Shivers (1975), 7/10 Rabid (1977), 6.9/10 The Brood (1979), 6.7/10 Fast Company (1979), 5/10 Scanners (1981), 6.5/10 Videodrome (1983), 7.4/10 The Dead Zone (1983), 6/10 The Fly (1986), 6/10 Dead Ringers (1988), 7.2/10 Naked Lunch (1991), 6.5/10 M. Butterfly (1993), 6/10 Crash (1996), 7.3/10 eXistenZ (1999), 6.8/10 Spider (2002), 6.8/10 A History of Violence (2005), 7.1/10 Eastern Promises (2007), 6.5/10 A Dangerous Method (2011), 6/10 Cosmopolis (2012), 6.6/10 Maps to the Stars (2014), 6.2/10 | Links: |
David Cronenberg, after two experimental short films in his native Toronto, Crimes of the Future (1970) and Stereo, directed the horror-sexual orgy Shivers (1975), also known as They Came From Within, a wild merry-go-round of rape, bestiality, pedophilia and murder. Rabid (1976) is inspired by Romero's Night Of The Living Dead (1968).
A young man and a young woman are riding on a motorcycle in the countryside
when they collide with a van that got stuck in the middle of the road.
The motorcycle explodes: the young man survives almost unhurt, but the woman
survives and is transported in terminal conditions to a nearby hospital
specializing in plastic surgery. The doctors operate but she remains in
a coma.
Brood (1979) is a psychological thriller that aims at placing terror in the realm of private traumas. While less successful than Rabid, it experiments with stereotypes that Cronenberg will reprise later.
Nola is a divorcee, mentally instable, and cared by a creepy Dr. Raglan in
his private hospital in the woods. Raglan's
innovative technique consists in reviving the anger that drove people mad.
Nola's ex-husband Frank takes care of their little daughter.
Fast Company (1979) is a detour into drag racing. Scanners (1981) is a sci-fi horror film. Videodrome (1983) mixes pornography, sadomasochism, mind control, and media, and the plot is a Moebius strip, an endless cycle of hallucination and reality. We have no idea what really happened and what was just a hallucination. The Dead Zone (1983) is an adaptation of a Stephen King story. The Fly (1986) was a sensational remake of the 1958 horror film. Dead Ringers (1988) was adapted from Bari Wood's and Jack Geasland's novel "Twins". Two twins have become the world's leading experts on sexual diseases, honored with awards and honors. They live together and share everything, even girls, to whom they are morbidly attracted. Beverly is a real surgeon; Elliot spends most of his time giving seminars. One day they are introduced to a new client, an actress who wants at all costs to have a child. The twins discover what other gynecologists had not: that her uterus is deformed. This triggers the twins' lust. First it is Elliot who takes advantage of it. Then Beverly even falls madly in love with him. But Claire discovers that he has a brother, and a twin to boot, and on top of that they live together. Claire senses the truth and Elliot candidly confesses. Elliot is amused, but Beverly is instead devastated. Elliot is cold and cynical, but Beverly is emotional and sensitive. Claire has the unintended effect of gradually detaching Beverly from Elliot (the nightmare of her biting the umbilical cord). When Claire leaves her for a few days to go on a film shoot, Beverly goes mad with loneliness. First she takes drugs, then she begs an artist to make instruments to study mutant women and botches some operations. Elliot tries to help him, but in turn is affected by his madness, as if the blood of one flows into that of the other. They therefore decide to separate, as if they had always been Siamese twins, with a complicated operation. Naked Lunch (1991) is a bold rendition of William Burroughs' novel. The director manages to turn the delirious narrative into a more or less linear plot. Basically, Cronenberg interprets Burroughs' novel literally: what was a series of delirious drug visions turns into a sci-fi epic. The film's main drawback is that it flows at a terribly slow pace. But one day William finds his wife in bed (or better, on the couch) with a friend and kills her. Wanted by the police, William trades his gun for a typewriter and escapes to the InterZone, a decadent, labyrinthine Arab city. He is welcome by a green reptile, the Mugwump, who asks him to write a daily report on his experiences in the Interzone. His typewriter turns into a bug with the mouth of a vulva that encourages him to engage in homosexuality. As he wanders from