Halloween Horrorfest 2018: RABID (1977)

Just like our last entry, you should thank The Great and Terrible Soska Sisters for this discussion.  Jen and Sylvia are presently remaking this Cronenberg entry with Laura Vandervoot (a beautiful young woman whose career seems inextricably linked to Supergirl--she played the character in Smallville and was one of the major villains during the first season of the present TV series) playing the Marilyn Chambers role of Rose.  One of the things I appreciated about American Mary was the shrewd casting sense the Sisters seem to have, and I have faith that Vandervoot will be an improvement over Chambers.

Not that I am going to blame Chambers for anything.  A lot of reviews I have read of this film criticize the former porn star for her performance, and it’s not that she’s bad or that she’s there just for the copious nudity; it’s that Rose isn’t really a character.  There are very few attempts throughout Cronenberg’s script to give the people in it any back story or personality, which results in them being cyphers. We have no sense of who is related to who except when one of the character expressedly states what these relationship are.  It’s kinda funny that Joel Silver’s aptly named Murray Cypher is a background character, and yet seems the most realized--which, oddly enough, is why his fate has the most impact.

It’s the one thing I found most frustrating about the film--that this was obviously made before Cronenberg was able to integrate the plot with the story.  Without characters I could relate to, I felt a strange detatchment with what was going on in the movie.  I ended up watching this as a document of a disaster and not a narrative film, and it works very well on that level.  I can’t help but think that Cronenberg had Night of the Living Dead on his mind, as there are little fiddly bits like the ambient news reports that echo Romero’s classic.  By the time the weird, lumpen proto-John Cusak hero (Frank Moore) is driving through an infected Montreal’s streets, disturbingly empty save for the stray rabid victim and army sharpshooter, the sense of things being totally out of control is more effective than the shaky-cam reeling its way through a rioting mob many a recent film has given us.  Taking it as a record of an epidemic, Rabid is actually kind of fascinating.

Rabid was only Cronenberg’s fourth feature-length film (I am counting Crimes of the Future and Stereo, which I did see at the Museum of the Moving Image some time ago), and it seems to me that Rabid is mostly a plot that isn’t connected up with its story.  Luckily for us, Cronenberg finally got that balance right in his next horror film, The Brood, which is one of my favorites.  As it stands, Rabid is more interesting than engaging, and is best approached as the last step before Cronenberg perfected his mix of emotional and clinical horror.  I do recommend it.

You can still head over to my Twitter Page to vote on tomorrow’s Halloween Horrorfest Movie of the Day.  You can even vote in today’s poll as of this writing for the next two hours.  I’ve kept the pace of a movie a day even though I sometimes posted two days’ worth of articles in a row.  I don’t plan on letting up until Halloween Day’s Special Last Chance Poll.

And a special thank you to the Great and Terrible Soska Sisters, who energized the polls for the last two days.  Go visit their Twitter Page to keep up with the fun things they're doing. 

Jen, Sylvia...I’m glad we’re buddies.