m so glad I did because, right from the opening shot, the Soska Sisters suckered me into accepting their new take on this even while I was aware of the manipulation tactics they were lovingly employing to make sure the Cronenberg fans were kept on board and happy with what they were doing here. And I mean quite literally the opening shot, which starts off with a leather jacket clad girl standing by her motorcycle... just as Marilyn Chambers did in the original, before panning down and away to reveal that it’s actually a billboard advertisement (shame it wasn’t an ad for Ivory Snow, I guess). We see the main protagonist/antagonist of this movie, Rose (played by Laura Vandervoort) standing by her own modest scooter and looking up at the advertisement before riding off to her job as a staff, fashion designer for a conceited fashion superstar called Gunter (played by Mackenzie Gray).

As she approaches her work area we hear Gunter giving a speech and, again, I suspect this is all about the Soska Sisters wanting to make the Croneneberg fans feel comfortable because he’s talking about ways of remaking oneself... while it also taps nicely into both the body horror theme of the story and the idea of his upcoming ‘Schadenfreude Collection’. So, yeah, it was overt but by this point the idea of being open to a remake was slowly settling in with me. I’m pretty hit and miss on remakes myself... everybody loves the third version of The Maltese Falcon with Bogart, for example but, if you are going to be remaking stuff like Ringu then you’d better watch out, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, over the next few scenes the characters such as Rose’s best friend and model Chelsea (played here by Hanneke Talbot) and the potential boyfriend Dominic (played by Stephen Huszar) are introduced and Rose’s back story is also fleshed out a little before we get into the main first incident which sparks all that follows, which people who know the original will remember is a motorcycle accident and there is a variant of that here. The nice thing about this was that the directors appear in a few cameo scenes at a party and, due to something they are saying in a toilet cubicle, overheard by Rose, they kinda become the catalyst of all that is to follow because Rose is not left in a stable mindset after this scene.

So after this, things run pretty similarly to the original movie in terms of the main plot focus... the accident happens and a new form of living skin graft is applied to what is left of Rose’s grizzly, hollowed out face and torso. And after things take their course we have the craving for blood, spells of amnesia and, of course, the attacks which begin and, as in the original, escalate on their own independently of Rose who is the carrier of a viral, “don’t mess with me big time” version of rabies. And all I will say as to what Rose becomes in this is... well, you remember those little armpit stingers in the original? I was wondering if the directors would run with that concept here or do their own thing as a replacement and, without getting into spoilers, all I am saying is that this film doesn’t do anything small. And I’ll  leave that for you to discover.

In terms of how the film plays.... well it’s just beautiful. Vibrant, sometimes almost primary colours and shot set ups with a Bavaesque quality to them which eschew some of the more coldly clinical moments of Cronenbergism while simultaneously enhancing the content of key scenes where a sequence might be washed in a dominant green or red playing in contrast to the preceding scene.

Added to this you’ve got a lot of strong performances in here and in terms of the story and dialogue... well it mostly does the same kinda thing but it reaches its end goals in a way which, I think, is more in tune to the way stories are explored and presented now as opposed to, obviously, the late 1970s. Which is absolutely right for this because... who wants to see a so called remake when it just does exactly the same thing as the original, which is its own entity entirely? This one tries to take the essence of Cronenberg’s ideas but makes it more direct and takes its time more in certain areas and rushes through other bits which don’t seem so important in this vision of the tale. Again, it feels like this was the right way to do this and I think this new version is different enough that it would make for a good cinematic double bill with the first version playing right before it.

And, as I said earlier, this one shouldn’t alienate those who are big Croneneberg fans. There are a lot of visual and textual references to his world scattered throughout. For instance, the surgical gowns in the operating room presided over by... ahem... Dr. William Burroughs (played by Ted Atherton) are a deliberate echo of the surgical gowns worn by Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers... as are the names of the characters played by the Soska Sisters in this, Bev and Ellie. And there are quite a few little nods in this to keep enthusiasts for the work of Mr. C on their toes, such as a shop Santa Claus being gunned down, just like in the original (but for slightly different reasons). One which I’m not 100% sure was deliberate or just me imagining things, is when Dr. Burrough’s wife turns up near the end of the film. I’m skirting around specifics here because of spoilers but the visual look of some of the scenes she is in reminded me somewhat of a reveal right at the end of The Brood. Like I said, though, I’m not sure if that was on purpose or just me getting too near to my bedtime.

