Author's Note: Hey all- thanks for hanging in there on this one. We're having our roof redone, among other things- this is all a continuation of the whole termite situation from earlier this year- so things are kind of hectic, and VERY noisy, making it tough going to be writing at the moment, as I am upstairs and the roof is quite literally over my head, obviously, and they're not done. (They did take a break, on account of inclement weather, however- hence my finally finishing off this article.)
As such, I've been downstairs a lot lately and not working on the computer, as it is located upstairs. (I do have a laptop, but we don't have wifi at the moment.) I have been watching a fair amount of movies, though, so look for some Movie Round-ups sooner than later. All I can say is continue to hang in there: I'll get back to it on the reg ASAP. In the meantime, here's my long-awaited look back at...
The huge success of Shivers proved to be a bit of a Catch-22 for David Cronenberg. On the one hand, it was the biggest hit in Canadian film history, but on the other, its worth was debated in Parliament, and critics bemoaned that taxpayer money was used to make it. Never mind the fact that the film not only made back every penny the government lent Cronenberg and company to make the film, it also turned a solid profit to boot.
Because of this latter fact, the government was actually keen to give Cronenberg and his distributors, Cinépix Film Properties, money to do a follow-up, but they weren't too hyped on people finding out about it, and the resulting film causing the same kind of stir Cronenberg's Shivers had before it. For this reason, some time passed by before they were able to hammer out a deal, even though Rabid was good to go almost immediately after Shivers was completed.
Ultimately, Rabid was sort of grandfathered in via a package deal including a number of other films, under the title of Mosquito, in hopes of downplaying the government's involvement this time around. The gambit essentially worked, as the film proved nowhere near as controversial as its predecessor, even though, ironically enough, it starred adult film star Marilyn Chambers, which Cronenberg wryly noted probably wouldn't have helped his cause if the government knew that going in.
After seeing her in the cult hit Badlands, Cronenberg had actually wanted rising star Sissy Spacek for the lead role, but his producers- which, once again, included future heavy-hitter Ivan Reitman (who would go on to hit it big as the director of such massive hits as Meatballs, Stripes and the Ghostbusters movies), as well as John Dunning (then of Cinépix, which would eventually become part of Lionsgate)- both balked at casting a relative unknown.
They would end up eating those words after Spacek became a huge star with her Oscar-nominated turn in Brian De Palma's classic Stephen King adaptation, Carrie. Ironically, if you look closely, you can see a poster for Carrie in Rabid, towards the end, as Chambers' character walks the streets, putting a button on the whole affair- though Cronenberg admits in the commentary that he has no idea if Spacek would have even taken the role in the first place, given the content at hand.
The story revolves around a woman, Rose (Chambers), who is in a near-fatal motorcycle crash at the beginning of the film. Incidentally, that's the sound of Cronenberg's Ducati, not the actual bike used in the film, as he didn't want to trash his own bike, for obvious reasons, but liked the sound of his bike better. Fans of The Italian Machine will realize the significance. (You can read more about that here.)
She is "rescued" by a nearby plastic surgery institute, the Keloid Clinic, where the doctor who gives the clinic its name (Howard Ryshpan) performs emergency surgery on the girl, using a radical new form of surgery involving neural grafts. The operation saves her life, but it also changes it irrevocably, probably making her eventually wish they'd left well enough alone.
BTW, Dr, Keloid's name and the name of his clinic are a inside joke, as keloids are what doctors call the raised scar that results after a specific type of injury, including a severe burn. So, basically, Rose gets treated by a doctor at a plastic surgery clinic both named after the type of scar she herself will have after getting said surgery. See what Cronenberg did there?
After the surgery, Rose goes into a coma, while her boyfriend, Hart (Frank Moore), is comparatively okay, and is released a month later, with the doctor's business partner, the affable Murray Cypher (Joe Silver), promising that he'll call the minute that Rose shows any signs of life, and that Hart can call him anytime for updates.
Some time after that, Rose wakes up screaming, and a fellow patient, Lloyd (J. Roger Periard) overhears and goes to check on her. While there, she embraces him and cuts him somehow, leaving his side bloody. Lloyd passes out eventually and awakens with no memory of what has happened, but a nurse suspects he has raped the still seemingly comatose Rose.
