Eviscerating Middle Class Comfort: David Cronenberg's Rabid and the City of Montreal

by Nick Thomson © 2024

N.B. The following is an updated version of an essay that I wrote in April 2005, titled “Tearing Apart Stuffy, Middle Class Comfort: David Cronenberg's Rabid and the City of Montreal”, for a third year course called 'Canadian & Québecois Cinema', during my degree in Film & Television Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Do also note that the following contains SPOILERS for the films discussed.

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David Cronenberg's second full-length feature film Rabid (1976) became a conspicuous financial success, emerging “unexpectedly from a country at best in the twilight zone of film-consciousness”ⁱ focusing on a “disease-driven apocalyptic revolution”ⁱⁱ set in the city of Montreal, in the Canadian province of Québec. The film centres on Rose (Marilyn Chambers), who suffers severe injuries after being involved in a motorcycle crash on a lonely country road with her boyfriend Hart (Frank Moore). She is whisked away to the nearby Keloid Clinic – a private health centre for plastic surgery – where the opportunistic Dr Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) uses her as his guinea pig. Cronenberg's disparaging reaction to institutional life is central to his films, most potently in his early works, from the Somafree Institute in The Brood (1979) to Consec in Scanners (1981) and Spectacular Optical in Videodrome (1983), in which they all lead towards disease, trauma, and death.

Foreseeing present day skin graft and stem cell techniques, Cronenberg introduces the viewer to 'neutral field tissue', which has the ability to rebuild damaged flesh and conform itself according to the characteristics of its new locale on the human body; this is a continuation of a thought process started in 1975 with Shivers. In that film, within the Starliner Tower (an apartment complex on the outskirts of Montreal, designed to house every consumer need) a parasite has been developed, intended to replicate human organs, but which instead turns the host into a sex-crazed lunatic intent on only three things: lust, murder, and the spreading of their disease. The final shot of the film sees the contaminated inhabitants of this secluded, stylish, and modern community heading off to corrupt the rest of the world, an infection aimed outwards by comparison to the inward spread of disinhibition and social collapse witnessed in J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise, also released in 1975; Cronenberg would adapt Ballard's 1973 novel Crash to much controversy in 1996. Building on this shared fascination, Rabid continues Cronenberg's critique on a progressive society by subtly undermining comfortable middle-class idleness as a predatory civilisation obsessed with cosmetic surgery...

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Frankie Freako (Steven Kostanski, 2024) Review

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“He's like a little gremlin guy who likes to party.” Take off that cornflower blue corporate tie and set aside prurient interests, because it's time to go hog mild in semi-safety with a bodacious trio of rambunctious, hyper-caffeinated, knee-high troublemakers whose sole purpose is to turn your beige life upside down...

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Flavours of the Month: September & October 2024...

Psycho docs, X-Ray nut shots, and the end of an era is just some of what's been setting the tone of my September and October of 2024...

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Exacerbated Adolescence: The Heterosexual Male Bond in 'Swingers' and 'Shaun of the Dead'

by Nick Thomson © 2024

N.B. The following is a tweaked version of an essay that I wrote in November 2004, titled “From the idealised homosociality of Swingers to the problematic male bond in Shaun of the Dead”, for a third year course called 'Gender & Genre in Contemporary Cinema', during my BA degree in Film & Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. Considering that 2024 marks the 20^th anniversary of Shaun of the Dead, I figured it was worth revisiting.

Do also note that the following contains SPOILERS for the films discussed.

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“For boys, the male gang is more important than one-on-one friendship, but the gang members require little closeness and rely on their abilities for membership”ⁱ. This essay will explore the idea of homosociality – or male friendship – as it is represented in film; most specifically in Swingers (Doug Liman, 1996) and Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004). The former is an American film, part of what could be called the 'friendship movie' or 'hang out' genre, while the latter, a British film, was sold as a 'rom-zom-com' (romantic zombie comedy), underneath which lies a potent subplot concerning male bonding.