Oh... and Claude Foisy’s score works a charm here and is certainly a lot better than the needle dropped tracks on the original Rabid. It’s a shame that this thing isn’t on a CD because I would rush out and buy it (or, you know, my fingers would rush to the internet to grab it) and I’d similarly do the same thing with his score to Pontypool (reviewed here) if it was around on physical media. It’s one of those scores which has moments of great beauty interspersed with an almost industrial grating, ragged style of musical colour and it’s really much more appropriate to this film than what was used in Cronenberg’s original.

If I had one criticism of this version I’d say the ending, which is quite a bit different from the 1977 one, due to the fact that by this point the character of Rose is now quite self aware of what she has become, maybe missed the best part to just stop at. There was a moment near the end where she does something and I thought... “Yes. Good ending! This is precisely what she should do here.” Alas, the scene has a follow up where things are somewhat compromised in terms of how Rose is left and I felt it diluted things a little but, honestly, it’s a very minor criticism of what I shall be proclaiming to people is the Soska’s great masterpiece (with many more to follow, I’m sure) and I can kinda see why this particular ending would also have been a desirable one. It'll grow on me.

Okay... I think I’m drying up on things to say about this because I really need to see it again and study it properly for a few more hits and, alas, it doesn’t come out on Blu Ray here until October... although I think this would have done well as a full cinema release over here, for sure. This is one of the most beautiful looking horror movies made in the last few years and it doesn’t skimp on the gore here either... which is kind of a bonus when it’s done as well as this. Whether you are familiar with the wonderful original version of Rabid or not, this new film deserves your attention. I was, as you can probably tell by now, really bowled over by the Soska Sisters' movie here (who did their Q&A wearing the same dresses as they wear in the film) and I really can’t wait to see where they are going next. Guess it’s about time I ordered their first movie to have a look at on the strength of this one. I’ll try and get that one watched and reviewed sometime next year. Check out Rabid though because... you know... it’s kind of sensational and everything I didn’t think it could be.

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.

Shivers

Parasite Lost

Shivers
aka The Parasite Murders
aka They Came From Within
Canada 1975
Directed by David Cronenberg
Arrow Blu Ray Zone 2

I’ve been meaning to re-watch some of the old Cronenberg classics for some time now and have, over the last few years, bought some shiny new Blu Ray restorations to do just that. The reason I’m watching Shivers now is because I’ve got tickets to the premiere of the Soskia Sisters remake of Rabid and I wanted to watch the original again before seeing the new one. However, since I always get Shivers and Rabid confused in my mind, I wanted to refamiliarise myself with Shivers first... especially since it comes directly before Rabid in terms of when it was made.

Looking at this now, it’s strange to try and process the reaction to this movie when it was first released in Canada. There was a bit of a scandal about this being made with funding from the taxpayers and most people seemed to condemn this film as being a terrible movie. I’ve never thought it was a terrible movie, to be honest. I always kind of quite liked it although, it has to be said, some of the acting may be a bit questionable... I’ll get back to that in a minute.

The film’s opening credits sequence takes the form of a slideshow advertisement, where a voice tells us of all the promise of buying an apartment in the new, modern Starliner Apartment Block which houses a community of people on Starliner Island. It introduces us to the fact that the people who live in the block have their own shops and facilities like an indoor swimming pool (which plays prominently in the last act of the film) and it’s a nice idea for Cronenberg to give the audience a kind of a map to the environment in which the film they are about to watch will take place.

We then have a sequence with a new couple visiting the apartment block for the first time to get a sales tour but this is intercut with the film’s first scene of ‘ body horror’ running simultaneously with their dialogue with the guy in charge of the buildings. A man... a doctor/research scientist as it turns out... is trying to stop a schoolgirl from leaving his apartment, violently and eventually manages to strangle her. He then tapes up her mouth... to stop something we’ll see later from leaving her body and then puts her down on a table, slices open her stomach with a scalpel and then pours acid into the open cavity. After he’s done this he slices his own throat open with a scalpel and dies.

