Rabid

Canada

1977

91 Min

Color

English

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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CAST Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silver, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman, Roger Periard, Lynne Deragon

A critically-injured woman, victim of a motorcycle accident, is taken to the plastic surgery clinic of Doctor Dan Keloid, where some of her intact tissue is treated to become “morphogenetically neutral”. The tissue is grafted to fire-damaged areas of her body in the hope that it will differentiate and replace the damaged skin and organs. The woman’s body unexpectedly accepts the transplants, developing an orifice under an armpit, within which hides a phallic stinger. She uses it to feed on the blood of other people and afterwards erasing their memories of the incident. It soon is apparent that her every victim transforms into a rabid zombie whose bite spreads the disease. This eventually causes the city to fall into chaos before the outbreak can be contained.

Director

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father was a journalist, and his mother was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early age (he wrote and published eerie short stories, thus following his father’s path) and for music (playing classical guitar until he was 12), Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Literature after switching from the science department. He reached the cult status of horror-meister with the gore-filled, modern-vampire variations of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), following an experimental apprenticeship in independent filmmaking and in Canadian television programs.

Cronenberg gained popularity with the head-exploding, telepathy-based Scanners (1981) after the release of the much underrated, controversial, and autobiographical The Brood (1979). Cronenberg become a sort of a mass media guru with Videodrome (1983), a shocking investigation of the hazards of reality-morphing television and a prophetic critique of contemporary aesthetics. The issues of tech-induced mutation of the human body and topics of the prominent dichotomy between body and mind were back again in The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), both bright examples of a personal filmmaking identity, even if both films are based on mass-entertainment materials: the first being a rendition of a Stephen King best-seller, the latter a remake of famous American horror movie.

With Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), the Canadian director, no more a mere genre movie-maker but a fully realized auteur, got the acclaim of international critics. Such profound statements on modern humanity and ever-changing society are prominent in the provocative Crash (1996) and in the virtual reality essay of eXistenZ (1999), both of which well fared at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals. In the last two filmic projects Spider (2002) and A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg avoids expressing his teratologic and oniric expressionism in favour of a more psycological exploration of human contradictions and idiosyncrasies. –IMDb

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Matthew Martens

21Dec12

Let the dread truth be told: morphogenetic neutrality is a lie! Of course, the news has come too late, the plague's work is complete, and putting Marilyn Chambers out with the trash is a merely symbolic gesture. Connections among putative self-improvement through science, sexual license, and the accidental unleashing of dark forces "from within," so typical of early Cronenberg, are drawn here with frothing ferocity.

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