Both films depict homosocial behaviour differently, yet also similarly. As Wyatt explains, gay male friendship is more inclusive of emotional intimacy, unlike the typical heterosexual counterpart; there has been a softening of this exclusivity in the past twenty years, but broadly speaking the status quo remains. The very idea of homosociality, of the male bond, denotes at least a certain level of intimacy shared between straight men – indeed, as Wyatt notes in his title, this 'straight intimacy' can be interpreted as “queerness”. However, to analyse these films, we must first consider what 'homosociality' means...

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V/H/S/Beyond (Various, 2024) Review

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“That's why everyone likes filming spooky things with VHS cameras.” A few years ago the terror-fuelled streaming service Shudder took over the portmanteau horror franchise V/H/S, one that has always produced mixed results, from soaring heights of inventive and gore-drenched scares to crushing lows of misplaced fumbling for direction. Now onto their fourth entry in the long-running series, does Shudder's alien-themed V/H/S/Beyond deliver the gruesome, gruelling goods?...

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In A Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024) Review

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“Animals don't get too hung-up on reason.” Taking the typical story of a slasher movie and inverting the POV to instead focus on the monstrous killer, debut feature writer/director Chris Nash sets out with a bold hook, but can it be sustained over 90 minutes?...

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Flavours of the Month: July & August 2024...

Seventies sauce, humorous horror, and seeing how far the rabbit hole goes is just some of what's been setting the tone of my July & August 2024...

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Mosquito (Gary Jones, 1994) Review

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“My God – this looks like a proboscis!” Your common or garden mozzies have sucked the blood of an alien lifeform that has crashed to earth, and now they've mutated into giant man-killers and they've got a mad thirst on for some juicy human haemoglobin. So who's gonna save the world? A park ranger, a meteor hunter, and a chainsaw-wielding bank robber, that's who!...

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Flavours of the Month: May & June 2024...

Rural japes, problematic paranormal adventures, and jacking-in to 'run the net' are just some of what's been setting the tone of my May & June 2024...

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Stone Cold (Craig R. Baxley, 1991) Review

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“Welcome to my slaughterhouse!” There's an out-of-control biker gang menacing the people of Mississippi and there's only one man brave enough to go undercover, the type of man who has not a dog, but a giant lizard for a pet, the sort of burly slab of beef that has no qualms about walking around in an alarmingly skimpy pair of underpants, the very breed of man who straddles a rumbling road hog and states the bleedin' obvious as if it was profound revelation – his name's Huff, Joe Huff!...

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Flavours of the Month: March & April 2024...

Apocalyptic retro-futurism, laid back pixel packing, and a trip to Delta City is some of what's been setting the tone of my March and April of 2024...

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Destroy All Neighbors (Josh Forbes, 2024) Review

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“Rock and roll is about being on time.” The nightmare neighbour next door with their loud music blasting all through the night while you lie there in bed awake, eyes bloodshot and weary, wanting to put a stop to it and never having the stones to do it. But what if one day you worked up the gumption to bang on that door and tell them to turn it down … and then accidentally killed them?...

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Flavours of the Month: January & February 2024...

Bone-crunching action, mysterious woodland happenings, and the rediscovery of creativity is just some of what's been setting the tone of my January & February 2024...

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Vice Academy (Rick Sloane, 1989) Review...

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“A Vice cop?! I feel used and violated.” From 1984 through to the end of the decade, six Police Academy movies were released (a seventh came in the mid-90s). What started out as a raunchy comedy quickly turned into a family franchise with cartoonish gags and even broader characters, rendering it practically a parody of itself. And still, along came Vice Academy, a cheap-as-chips combination of sauciness and spoof, in which a gaggle of goofy police trainees – headed up by Scream Queen legend Linnea Quigley (Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-o-rama) – attempt to make ten arrests to qualify for graduation. First stop, that most hilarious of subjects: an under-age smut operation … wait, what?!...

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