A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977)


Cast: Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silva, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman, J. Roger Periard, Lynne Deragon, Terry Schonblum, Victor Désy, Julie Anna, Gary McKeehan. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: René Verzier. Art direction: Claude Marchand. Film editing: Jean LaFleur. 

David Cronenberg admitted he had trouble writing the screenplay for Rabid, and it shows. The movie begins promisingly in a somewhat isolated plastic surgery clinic in Quebec, where the surgeon, Dr. Keloid (Howard Ryshpan), is persuaded to try a new technique whose side effects are still unknown. When a young woman named Rose Miller (Marilyn Chambers) is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident near the clinic, he decides to use the technique to save her life. Rose lingers in a coma after the operation until she wakes up screaming one night with a serious hunger for human blood. The surgery has somehow left a sphincter-shaped organ in her armpit, from which a kind of stinger emerges that allows her to feed on other people. The victims wake up with no memory being attacked but with a similar hunger, and they swiftly go mad, infect others, and die. Rose escapes from the clinic and makes her way to Montreal, spreading the plague behind her. Rose doesn't suffer the madness and death that her victims do, so nobody suspects that she's the carrier of what is initially diagnosed as a new strain of rabies. Rose's story should provide a steady through line for the film, but Cronenberg gets sidetracked too often into scenes that take the plot nowhere and dissipate the suspense a thriller needs. Cronenberg had Sissy Spacek in mind for the role of Rose, but the producers disagreed, thinking that Chambers's notoriety as a porn actress wanting to go straight would attract audiences. Chambers gives a competent performance, but the role needs an actor who can generate both sympathy and menace -- the sort of thing Spacek demonstrated in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976).