Tag Archives: david-cronenberg

The Brood (1979)

Family drama and psychoplasmic therapy, directed by David Cronenberg 92min imdb

Recap:

As a child, Nola has been abused by her mother, and her father didn’t help. Now she is a patient of Dr Raglan who is a shrink at the “Somafree Institute Of Psychoplasmics”. Her husband Frank notices marks of abuse on their daughter Candice. He decides to keep her away from her mother, talks to Raglan, has Nola’s parents involved…

It’s not a spoiler to say that Raglan, while not exactly competent, is not completely inapt, either. He has taken all the psychobabble about giving your emotions Gestalt to the next level. Patient Mike gets a physiological rash when psychologically (or psychoplasmically) interacting wit Raglan, expatient Jona even has developed lymphoma, and Nola, well, let’s just say that she has ways to externalize her bad vibes.

So what we have here is a cheap and nasty family drama, a psycho therapy from Cronenberg World (and, I guess, a look at the shards of Cronenberg’s shattered marriage). People are not getting tired of pointing out that this is not Cronenberg’s best movie, but nobody denies that the ending will be a classic forever.

Movie 92min

Trailer

Rabid (1977)

Movie 91min

Trailer

On Cronenberg World, vampirism is a disease much like the rabies. 91min imdb

Recap:

Rose has a motorcycle accident and is picked up by the ambulance of the nearest hospital, which happens to be an institute for plastic surgery where she is given some kind of stem cell treatment. You can imagine that stem cells were rather experimental back in 1977, so from now on she can no longer digest conventional food. Instead she starts hugging people to death, sucking their blood with a proboscis that she keeps in an additional vagina hidden in her armpit. But you know what mosquitoes are like, they spread diseases, in this case: the Vampirabies which turn people into rabid bloodbingers. This disease is quite deadly, especially when you shoot the infected as part of the containment strategy (the other part is handing out vaccination certificates). I would like to file this as a holiday movie because when fighting this epidemic, shooting Santa is just a collateral damage (but then I won’t because only one Santa slayed just isn’t enough).

I guess it’s quite obvious that I like this movie, and why not? People say that this is far from being one of Cronenberg’s better movies, and I don’t disagree. The narrative is a bit choppy, it feels a bit as if they have had a script for a much longer movie and then removed every scene that wasn’t indispensable. Well whatever. I liked it. It is a good movie, it is well done and contains a lot of good ideas. I sure would love to re-watch Videodrome and watch those other Cronenberg movies which are considered better, but there’s nothing wrong (and much right) with this movie.