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.

********************************************************************************

 

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...

Click READ MORE below to continue...

Free Hand For A Tough Cop (Umberto Lenzi 1976) Review

Find more exploitation reviews here.

“Who would've believed it, me playing a hero? I would have been a lot happier if you'd left me in jail.” Umberto Lenzi was a skilled journeyman director, but he was perhaps at his happiest when toiling in the criminal underbelly during Italy's tumultuous 'Years of Lead' in the 1970s, with films such as The Tough Ones and The Cynic The Rat and The Fist. Brandishing a keen eye for sudden flashes of violence as well as a darkly dry sense of humour, Lenzi's Free Hand For A Tough Cop acts as a proto-buddy-cop flick, featuring a mismatched pair on opposing sides of the law as they attempt to track down a remorseless criminal in order to save the life of an innocent child...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…

Live Like A Cop Die Like A Man (Ruggero Deodato 1976) DVD Review

Find more exploitation movie reviews here.

“What are we coming to when they let common criminals join the police?” Ruggero Deodato will perhaps forever be inextricably linked to his notorious grand guignol video nasty Cannibal Holocaust, but the famous Italian director tried his hands at numerous genres. He dabbled in gialli with the likes of The Washing Machine, for instance, albeit in the 1990s long after the movement's heyday in the 1970s. Indeed, three genres ruled supreme at the Italian box office – the aforementioned gialli (bloody murder mysteries), sex comedies, and crime films (generally referred to as poliziotteschi), and it is in this latter category that Deodato produced one of his finest films. Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man (what a fantastic title!) is an ultra-charged poliziottescho that knows no bounds of shame, as tough-as-nails coppers take on the dangerous world of crime...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…

SS Experiment Camp (Sergio Garrone, 1976) DVD Review

Find more exploitation reviews here.

“All this happiness is frightening.” If Don Edmonds' Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS is the poster girl for Naziploitation, then Sergio Garrone's SS Experiment Camp (aka Captive Women II: Orgies of the Damned) is the poster boy, literally, one could argue. At the beginning of the 1980s, the United Kingdom was wrapped up in a moral panic: the notorious 'Video Nasties' era, which was spurned on by the grisly, shocking, and altogether lurid cover art that adorned the shelves of countless video rental shops. Self-appointed 'Moral Campaigners' – from crusty old busy bodies who saw no point in actually viewing the material they so vehemently opposed, to the entire political establishment – marched about in a blue rinse fury, which the majority of newspapers were only too willing to embolden. Splashed across front pages and evening news reports was the graphic box art of various exploitation flicks – including that of Garrone's decidedly trashy slice of grindhouse grot, which was banned in the UK from 1976 until 2005. If you're easily offended, then why on earth are you reading about a movie like this? However, if you're not consumed by a perpetual tide of offence-taking, and recognise that a movie is just a movie, then strap in for something nasty...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…