Anyway, as I'd prefer to review the two episodes together, I'm just going to wait and do it on the 20th, the Monday following the release of Episode 2 of Season 2. Apologies to those who like to watch stuff on or around the dates on which they occur- i.e. Halloween-themed movies around Halloween, Christmas-themed movies around Christmas, etc.- I'm right there with you, but this can't be helped, obviously.
Now, on with the creepshow...
Almost immediately after completing Stereo, David Cronenberg went right into his second feature-length endeavor, Crimes of the Future. Once again, he served in as many capacities as he did with that film: writer, director, producer, editor and cinematographer. And, as with his first feature, this one was shot as a silent film, with narration and sound effects added later, only this time in color, and with a slightly larger budget. The running time was almost exactly the same- just over an hour- and, as with his prior effort, it revolved around the strange goings-on amongst a group of scientists. Only here, we actually got to see said scientists instead of just hearing them.
While the plot in Stereo was relatively straight-forward: a group of scientists try to induce telepathy via brain surgery, only to see the end results go horribly awry- here, the plot is anything but easy to comprehend. I'll do my best to summarize, admittedly with a little help from some online sources, but rest assured, a lot of this is open to interpretation, especially given the fact that most of the descriptions I read wildly varied in their given synopses. As with Stereo, I highly suggest you watch it yourself before reading this article, which you can do here.
Here goes: it's the future- all the way to... 1997, lol. (I love it when I watch a sci-fi movie set in the future and it's already in my semi-current past.) The older female population has completely died out, on account of a certain cosmetic, with only a few female children left. Left to their own devices, the men have devolved into bizarre sexual practices, as scientists both study said men, and, in some cases, succumb to their own fetishes themselves.
Some of these sexual deviations have led to new forms of venereal diseases- for instance, one man is able to grow new organs, which the scientists then remove for study, dubbing them a "creative cancer," only to see new ones grow in their place. The man gets agitated when said organs are taken away, and become calmer when they are in the direct vicinity of himself, so those studying him tend to keep him close, so as to put him at ease. It seems that the man thinks of said organs as his "children," serving as a sort of perverse childbirth for him, in lieu of having women around to do the real thing. (Shades of The Brood, to a certain extent.)
Another man secretes a chocolate-like substance that has addictive properties to those who eat it- but why would you? Yet another man obtains a strange plant-like growth from his nose, while others seem obsessed with feet and attempting to "rearrange" them in hopes of functioning more like a sea creature of some sort- some even grow webs between their toes to that end.
Doing his best to navigate all this insanity is our main character, Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik, also of Stereo), the former director of a dermatology clinic called- wait for it- the House of Skin. (Only in a Cronenberg movie.) Tripod is ostensibly in search of his former mentor, Antoine Rouge- gotta love these names- who mysteriously disappeared after the aforementioned plague that decimated the female population. The inference may be that he went mad and possibly had something to do with it, which is part of why Tripod is trying to seek him out- to find out the truth of the matter.
In attempting to do so, Tripod joins several other organizations: The Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease (where the man with the excess organs resides) and The Oceanic Podiatry Group (where the scientists are obsessed with feet and sea creatures- hence the name). Eventually, he comes upon a secret group of scientist pedophiles, The Metaphysical Import-Export Group, that think that the way forward may be to impregnate children, and have kidnapped a "special" one with the intent of attempting it.
They recruit Tripod and try to convince him to do so, which, understandably, he is hesitant to do. But when confronted with the child, he senses that Rouge is present within her somehow, and it looks as if he may take them up on their proposal after all. The film ends with the child sharing some secretions of her own with Tripod, which he willingly ingests as the child smiles and the credits roll. Yikes! 😱
Perhaps needless to say, given this plotline and all the strange happenings, this film is far more disquieting than Stereo. While Stereo does have the clinical sense of remove that Cronenberg is famous for; here, it is applied to far more disturbing material. And his claustrophobic camerawork- even oppressive when it's outside- doesn't help matters, making for a squeamish watch.
If you keep up with current events and all those crazy conspiracy theories going around lately, you might find yourself thinking, as I did, of the wacko QAnon theory, which has a group of far-left liberals who run a child sex trafficking ring working overtime to bring down Trump. (Not kidding.)
I can't help but wonder if whoever came up with all that nonsense saw this film and made up his own crazy theories from there, applying them to more current events. But I digress, lest I start sounding like one of these insane people. That said, if you dare, you can read more about QAnon here, but beware- it's one hell of a rabbit hole to go down. I'll stick with Cronenberg, thanks.
Critics were not kind to Cronenberg's early efforts, with one saying that filmmaking was clearly not his forte, and he should consider another line of work. Even Cronenberg himself blocked the release of his earliest two features for some time on home video, only allowing them to be released along with the DVD of Fast Company begrudgingly, allowing that they might have an "academic interest, but artistically, they're so bad." By the time of this release, he hadn't seen them in some twenty years, and found "everything was wrong- the rhythms, the editing," but decided to leave them be to "stand as they are."
While there's no denying his first two features are slow-going, and the complete absence of proper dialogue and a score make them more than a little boring and, at the very least, dry as a bone, there is definitely some value to fans in seeing them.
