Rabid. David Cronenberg. 1977.

Let’s do another Cronenberg! The Pakistani mangoes are in season and are so delicious so I made a batida de mango.

Uhm oh… I thought I had seen all Cronenberg films before, but perhaps I haven’t seen this one? I mean, there’s a lot of actors returning from Cronenberg’s previous movie, Shivers, so they all look familiar…

Yes indeed, this is a Cronenberg film. It’s his second commercially released movie, and it’s got all the Cronenberg tics, down to women undergoing radical experimental (and insane) operations.

It’s a strange movie. I mean, just the mechanics of the main vector of spreading the disease: There’s a woman that presses her… arm pits? to people’s bodies and her skin graft bites them. It’s not quite as scenic as vampires are. But I guess it’s a quite Cronenberg move: Arm pits are probably horrifying things for him?

It’s just very, very boring. It’s got the Cronenberg touches (EWW THE BODY), but there’s no tension and there’s nothing interesting going on and the actors are all pretty unremarkable and the cinematography is anything special at all.

I wonder whether George Romero was inspired by these movies for his next two Dead movies: Day of the Dead (I think) have some scenes that are very reminiscent of the tower block setup in Shivers, and Dawn of the Dead (if I remember correctly) has scenes that are very much like this movie. The main difference is that Cronenberg assumes that a sane, well-functioning government can exist, while Romero assumes that that’s impossible.

Shivers. David Cronenberg. 1975.

I long wanted to re-watch Cronenberg’s 80s movies, and I recently was made aware that all of them were available on 2K now, so I went shopping. I had not planned on doing his early movies at all: First of all, because I don’t want to watch Crimes of the Future again, and second of all: It’s not that many years since I watched Fast Company and The Brood just the other year.

I wanted to start with Scanners, but the Scanners bluray included Shivers and Rabid, so here we are.

I’ve seen Shivers at the Cinematheque like thirty years ago, and I remember it as being more than a little creepy. And not in a good way.

Well, OK, this is better than I remember. It’s similar to Crimes of the Future in some ways: It’s made very cheaply and the Montreal architecture is an important feature. And there’s the paedophilia thing. But he really leans into the things that would become the theme of his 80s movies: Disgust with the human body.

I mean, “Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease”.

It’s a quite slow movie, and it’s surprisingly scary.

The 2K version looks and sounds great, which wasn’t the case before, apparently:

The film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it’s difficult to stay with it.

The actors are pretty good. The weakest one is unfortunately the guy who plays the doctor (and is the lead): He’s constantly wearing and expression as if everything bemuses him and he know everything what’s going on… and it doesn’t, and he’s not supposed to.

At about two thirds through, it stops being scary, and instead it’s just one rape scene after another… played for laughs. It gets tedious.

The Sea of Trees. Gus Van Sant. 2015.

I started watching Restless, another Gus Van Sant movie:

But then I remembered that I’d somehow seen that one recently, so I bailed and went with this Van Sant movie instead.

I hope I haven’t seen this one as well. Hm… nope!

Hey, it’s McCaunnegheyheyhey.

Oh, how weird. The sound is all fucked up… Oh, there’s three mpvs of the main feature here and two are fucked up… I guess makemkv isn’t perfect.

Van Sant has done some movies that were all about some people walking about in the wilderness, and the first fifteen minutes of this was McCaugnegwhatever doing that in a forest, so I assumed that that’s what all this was going to be, and I was absolutely fine with that. The forest cinematography is gorgeous.

But we get extensive flashbacks to explain why McCounewhat is in the forest, and while these scenes are good, they’re just not as interesting as the forest scenes.

I assumed almost from the start that Van Sant was going to go all Shamalayamana on us and I was just sitting waiting for it, and… I’m not going to give it away whether that was right or not, but that certainly coloured my viewing of this.

Everybody hates it, but I think
that’s pretty harsh:

The interest that once greeted every new Gus Van Sant film has been evaporating for some years now. And this latest movie, which can aptly be termed pathetic, only strengthens that feeling.

Lik, one third of the movie is really good, but the other three fourths are really bad. I can understand why many people hate it sooo much, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. But I did really like the first er twenty minutes, so there’s that.