Rabid

Reviewable horror movies are few and far between.  This is the only excuse I'll offer for three or so months between updates.  In any case, the selection this time is David Cronenberg's Rabid, a 1977 flick that should make pro-lifers feel all warm and gushy inside.  The plot focuses on a young woman who gets set on fire during a motorcycle accident and is given an experimental skin graft.  They take the same skin from her thighs, but treat it (off camera) so that it will look more like abdomen skin, and they do it by mutating the cells or something.  Basically, it's the same premise of stem cell research, and wow, are the results wacky.

So the girl is in a coma for about a month while the skin is getting treated.  Her boyfriend, who was driving the motorcycle during the accident is at home doing whatever.  One of the other patients hears the girl scream from a nightmare or something and comes to help her.  She is, of course, topless, which is good, because fifteen minutes into the film and I was getting antsy to see someone's tits.  Watch as many horror movies as I do and see if it doesn't happen to you.

Anyway, the chick hugs him and blood starts coming out of everywhere, so the viewer is forced to assume that her awesome rocking tits are murdering him, but it's not that interesting, I'm afraid.  It's actually a phallic-looking thing that comes out of her armpit, which kind of looks like another orifice, but which was no where near the actual skin graft site but whatever (see right).  For me, I've been gun-shy about Cronenberg's films and weird orifices when I happened to catch Crash (1996) on late night television one night and witnessed James Spader screwing an incision in Roseanna Arquette's leg.





No, I'm not fucking kidding.


The guy that the chick, um, stuck, turns into a rabid monster and eats a taxi driver before crashing to his death over and overpass. The girl escapes and tries to eat a cow through osmosis and then feeds from a drunk farmer. For some unknown reason she returns to the hospital, eats another chick in the hot tub, and stashes her in a freezer.


An outbreak of skin-graft-rabies starts in Montreal after the girl feeds from her doctor in the same way. The chick's boyfriend is convinced it has something to do with her, so he goes looking for her, since she kind of escaped (again). The security of this place sucks. She eats her best friend who took her in and finally the boyfriend catches up to her. He tells her she is the cause of the outbreak and she pushes him down the stairs, like you do. Then, to prove whether she was the cause or not, she sticks a guy and then locks herself in a room with her. The guy gets the rabies or whatever and kills her. The movie concludes with a shot of her corpse getting thrown into a garbage truck by a bunch of guys in haz-mat suits.


Fucking Canadians.