A lot of the early part of the film also concentrates on Nicholas, played by Allan Kolman, who is very sick with constant, surprise stomach cramps and who is trying to just survive his day. His wife Janine, played by Susan Petrie, is worried about him so she goes to see the doctor who has a practice in the Starliner apartment block. Here we meet the two people who act, for the most part of the movie, as the real protagonists of the film... Doctor Roger St. Luc, played by Paul Hampton and Nurse Forsythe, played by the lovely Lynn Lowry, with whom he is romantically involved. He promises to stop by and have a look at Janine’s husband later that evening but, as he gets more patients exhibiting similar symptoms... things moving around inside them and pushing on the skin... it’s an appointment he never gets to make. 

As he gets deeper into his day, Roger finds that the doctor who killed himself has been experimenting on people under the guise of an organisation who are breeding parasitic slug thingies to replace failing human organs like kidneys. However, as his fellow researcher soon finds out and then reveals to Roger, he was actually on a mad scientist trip to create a parasite that's “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy.” And that’s exactly what the parasites do... get inside people and then ‘sexy them up’ so that they attack other people and pass more sluggy looking parasites on to them...  transforming them into a growing number of infected, sexed up, somewhat aggressive and ultimately doomed human beings. So there’s your plot set up and the rest of the film is about Roger and his nurse trying to get out of the apartment complex and warn the rest of the world before becoming infected themselves. People who are familiar with the work of David Cronenberg will know him as one of the main geniuses of the modern horror scene, not to mention the man who... well he didn’t exactly invent but certainly he popularised the sub-genre of ‘body horror’ with films like this, Rabid, Scanners, The Brood, Videodrome, the remake of The Fly, eXistenZ and probably a few others I’m forgetting. So if you’re familiar with the inevitability of the situations he creates in these films, which might seem to some as pessimistic and bleak in their outlook, then you can probably guess how this all ends.

Meanwhile, Nicholas has been vomiting up parasites which escape into the complex and attack other people, including the most famous member of the cast, to genre fans at least, Barbara Steele as Janine’s friend Betts. Now let me say something about the almost amateurish acting vibe coming from some of the cast. I think the real problem here... at least in how the film may have been perceived by some at the time... is in the somewhat lacklustre and minimalistic performance by Allan Kolman as Nicholas. However, you have to remember that right from the outset, this character has several parasites swimming around in his body affecting the way he acts and talks so, I suspect, this somewhat less than engaging performance is a result of him really nailing the part and giving Cronenberg exactly what he wanted, rather than anything lacking in his performance skills. That’s my guess anyway since the actor seems to have gone on to a successful career in small roles in film and television over the years.

Let’s talk about Barbara Steele for a moment here too. This iconic actress from such fan favourites as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Roger Corman’s Pit And The Pendulum, Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, Federico Fellini’s Eight And A Half, Michael Reeves’ The She Beast plus The Curse Of The Crimson Alter, Nightmare Castle and The Long Hair Of Death, amongst many others, has a nude scene here which is both supposed to be an obvious ‘exploitation’ moment but which also manages to not show any of Steele’s sexualised body parts such as breasts or backside. It’s a scene where Steele is attacked by a parasite in the bath and it swims into her vagina (is the implication) but there’s no real nudity on display in any overt way here. Which is odd considering there’s a scene with Steele and Susan Petrie naked and doing the back stroke in the pool towards the end of the movie.

However, the reason I’m highlighting this scene is not to complain about it but to show how Cronenberg, who clearly wants us to get a ‘sex vibe’ from the sequence, manages to give us a ‘sexual surrogate’ to create the illusion in the audience's head that they are watching a proper nude scene. It’s simply done by just crosscutting this scene constantly with a sequence in which Doctor St. Luc is on his phone talking to someone but, as he talks, he watches (as do we) his nurse lover strip down out of her uniform to finish up for the day... under which she is not wearing any underwear of course. So, simply but brilliantly, the director manages to add the sexualised thrill missing from the simultaneous scene of Steele’s bathtime encounter... which ends really strongly with a close up shot of her walking bare foot on broken glass long before Bruce Willis did exactly the same thing in Die Hard... while not showing anything of Steele herself.