The promise of what Cronenberg would become as a filmmaker is on full display, from the left-of-center plotlines and clinical detachment, to the oddball characters and weird scenarios. He did it better later, to be sure, but this film and Stereo are where his vision began in earnest.
As with Stereo, there is a fan-edit of the film available, this time with a full-on score, rather than re-editing the film to tighten it up and adding random music that may not be to some people's tastes. This version, featuring a score written by an ambient artist who goes by the name of Skeleton Lipstick, may actually be a better bet for those who find Cronenberg's lack of dialogue and music boring rather than hypnotic.
It's firmly in the vein of the synth-driven scores of the 70s & 80s from people like John Carpenter (the first three Halloweens, Escape from New York, etc.), Goblin (Dawn of the Dead, Phenomena, etc.), Tangerine Dream (Firestarter, The Keep, etc.), Giorgio Moroder (Midnight Express, Cat People) and Vangelis (Cosmos, Blade Runner). You can check that version out here on YouTube. In addition, the band Spoonbender 1.1.1 performed a live score to the film at one of its rare theatrical screenings, which you can listen to an excerpt from here.
Once again, I found the fan-edit to be preferable to the original, which is almost too minimalist for its own good. I kind of get what Cronenberg was going for, and he certainly comes closer to achieving it here than he did with Stereo, which was like listening to a psychology lecture with sometimes interesting visuals; but those long, droning sequences in Crimes with no sound whatsoever are deadening in their own way, in spite of Cronenberg at least trying to add the occasional oddball sound effect, such as bird calls, underwater sounds and weird synth squelches here and there.
Truth be told, both Stereo and Crimes are basically failed experiments, by Cronenberg's own admission, which were more important in terms of his learning on the job how to make films and how to achieve the look and feel he was going for. He said the ideas and scripts came naturally- after all, he had been writing since he was a kid, as I detailed in the intro to this series- but the filmmaking was tougher, since he had to learn as he went, rather than studying it in college.
Judged by those standards, then, his early work is still pretty impressive, if rudimentary. But then, few filmmakers who go on to achieve greatness later on in their careers knock it out of the park right off the bat. Sure, there's Orson Welles, with his justly celebrated debut Citizen Kane, but a lot of critics would allow he peaked early and then it was downhill from there. Cronenberg, on the other hand, may have started out a bit wobbly, but from his next film on, he would remain remarkably consistent. But like I said in the previous article, we all have to start somewhere.
Another important element of these early films was in casting like-minded individuals to help him realize his visions. There's a reason certain faces kept cropping up time and again in his early work- they clearly saw something in him as well, and vice versa. Cronenberg favors actors with a very specific and kind of otherworldly look to them. His actors manage to be both everymen (or women) and just a little off at the same time.
Granted, he would go on to use bigger name actors in time, but even then, it was people like James Woods, Jeremy Irons, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken and Viggo Mortensen- none of which are exactly your typical or traditional leading men. The women- Barbara Steele, Lynn Lowry, Marilyn Chambers, Samantha Eggar, Deborah Harry, Geena Davis, Judy Davis, Holly Hunter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julianne Moore, etcetera, also fit that bill. Like his films themselves, he likes his actors to be a bit off-kilter and left-of-center. He seems to love actors that Hollywood doesn't quite know what to do with, more often than not- the quirkier, the better.
Here, albeit by nature of the film's subject matter, the entire cast is male, save one key player, and she's a child. In addition to the aforementioned Mlodzik, there's Paul Mulholland and Iain Ewing (both also of Stereo), Jack Messinger (who was in Stereo, Rabid, Scanners and The Dead Zone) and Norman Snider (who would go on to co-write Dead Ringers with Cronenberg). But everyone concerned has their own unique look and seems pretty committed to the story at hand, to the point where you could be forgiven for wondering if, like Stereo, you're watching a documentary instead of a fictional narrative.
Make no mistake about, this is brave new territory for the time, and it's no wonder that not everyone was getting it. Indeed, things would, in some ways, get worse before they got better. Though many of his films are now considered cult classics, back in their own time, they were often considered perverse and unseemly, even by Cronenberg's own country. It wouldn't be until The Dead Zone that Cronenberg achieved widespread critical acceptance, and not until The Fly that he achieved commercial success- and the latter was pretty short-lived.
His films just don't tend to be Hollywood blockbusters, for the most part, I'm afraid. But then, I don't think Cronenberg himself ever thought they would be. He makes the films he wants to make, period. And even if he did crave some measure of critical acceptance on some level, he certainly did it on his own terms, to be sure. And I think that's something to be admired.
It would be several years before Cronenberg was able to make another film- financing remained elusive, especially with the kind of films Cronenberg was making up to that point, which didn't exactly scream commercial success, to say the least.
So, Cronenberg decided to try something different, and, following the lead of old pal Ivan Reitman, who had just made the horror flick/Grindhouse send-up Cannibal Girls, decided to take a stab at horror with a little project he initially called Orgy of the Blood Parasites...or, as it would eventually become known as: Shivers.
Join me next time, when we take a closer look at Cronenberg's breakthrough film, also known as They Came From Within or The Parasite Murders. Have a happy 4th of July, everyone, and stay safe out there! 💥😨
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