Rabid

REVIEW
TLA Guide: Porn queen Chambers stars as a young woman who undergoes experimental skin-graft surgery after a motorcycle accident. One month later, she emerges from a coma with an insatiable appetite for blood which she obtains though the use of a spiked organ growing out of very sexual-looking orifice in her armpit. Her victims then become rabid vampires themselves, attacking all who come near them until they, too, go into a coma and die. Chambers is surprisingly good in her Typhoid Mary-like role, and the irony in the very sexual scenes when she feeds on her victims is certainly the reason Cronenberg cast her in this non-pornographic role. Less cerebral and more reliant on standard shocks for its success, Rabid is nevertheless a highly original exploration of the familiar vampire and living dead genres.

Danger After Dark: Canadian horror auteur David Cronenberg’s second commercial feature, Rabid often plays like a more expansive reworking of his debut Shivers, with widespread chaos and societal mayhem replacing the claustrophobic intimacy (and more formal rigor and cerebral detachment) of his maiden effort. Rabid occupies an odd placement within the director’s filmography: the film is neither as conceptually brilliant nor as visually accomplished as the horror films that surround it (the aforementioned Shivers, The Brood, Videodrome), yet it’s also the most prototypically Cronenbergian of any of the early works in theme, and its comparatively uneven, confrontational tone has actually aged well, particularly in comparison with the chilly, restrained tone of the director’s recent work like Spider and Crash. Rabid’s closest cinematic cousin within the world of Cronenberg is likely the 1981 hit Scanners, as both films are ambitious action-driven spectacles of anarchy and bloodshed that connect with genre fans on a simpler level than his more complex films. The storyline of Rabid is pure Cronenberg: Rose (porn star Marilyn Chambers, in a clever bit of iconic casting) suffers horrible injuries in a motorcycle accident, followed by experimental plastic surgery in a nearby clinic. She seems to recover, but with one slight problem: she now has a vampiric phallus that protrudes from an orifice in her armpit, piercing victims and thereby triggering a plague that ravages the streets of Montreal. Rabid seems to lose some of its impact in the second half, once Cronenberg expands the canvas to include the sizeable effects of the Rose-colored plague on the city (the film actually resembles a George Romero shocker during this stage, with the emphasis on the chaos that produces martial law conditions), but the film remains very strong and often quite disturbing in its graphic imagery, and it is an essential entry in the Cronenberg canon.