As a quick shout out to the lack of underwear on the nurse, I will say that, for a film about a sexual parasite, there is very little nudity in the movie as a whole but there is a definitive lack of underwear in it. None of the female characters seem to have ever heard of a bra (maybe people in Canada don’t wear them) and so everyone’s nipples seem to be covered but fairly prominent throughout... which I’m not going to complain about either. That Susan Petrie is a dish, though. Sorry, I just had to make that pun here or I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

There are some nice shot compositions in this movie too... which you kinda expect from Cronenberg these days, it has to be said. Especially in some of the few, rare scenes shot externally to the apartment block at night. There’s a lovely shot of actor Joe Silver, for example, leaving a big office block via the front entrance and the whole atrium area is lit up in subdued greens right in the centre of the frame as he leaves and walks towards camera, with the rest of the shot around that atrium all very dark (practically pitch black) to highlight the action... very nice. It’s somewhat echoed in a similar shot in Rabid but it’s much more striking here.

Looking at the film now, it doesn’t seem that much dated but seems to give off that 1970s vibe of laid back, voyeuristic naturalism (for want of a better term) which puts it as a spiritual cousin to other contemporary movies such as Brian De Palma’s Sisters (reviewed by me here) or Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets. Which is good company to be in, as far as I’m concerned. There are a few silly mistakes in the movie too, it has to be said but my biggest criticism would be the scene where Doctor St. Luc rescues his girlfriend by repeatedly shooting the guy who is trying to rape and ‘parasite her up’ in the car on top of her. Honestly people, a doctor should know that the human body is usually not resistant enough to bullets that said projectiles at that close range would as likely travel through the body and into the person below. However, James Bond makes a similar mistake in Thunderball (reviewed here), if memory serves, so I’ll just let that one pass for now.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about Shivers at the moment. Some of the music is nicely effective in some sequences but I’m pretty sure it’s all been needle-dropped in from a music library from varying, contributing composers so it’s not likely at present that I can find any of them on CD. They are, for the most part, well utilised and all in all help contribute to some of the stronger performances in the film and give the whole bunch of viral shenanigans a certain sense of menace and inevitability. Not my favourite of Cronenberg’s oeuvre but certainly one of his best and most fondly remembered (as much as I mix it up with his next film). Definitely a recommendation from me, especially if you’re not familiar with this director’s work and aren’t worried about the lack of visual sophistication in some of the effects shots. This is a film I’ll continue to come back to when I can.

Slugs

From Mollusc To Dawn

Slugs
Spain/USA 1988
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B
Ha! This movie, I’ll warn you up front, is quite delightfully terrible... in all the right places.

I’ve wanted this one since hearing of its existence a few months ago when Arrow Films said they were putting a super duper restored print onto Blu Ray. Now, to be fair, it wouldn’t really take much more incentive than the title and the promise of a movie about killer slugs to ensure I watched this anyway but... as soon as I'd heard the title I did a little quick research and realised that this is kind of like watching an old friend, in some ways...

Back in the early 1980s I, like many other kids the same age as me in their early teens, started reading horror novels. There were plenty of them about and the first author I tried was Stephen King, who I liked a great deal (although his first novel, Carrie, never did anything for me for some reason... I much preferred the movie version of that one). Of course, after you’ve tried King, things get to be a slippery slope and you go onto James Herbert where you suddenly find, if you’re at that age of around 12-14 years when this kind of thing starts to be appealing, that the mixture of full-on graphic sex and bloody carnage is a heady cocktail too powerful to resist. Soon you start trying all the trashiest horror novels you can find that have that lethal combination of flesh sliding against flesh followed by flesh mutilated by some unspeakable horror and, like I said, the bookshops of Great Britain were full of this kind of stuff and all the kids at school would be reading things by these kinds of authors.