Dr. Keloid balks at the suggestion, but does admit that what has happened to Lloyd is beyond his pay grade, and has Lloyd transferred to a proper hospital. Lloyd later leaves said hospital, only to suddenly transform into a raving lunatic, literally frothing at the mouth. He attacks the cab driver he's hired to take him home, while the man is driving, causing him to wreck the car in a fairly spectacular crash.
Cronenberg mentions in the commentary how the stunt almost killed him, as he was doing second-unit camerawork at the time, and the car came very close to crashing into him. Perhaps needless to say, Cronenberg didn't do a lot of camerawork after that. It's a great sequence, though- so, well done, even if it did nearly cost him dearly. Fun fact: the car used in the crash is a '73 Plymouth Fury, which horror fans will recognize as the same brand, albeit not the same year, of a certain other famous horror vehicle.
Meanwhile, Rose escapes the clinic and has a run-in with a farmer, who she also infects. This time, we clearly see that it is through a stinger-like appendage in her armpit, which allows her to "feed" on other people's blood. One major problem- not unlike a vampire, the process infects the person Rose feeds on, causing them to go- you guessed it- rabid, like a dog bitten by a bat. Perhaps a dog named Cujo.
Rose, freaked out by the situation, goes back to the clinic, where she tries to call Hart for help. This time she is caught by a nurse, who quickly informs the doctor that Rose is up and about. He inspects her and she ends up feeding on him as well, thus he is infected with the virus in the process.
Meanwhile, as Hart calls Cypher to pick him up to check on Rose, the farmer Rose infected goes nuts at a local BBQ restaurant and attacks a waitress and gets in a brawl with a man whose chicken he tries to steal. Hell hath no fury like a man who comes between another man and his chicken!
Later, as Dr. Keloid is going into surgery, the nurse notices him looking a bit out of whack. She's not wrong as he eventually goes rabid as well, cutting off her finger and attacking the others there. Eventually, he is subdued and locked into a paddywagon, as Hart and Cypher arrive, unable to believe their eyes as to what has happened.
A policeman has Hart identify a female body, which proves not to be Rose, but another of her victims- the image of which was famously used on the iconic poster for the film. Rose has fled the scene of the crime, hitchhiking her way to a friend's place in the city.
Needless to say, she infects people along the way, hastening the spread of the virus, which eventually hits the city in full force, leading to a crazy series of scenes that are iconic in their own way. Let's just say Santa Claus doesn't fare too well here.
It also goes without saying that it's impossible to watch all this without thinking of what's going on IRL with the Coronavirus. Watching Shivers, I thought about it a little, especially in the scene at the end, where the infected all get into their cars and head to the city to infect everyone else, but that scene was played sort of for laughs, in a dark, twisted way.
Rabid, though not without a wry sense of humor, is mostly played straight- it doesn't get much more real than dead bodies being loaded into a garbage truck and crushed, rather than being given a proper burial, which is impossible to see without thinking about recent developments in the news where local hospitals are so full of dead people that they had to stack them like cordwood in a freezer truck.
On the one hand, Cronenberg's approach, though meant to be darkly humorous- and it still is, at times, i.e. the Santa Claus bit, or Rose, aka Chambers, an IRL porn star, trolling an adult theater for a "worthy" victim- does work like gangbusters: this is just plain a better movie all around than Shivers, and a much more ambitious one, to boot.
Under Reitman and Dunning's stewardship, this is Cronenberg's first movie to look like a proper movie. There is shooting in multiple locations, in a much more sprawling way than Cronenberg's more claustrophobic earlier efforts; a sizable cast made up mostly of solid local Canadian talent; and the film is just plain more impressive than his earlier efforts, which have their charms, but are hemmed in by their low budgets and Cronenberg's inability to fully realize his intentions. Not so here- Cronenberg goes for it in a big way.
Granted, this is still a relatively low-budget affair, but, admittedly with his producers' help, Cronenberg is able to make the film seem that much bigger than it is. For instance, the producers taught him how to make a handful of extras look like a bigger bunch of people than it was by redressing and reusing them again in multiple shots, making it seem like there are more people there than there really are.
They also made sure he shot a lot of the film's major set-pieces early on, so as to make sure they had the most important stuff in the can before moving on to the more character-driven stuff. To be sure, in some cases, it makes the film seem a bit rushed- for instance, the attack in the hot tub could have been more leisurely paced.
