Rabid series

  • Rabid (2019)

    Rabid (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) If anyone’s going to remake 1970s Cronenberg, I’m glad it’s the Soska Sisters. Returning to the icky kind of horror à la American Mary, the Soskas cleverly expand upon Cronenberg’s original Rabid with far better technical assets at their disposal (the makeup effects to depict the result of a motorcycle accident are… terrifying) and also a bit more realism in their presentation. Matters of transhumanism (and the vocabulary of a public health crisis that rings disturbingly eerie in pandemic-dominated 2020) make this feel like a 2010s film rather than a 1970s remake. Not everything is perfect, though: the film is definitely too long (I accidentally started watching it twenty minutes into the film, and when I went back to see what I had missed, I didn’t feel as if I had missed anything), and the balance between the personal story of the protagonist and the wider outbreak of “rabies” feels disconnected to the point of being useless. I’m also not crazy about transhumanism being held up (here and in other places) as the new boogeyman of medical horror—but that’s just me. Still, this new version of Rabid does a few things better than the original. The ending is better than the original; the heroine is far better developed; the story has been justifiably transplanted to the United States, with a few potshots at the state of their health care system. The Soskas wisely keep the full craziness of the film for the final sequence (it does get wilder than expectations), and it’s good to see them back in the full-bore horror mode after a few underwhelming action movies. Still, I think they could do better—perhaps not in execution as much as in premise: competently reheating a low-budget 1977 feature does have its merits, but isn’t it time to see them do more original material?

  • Rabid (1977)

    Rabid (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Considering that the current international headlines are all about a global pandemic, watching writer-director David Cronenberg’s Rabid isn’t so much mindless fun right now. This being said, even if Rabid is definitely about a zombie epidemic going out of control, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to attain the wild body-horror madness of Cronenberg’s take on a (now) well-worn trope—by the time the heroine (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers) has a phallic appendage growing out of her armpit and motivating her to feed on human blood, well, I feel confident that we’re some way away from even the most horrible reality. What I liked most about the film, however, wasn’t its horror aspect as much as setting and atmosphere—loudly and proudly taking place in late-1970s Montréal, it features eye-catching details of the era and a fun “feels like my childhood” quality to an otherwise humdrum story. But unless you were born within three years and two hundred kilometres from Rabid’s production, I can’t quite promise the same kind of inherent interest. Otherwise, it’s an early Cronenberg, tackling a now-overexposed topic and doing it in a typically Cronenbergian way—which either counts as an advantage or a distraction.