Crimes of the Future: David Cronenberg

I honestly didn't think that David Cronenberg could make a film worse than his first full-length feature Stereo (1969).  But I was wrong...so very, very wrong.  His follow-up, the cryptically titled Crimes of the Future, takes everything bad about Stereo and makes it worse.  They both are about medical foundations and sinister scientists, are a little over an hour, and were shot without sound because Cronenberg's camera was too noisy.  They both feature grating, monotonous voice-overs added in post-production where actors improvise insane medical jargon to accompany the bizarre images.  But amazingly, Crimes of the Future does a worse job with this technique because the voice-over only accompanies about fifty percent of the film. The rest is comprised of soundless footage of actors doing who knows what.  Even though the voice-over tries to make a case for an overall "plot" concerning a dermatological drug which accidentally kills the world's sexually mature women, I refuse to believe that Crimes of the Future has any kind of story. It's boring, poorly shot, abysmally paced, and mind-numbingly dull. I found a plot summary on wikipedia that claimed to explain what was going on.  But even with the outline in front of me, I still couldn't make heads or tails of what I was witnessing.  Something about men giving birth? Secret underground pedophile rings? Men growing flippers? I need to stop thinking about this film before I get a brain tumor.

1/10