Cronenberg says in the commentary that he was going for a sort of lesbian vampire vibe, which somewhat comes across, but the scene moves a little too fast for its own good- especially if you compare it to the sorts of films he was emulating, i.e. The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, etc. This can be said for a lot of the action scenes, which are often over in the blink of an eye.
But, in other cases, it works really well, such as the subway attack. Cronenberg does take his time for the infamous scene at Cypher's place involving his family, which does play very well, though perhaps not as well as it does in the book, where what happens to Cypher's child is made much more explicit. (Yes, there's a book- more on that later.)
As noted, the film stars Marilyn Chambers, who Cronenberg was a bit dubious of casting at first, having not seen her infamous porn films, but his producers felt would bring the film just the notoriety it needed to take Cronenberg's career to the next level. It worked- Chambers is not only great in the film, she became the first porn star to somewhat go "legit," paving the way for others to come, like Traci Lords or Sasha Grey.
Interestingly, she started out pure as the driven snow- Ivory Snow, that is, as Chambers was the model shown on the box of the popular soap, which proclaimed itself ""99 44⁄100% Pure." Ironically enough, the slogan would be used to promote her first major porn movie, Beyond the Green Door, a massive hit back in 1972. I've seen it (online), and let's just say, proper hygiene and personal grooming was hella different back then, lol. 😬
Believe it or not, there once was a time in which one could go to an actual movie theater to see such films, as opposed to the dives that most of these films are associated with. If you've seen Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood, there's an amusing bit where Sharon Tate (as played by Margot Robbie) asks someone what's going on down the street and is told they're having a porn movie premiere. "They have dirty movie premieres?" she asks, wild-eyed. "Yeah, they're fun!" he replies. Incidentally, the theater in question was the New Beverly, which Tarantino owns and is now a revival house theatre. Go figure.
Anyway, people actually used to go to see porn in movie theatres, though I can't imagine taking a date to one- it would probably be akin to what happens in Scorsese's Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle does just that, as seen above. Try doing that these days and see where that gets you. But yeah, it was a thing back before I was born. The 70's were a crazy time. I don't think they even have porn theatres anymore, period, upper class or otherwise.
Although, they did try and get me to review Pirates back when I worked at UAB's student newspaper. I was willing, but the editor was like: "Um, that would be a no." 😅 Apparently, they really did screen it on college campuses all over the US, and it was pretty well-received. It actually wasn't half bad- for a porn. Hey, I got a free T-shirt and various other goodies, along with the DVD screener set, so there's that. (Speaking of Sasha Grey, she's in it, BTW.) Moving on...
Chambers made her debut in the mainstream sex farce The Owl and the Pussycat, which features George Segal (of The Goldbergs fame) and a young Barbara Streisand as a hooker! Though a huge hit, it didn't lead to much right away for Chambers, save a turn in a low-budget early effort, Together, by none other than Sean S. Cunningham, who would go on to massive success producing the horror classics The Last House on the Left and the franchise-spawning Friday the 13th. Cunningham directed and co-produced the film along with the legendary then-future horror maestro Wes Craven, who would go on to himself direct Last House.
Chambers then auditioned for a film that she thought was a "major motion picture," but turned out to be a porn. That old trick! 😏 The film's producers, the Mitchell Brothers, spotted her and noticed her resemblance to Cybill Shepherd- the very actress that plays the character that Robert De Niro takes on that aforementioned porn date in Taxi Driver- see how it all comes around full circle?
Chambers balked at first, but then managed to finagle 10% of the film's profits and a sizable salary to boot, and said she'd only do it if everyone she was going to be having sex with was tested for STDs! Smart girl. Especially back then, when many a naive girl was taken advantage of under far more dubious circumstances.
Even so, if you've seen the film, you know what she was getting herself into. Not only was she the first major porn actress to engage in interracial sex with a black man in a mainstream porn film- which is nothing these days, at least to most people (we are living in El Trumpo's America, after all)- but the sex scenes themselves are nutty even by today's standards. At one point she has sex while suspended by a trapeze!
The film was a massive hit, and became part of the mainstream conversation, as porn was, for the first time, widely acceptable to the average filmgoer, thanks to Door, as well as films like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. It also upped the sales of Ivory Snow considerably, lol, though they were not happy about the association and ultimately pulled the product with Chambers' face on it from the shelves. Talk about being counterproductive to one's sales.
