Rabid: David Cronenberg

If there is one lesson that can be taken away from David Cronenberg's Rabid, it's that you shouldn't make a film about any kind of apocalypse taking place in a city when you have a small budget.  Though I had problems with his earlier Shivers, I must admit that Cronenberg did a good job convincing me that all hell was breaking loose during the film's central epidemic. But that was because Cronenberg contained the entire film inside a single building. In Rabid, Cronenberg tries to tell the story of another widespread epidemic. But this time he sets it largely in small towns and cities. And let me just say this: playing sirens over shots of big buildings does not make the audience believe that the end of the world is truly upon them.  But I digress.  Rabid is a curious film in which a young woman, played by porn star Marilyn Chambers, gets in a terrible motorcycle incident.  She is rescued by the staff of a nearby plastic surgery hospital who treat her wounds with morphogenetically neutral skin graphs in the hope that they will rebuild her lost tissue and organs. The process saves her life, but has the unfortunate side effect of turning her into a vampire-like creature which feeds with a stinger hiding in one of her armpits.  Her victims become blood-craving zombies who infect so many people that martial law is declared.  But it's too late...the zombie apocalypse has arrived!  Two things need to be noted. First, Cronenberg's zombies have more in common with the "rage zombies" popularized in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) then with the slow, shuffling George A. Romero zombies. So in a way, Cronenberg predicted the eventual transformation of the zombie from the walking dead into sprinting killers. Second, Marilyn Chamber's performance was extraordinary. It makes me wish that she had done more non-pornographic work. While Rabid has its flaws, it still is worth a watch for horror and zombie aficionados.

6/10