I got through a load of books by these kinds of trashy (and often fun) horror writers... I might mention authors like John Halkin or Guy N. Smith and the kinds of books they were churning out about killer jellyfish or giant crabs etc. One such author, producing some of the more well written pulps of the late 1970s/early 1980s horror boom, was Shaun Hutson. I remember reading one of his I liked at the time called Erebus and he was also the writer of a novel called Slugs (which later spawned a sequel, Breeding Ground). I hadn’t realised, until Arrow made their announcement about releasing this title, that there had been a movie adaptation of the first novel as a co-production between Spain and the US... which updated the action from the very ‘English England’ of the novel to America.

My first reaction was... why? My second reaction was... wow, I’ve got to see this one.

And so here I am with a first watch of Slugs and, as I said before... it’s really terrible.

Now, had I seen this movie back at the time of its release (and I suspect that over here it would have been a straight to video, pan and scan job), I would have condemned it for being utter trash and would have consigned it to video hell. However, looking back at it now with the benefit of a slightly rose tinted nostalgia for the kind of movies being made and released by companies like, in this case, New World pictures, it becomes a charming, hilarious and somewhat affectionate viewing experience, for the most part.

The acting is awful and, it has to be said, the screenplay isn’t doing the performers any favours either. Neither is the score in some sequences, credited to someone called Tim Souster but credited only as Music Department for this particular film in his IMDB listing. Maybe that’s because, although there is some nicely put together, Herrmannesque scoring for the majority of the scenes, there are some ‘heroic themes’ which are completely inappropriate to the on screen action and they just popped me out of the film in some truly ‘WTF?’ moments. Which, once you have got over the shock, also contributes to the maniacal enjoyment to a certain extent, it has to be said.

However, there are some quite good practical special effects in this one, to be sure. I thought the infamous ‘slugs bursting out from a guy’s eye sockets’ effect was looking pretty good and a scene where a slug takes a small bite out of the main male protagonist’s finger looked pretty amazing. I don’t know if this was done with stop motion effects or what. I don’t think CGI would have been a viable option back then.

So what did I learn from this movie?

Well, for one thing I learned that if you eat some bits of a slug that’s accidentally gotten into your lettuce leaves, they are going to come to life inside you and eventually burst our of your head in a fairly ostentatious fashion.

Another thing I learned was something which I remember being bizarrely pushed a lot in pulpy novels and horror movies of the 1980s... if you are going to have sex with someone and it’s your wife or long term partner then that’s okay. If, however, you are either having an affair or, in the case of this movie, are a teenage couple seeing each other illicitly behind your parents backs and then having sex... you’d better watch out. In this kind of movie, nature will always find some way to punish you by having some kind of monster or mutation dispose of you in some kind of gory but completely ludicrous manner, once you have your clothes off. And, seriously, this movie is about a bunch of slow moving slugs, after all. If you fall down amongst them... don’t stay down while they eat your eyeballs out and crawl over your bosom or unleashed genitalia like they do here, surely? How is this even possible to be a credible kind of death? It’s like these people just want to be slug fodder. Can someone go and get the condiments already?

And, of course, another valuable lesson which is a familiar one with movies of this ilk also crops up again in this story. That being... if you still have three heroes left at the end trying to kill the menacing molluscs of the title then, no matter how much of a nice guy or a family man any of them are, one of them is still going to get gorily eaten by the title creatures... who in the case of this film also turn out to be strong swimmers, somehow.

And there you have it. Slugs sounds like a terrible movie and it is. The performances are varied, ranging from just this side of acceptable to truly terrible and the pacing in some scenes is... well I’d have to say it’s quite sluggish in some places. :-) However, despite all this, I was grinning from ear to ear as I watched this shockingly stupid and therefore immensely entertaining movie and it’s definitely one I’ll be recommending to my friends. Potentially a star attraction for an ‘alcohol and a few movies’ night with your friends, as far as I’m concerned. As usual, Arrow do an absolutely brilliant job with the crisp, flawless transfer and it comes with the usual spate of cool extras which sets them apart from quite a few of the other boutique home video labels based in the UK at the moment. If you’re not looking for high art then... check out this movie and see how long it takes you to groan or laugh. Definitely worth a watch.