Chambers continued to work in porn for the next few years, all the while looking for mainstream Hollywood work. One potential project, City Blues, fell apart when the director, Nicholas Ray, died, while another, Goin' South (which sounds like a porn), went south when director Jack Nicholson- yes, that one, as seen above- along with musician Art Garfunkel (as in Simon and...), grilled her about whether she was faking her orgasms or not in her movies and she stormed off. Although that film was eventually made, and was not very good, IMHO.
To add insult to injury, she was rejected for a prime role in the dark flick Hardcore, about a father (George C. Scott) whose daughter gets involved with shooting hardcore porn and he tries to stop it, but the director thought Chambers was too "wholesome" for the role!
That one got made as well, with Season Hubley in the role intended for Chambers, and it's well-worth seeing- though it's not exactly pro-porn, if you're a fan of such films. (Not sure what it says about Hubley, either, given that it implies that she's less wholesome than an actual porn star!)
At long last, in 1976, Chambers finally came up a winner when she was cast in Rabid, thanks to Reitman and Dunning's support. Cronenberg is still enthusiastic about her work in his film and goes on at length about it in the commentary, lamenting that her mainstream career never quite took off.
Chambers is genuinely excellent in the film, especially in her final scenes. But Hollywood wasn't kind to her initially, and she turned to, of all things, stage-work, instead, having a moderate bit of success in Vegas in several long-running plays, including a turn in Neil Simon's Last of the Red-Hot Lovers.
She also dabbled in music, singing lead in a country band called Haywire, and doing some of the theme songs for some of her porn films, including Insatiable and its sequel. She also had a modest hit with the disco track, "Benihana," which is featured in Rabid- it's the song Hart listens to in his garage while working on a motorcycle.
Porn stars going into music was a bit of a thing at the time- see also the even bigger hit, Andrea True's "More More More," which people my age probably know better from being sampled in Len's "Steal My Sunshine." And, more recently, both Traci Lords (notably "Control," which was featured in Mortal Kombat) and Sasha Grey (here's a short mix of her stuff on YouTube) dabbled in disco's modern equivalent, techno. All of the above are fun listens.
Chambers also wrote several books, two of which I have, including My Story, her autobiography, and one with sex worker Xaviera Hollander, aka "The Happy Hooker," Xaviera Meets Marilyn Chambers. Both are interesting reads. She also wrote regular columns for men's magazines like Club and Genesis, and the text for an illustrated Kama Sutra (if you have to ask... 😉).
She continued to do porn until the AIDS crisis hit, after which she only acted occasionally in more mainstream films, with Angel of H.E.A.T. (with cult classic Queen Mary Woronov) possibly being a familiar one to some fellow 80's kids, from its constant airing on Skinemax, along with the lesser-known Bikini Bistro, Party Incorporated and Breakfast in Bed.
Chambers also ran for Vice President in 2006 on the Libertarian ticket and again in 2008. Just think of how much cooler the world would be had she succeeded. 😭 She died of an aneurysm in 2009, sadly, a year after completing her final film, Solitaire.
Her leading man in Rabid was Frank Moore, a vet of Cronenberg's The Italian Machine short for the Canadian TV series Teleplay, where he also played a biker. The Canadian actor had been kicking around since the early 70's, before his career started to take off around 1976, in which he received a Best Supporting Actor Canadian Film Award for his role in the movie The Far Shore.
After working with Cronenberg in two back-to-back projects, he received a nomination for Best Actor from the Canadian Film Academy for 1978's The Third Walker, a "switched at birth" tale before that was a common thing in (Lifetime) movies.
After that, he started to get more work in America, including the thrillers Stone Cold Dead, Thrillkill, Street Justice, the rats-gone-amok horror sequel Food of the Gods II (aka Gnaw), Replikator, the vampire comedy Blood & Donuts, the underrated action cult classic The Long Kiss Goodnight (with Fly star Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson), Murder at 1600, Seeds of Doubt, The Samaritan (also with Jackson), The Devil in Me, Devil's Mile and roles in the TV shows Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Earth: The Final Conflict and, more recently, Killjoys (that's him in that show in the above pic).
