Rabid (1977, David Cronenberg) (Patreon)

67/100

Second viewing, last seen 2002. I was a bit more keen on it back then, perhaps because I hadn't expected Chambers to be so creepily effective; if there's a distinction to be made between great acting and a great performance (and I'm never altogether certain whether there is), she embodies that distinction here. It's the same dichotomy that presumably made her a sensation at the dawn of porno chic: Her default look projects wholesome innocence, but she can summon a knowing, almost ravenous expression that works against it. (Cronenberg reportedly wanted Sissy Spacek, who opted for Carrie instead; while that result was best for all concerned—one film required an abrupt shift to nightmarishly freaky, the other a recurring shift to carnally hungry—I can see the broad similarity.) Chambers' face suggests impending carnage so plainly on its own that Rabid actually inverts the horror movie's standard trajectory, showing us Rose's attacks in detail early on (though the nature of her post-surgical...evolution allows Cronenberg to partially obscure the first few in what look like ordinary embraces), then switching to just the prelude and aftermath, letting Rose's predatory eyes and mouth do all the work. Usually it's the other way around, implicit --> explicit. I suspect that I was also very tickled, first time around, by the whole nutty idea of placing a phallic stinger emerging from a vaginal/anal orifice in somebody's armpit. It works fine onscreen, and I love the shot of Rose, interrupted feeding on her best friend, looking up from a crouched position with that bright-red mini-dick jutting from beneath her left arm, but it's hard to imagine the conversations that must have ensued when folks read the script. (Navel seems like the obvious spot, and Cronenberg more or less went that route, to different ends, in both Videodrome and Crimes of the Future '22.) 

What I have more trouble looking past now is the extent to which Rabid's narrative, despite the body-horror element and a (pretty vague) STD metaphor (repeated from Shivers), amounts to just vampire + Romero-style zombies, without adding any intriguing wrinkles to either subgenre. Granted, this was only nine years after Night of the Living Dead (even if the two feel decades removed to me, somehow), with Dawn still in the future; I'm not sure how many other movies had served up bite-transmitted homicidal plagues in the interim. Maybe that aspect was still somewhat fresh in '77. All the same, my engagement level reliably drops off whenever the movie abandons Rose to check in on some poor soul she "stung" hours earlier, who's now incubated the disease long enough to lunge violently at whoever's closest. Apart from one remarkably spectacular car crash (especially given the budget), it's all a bit tediously familiar. And it's not even terribly clear why Dr. Keloid's neutral tissue grafts constitute the sort of misguided tinkering that would create (biologically) or justify (thematically) what befalls Rose. This is arguably one of Cronenberg's least interesting films, even if I dig its warped conception of Typhoid Mary. But it's so damn assured, right from the jump—look at how Cronenberg separately establishes the Keloid Clinic and the speeding motorcycle, then links the two visually via a woman witnessing the explosion through binoculars, surgical bandages prominently visible at both sides of her nose—that I nonetheless still prefer it to many of his meatier but to my mind less coherent and less consistently, uh, engrossing efforts.