The Essentials: David Cronenberg’s Best Films

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“Shivers” (1975)
It’s really only our completist impulses that have us including “Stereo” and “Crimes of the Future,” both barely more than student movies, and not declaring “Shivers,” which Cronenberg turned in after a few years working in Canadian TV, his actual debut. Produced in an unlikely but robust early partnership with Ivan Reitman (a friend of Cronenberg’s who would also produce “Rabid” before launching his own comedy directing career), if you do regard ‘Shivers’ as Cronenberg’s first proper, full-length commercial feature, it makes for a cleaner “genius” narrative: it is certainly the director’s first great film. A summation of his evident desire to have us confront the darkest impulses of our imagination, “Shivers” is a psychologically and physically violent film, that combines a degree of social critique with the splatter sensibility of a gorehound and the exploitation vibe of a flesh hound, as its original titles, “Orgy of the Blood Parasites” or “The Parasite Murders” or “They Came from Within” suggest. In style, it marks a quantum leap forward from his student days, even though it still lumbers and creaks and some of the performances are less than polished—there’s a singular vision at work here that is so uncommon, unsettling and uncanny that even the sense of amateurishness in some areas is easily overlooked. Reportedly based on a single image—a spider emerging from a sleeping woman’s mouth—that Cronenberg dreamt up, the film’s bonkers plot involves engorged parasites that are simultaneously an aphrodisiac and an STI menacing  the middle class residents of Starliner Towers. It caused a minor scandal upon its initial release in Canada, of the “ban this sick filth” variety, as it was funded by taxpayers’ money, but the decades since have proven that investment more than worth a few ruffled feathers, and it’s a film that, cronky performances and creaky dialogue notwithstanding, still holds up today. [A-]

“Rabid” (1977)
A bit of a climbdown from early high watermark “Shivers,” the fourth film from Cronenberg is notable mainly as a blueprint of sorts, for better films he’d go on to make in the near future. It could be said to feature a melange of the micro/macro apocalypse of “Scanners,” the weird sexual politics of “Videodrome” and the genre and makeup/gore of “The Fly.” An oblique but unmistakable take on the vampire and zombie genres (a year before Romero would return to zombies with “Dawn of the Dead”)  it follows a woman (porn star Marilyn Chambers, serviceable in a role Cronenberg originally hoped to give to a then-unknown Sissy Spacek) who survives a motorcycle crash and then receives life-saving skin grafts at a seemingly idyllic plastic surgery clinic. But while the operation is deemed a success and the skin grafts are accepted, she develops a phallic stinger in a vulva-like fold under her armpit, that bites into and drinks the blood of her victims, and turns them into rabid zombies whose bites spread the disease further. Soon an epidemic ensues. Perhaps because it’s a kind of take on existing horror tropes of zombiedom, cannibalism, and vampirism “Rabid” doesn’t feel quite as shockingly original as “Shivers” and while it has an element of social satire in its subversive take on the plastic surgery industry and the and the lazy, quick-fix society that spawned it, it doesn’t feel quite as sharp-eyed in its critique. Still, this is a textbook, if minor, early Cronenberg, and in its way a pointed entree into the Cronenverse in which body modification, and the idea of physical improvement, perfectability or adjustment to meet a perverse and overtly sexualized impulse is a widely accepted norm. A cautionary tale marked with psychosexual imagery and a satisfyingly tragic and totally earned downer ending, “Rabid,” twisted as it is, feels a little bit like Cronenberg-lite to those of us who expect his horrors to have real ontological weight, but it’s still a diverting slice of late-70s video nasty . [B]

“Fast Company” (1979)
On the surface,  “Fast Company” a colorful action-drama about professional drag racers, seems like an anomaly in the Cronenberg canon, and certainly when it arrived in 1979 it was unlike anything the director has attempted to date. But especially with the benefit of hindsight, it has its place as an important marker for a complete picture of Cronenberg — his first work in non-exploitation, gross-out mode, it’s also his first film with a few notable collaborators, including  cinematographer Mark Irwin and production designer Carol Spier. But of most interest to the Cronenberg student, it’s the first exploration of Cronenberg’s fascination with cars and car culture — a preoccupation bordering on the fetishistic that found frequent expression later on in his career, most astonishingly with his adaptation of JG Ballard‘s “Crash.” But if here, however, there’s little of that kind of overt psychosexual perversity on display, instead you feel the director’s fascination with the material in his almost documentary-like approach: the flashiness of the vehicles, the roar of engines and the tremble of the cockpit — it certainly borders on obsessive. On the commentary track, Cronenberg describes the film as a “tone piece,” playings up its archetypal western imagery which suggests how anomalous it is amid the horrors and slahser-indebted sci-fi thrillers that were mre his stock in trade back then. But “Fast Company” may be most atypical for being sort of disposable — a fun and breezy ride (featuring some excellent race sequences, some of which are real and some of which are cunningly restaged and shot) and filled with slightly winky B-movie actors, including John Saxon and even a Playboy Playmate of the Year (Claudia Jennings, who died tragically in a car accident a few months after filming the movie). It’s pretty banal, but in the anything-but-banal catalogue of Cronenberg films, that gives it its own weird, sincere charm. [B+]

“The Brood” (1979)
Any fears (or hopes, if you are the sort of cinemagoer that we are not) that Cronenberg might continue in the petrolhead vein of “Fast Company” were swiftly quashed with his very next feature. “The Brood,” as its status as the fifth Cronenberg title to get the Criterion seal of approval might imply, is terrific, and it derives at least some of its considerable power from what we can read as an intensely personal connection to the material. It’s an occasionally truly revolting allegory for everything from the dangers of psychobabble, to the horrors of divorce to the monstrousness of motherhood, which all makes more sense when you realize it was made during a prolonged and painful child custody battle following Cronenberg’s divorce from his first wife. Dr. Raglan (Oliver Reed) is a pioneering psychiatrist/quack whose “psychoplasmosis” technique provides patients with catharsis but also induces inexplicable physical transformations and manifestations. His primary client is Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) who is going through an acrimonious divorce from her husband Frank (Art Hindle) whom she is fighting for custody of their young daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds). So far, so “Kramer vs Kramer,” but then along comes the band of murderous navel-less dwarf creatures — a batch of demons literally born from Nola’s otherwise un-sublimated rage. Combining intellectual, metaphorical and visceral shocks, and building to one of the most unforgettable and queasiest finales in horror cinema, “The Brood” stands out even within the outré Cronenberg oeuvre, as a Grand Guignol high point. [A-]

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