Moore wasn't the only vet from Cronenberg's films in Rabid. From the top, in the above pictures, there was also Joe Silver (Shivers) as the affable Murray Cypher; Victor Désy (Scanners) as health expert Claude LaPointe; Gary McKeehan (The Italian Machine, The Brood) as Smooth Eddy, the ill-fated trucker that picks up Rose; Greg Van Riel (Dead Ringers) as the man that tries to ply Rose with cigarettes at the mall; Jérôme Tiberghien (Scanners, he also did stunts for The Dead Zone) as Dr. Karl; Peter MacNeill (Crash, A History of Violence) as one of the men at the trucking load-out; Robert A. Silverman (The Brood, Scanners, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ and Jason X, which Cronenberg acted in) as the man in the hospital with Lloyd; Sonny Forbes (Shivers, Scanners) as the Police Captain; and a final farewell to Cronenberg's former leading man Ron Mlodzik (Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers, Secret Weapons) as a bemused patient at the Keloid Clinic- it would also prove to be his last role ever, sadly, as he retired to become a college professor shortly thereafter.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention some other familiar faces, particularly Allan Moyle as the man Rose picks up in the lobby of her friend's apartment building and goes home with, thus sealing her fate. Moyle would go on to become a respected director in his own right of such cult classics as Times Square (very underrated, with Tim Curry), Pump Up The Volume, Empire Records and several other solid flicks.
Other actors worth a mention include Una Kay (Stranger in the House, Eye of the Beholder) as Jackie; Mark Walker (The Vindicator, Disconnected, Hemlock Grove) as Steve; Riva Spier (Ghostkeeper, Syngenor) as Cecile; Patricia Gage (American Psycho) as Dr. Keloid's wife and Lynne Deragon (American Psycho II, Falling Skies) as Nurse Louise.
As I mentioned, there was a book based on the film, rather than the other way around. As my fellow novelization fans already know, these books tended to be based on early drafts of movie scripts, so that they could be released in tandem with the films, which is why they often feature scenes that were not in the movies they represented. Basically, the literary equivalents of a deleted scene. For instance, if you ever wondered about the mention of the octopus at the end of The Goonies, read the novelization - it's still in there.
While future novelizations will yield much more of this sort of thing for Cronenberg's films- especially Videodrome, if I remember correctly- the one for Rabid is pretty straightforward and true to the movie version. There's a lovemaking scene at the beginning- perhaps Cronenberg thought it was too on the nose to get Chambers naked that early on in the film and scrapped it- and we get a bit more of LaPointe and the goings-on of the World Health Organization (another thing that made me think of our current situation, needless to say) as the crisis turns into a full-blown epidemic in Canada, but that's about it, really.
Still, for fans, it's worth a read, as some of the scenes read a lot scarier than they played in the film, such as the hot tub attack and the bit at Cypher's house. You can also get the screenplays for Rabid and some of Cronenberg's other early work (including Shivers) in a compendium, which you can order here. The novelization is a bit harder to find, but eBay and Amazon are a good place to start- I got mine on the former.
The film itself is readily available on DVD and Blu-Ray, including a Collector's Edition with lots of bonuses, with the aforementioned director's commentary, from Shout Factory, via their horror wing, Scream Factory. You can find that here, as well as the obvious places like Amazon. It's also readily available via streaming, including Roku, which is where I watched it- their version was actually a better picture quality than my DVD! (And it has subtitles, unlike the DVD or Blu-Ray, for those who care.)
Overall, this is easily Cronenberg's most accomplished work of his early years, and a definite sign of what's to come in the following years, as Cronenberg came into his own in earnest. By the time he gets to The Brood, his inclinations towards playing things a bit more broad and darkly comedic start to go away in earnest, so Rabid is not quite as effective as that film or the likes of Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly, but with this film, he's definitely getting there, making it an important step in his evolution as a filmmaker.
It's my personal favorite of his early years, and in spite of the fact that it's impossible to watch it now without tying it into current events, it's still a lot of fun, especially if you view it as a sort of zombie film in the vein of The Crazies or the 28 Days Later franchise, and a companion piece to Cronenberg's Shivers, as he intended, having written them both around the same time.
It's also the first of his films to have been remade, by the infamous Soska sisters, and I'll be taking a look at that remake next- for the first time, I might add- in a special bonus edition of The Cronenberg Chronicles. I figure I owe you guys for all the unintended hiatuses I've had to take to help out around the house and the like.
Keep an eye out for it, hopefully sooner than later! 😉
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