bar to bar, William realizes that the Interzone has a vast supply of cute boys. One of them, Kiki, becomes his lover. William feels lonely and would like to escape from the Interzone. His life is now invaded by bugs: a black centipede crawls in the shower, two typewriters turn into bugs and engage in a bloody fight,... His talking typewriter tells him to seduce Joan, the sophisticated wife of writer Tom, herself a writer, who can actually write arabic on an odd typewriter that opens like a vagina. As he talks to her she gets excited. They make love but are interrupted by her jealous nazi housekeeper, Fadela, who practices magic in order to control Joan. Her husband Tom does not seem to mind the love affair, but he wants William to return the typewriter he borrowed. William's friends Hank and Martin arrive in Interzone and witness William's unhappiness. They leave and warn William to return as soon as he has finished his novel. William meets Yves, a dandy who befriends him. The Mugwump appears in William's room and warns him that Yves can turn into a centipede. William lets Yves take him for a ride in the countryside. Yves seduces William's gay lover Kiki but, when they have sex, they turn into a monster. William pursues Joan at the meatmarket of the mugwumps (where their blood is used as a drug). They meet Fadela, who pulls out her skin and reveals herself to be Dr Benway in disguise. William gets his permission to elope with Joan. William and Joan jump on a tank and drive towards the border. Border guards demand that William proves he is truly a writer. Instead, William shoots Joan in the head, just like he did with his wife, and the border guard tells him "welcome to Annexia". M. Butterfly (1993) is a diligent adaptation of David Henry Hwang's Tony-winning play. Crash (1996), from J.G. Ballard's science fiction novel, is a glorification of sex and cars, the mythological foundations of so much Hollywood cinema, in a a dark, mysterious, brooding tone (a Twin Peaks-kind of atmosphere), obsessively showing devastating crashes and visceral sex. All four characters are obsessed with each other's body and car. James is driving recklessly (he was trying to reach for some of his porno material) and hits a car. The driver is ejected into his windshield and dies. The wife, Helen, is paralyzed in her seat (unfastens her seatbelt and so exposes her breast). James is hospitalized with a broken leg and is cared by his icy and sexy lover, Catherine. Helen is hospitalized in the same hospital. Back at home, James watches traffic from the balcony through a binocular, always cared for by his sensual girlfriend in an almost fatal/noir tone. James meets Helen when they both visit their cars at the junkyard. Helen is cold but polite and accepts a ride in his car. After he almost killed them in another accident, the two make love in the car. At home, James then has sex with Catherine on an armchair. Helen takes James to see a show organized by her friend Vaughan, whom she met at the hospital. Vaughan, scarred and limping, hires stunt drivers to recreate famous car crashes, in the middle of the night in remote locations. The audience pays just to see them crash into one another at high-speed. The police send them home. One of the actors is hurt. Vaughan drives James and Helen and in the car he touches the woman who enjoys it. At Vaughan's home they meet Vaughan's bizarre and crippled girlfriend, Gabrielle, whose legs are broken and kept together by steel ligaments. Vaughan is an amateur scientist who is a car-crash fetishists: he is fascinated by wounds, the way a voyeur would be fascinated by sex. James alternates his sexual performances between Catherine (at home) and Helen (in the car), wild with the former and casual with the latter. Vaughan's group of friends constitute de facto a group of cultists, who spend evenings watching videos of car crashes and getting excited. Helen almost gets an orgasm watching one video, while she touches Gabrielle and is touched by James. Vaughan and James hire a prostitute: while James drives the convertible, Vaughan makes love to her in the back seat. Then the two men pick up Catherine and drive by a huge accident, Vaughan taking pictures of the wreckage while firemen try to rescue the passengers still trapped in the twisted metal. The car is stained with blood and they decide to drive to a carwash. Vaughan and the icy Catherine make love in the back seat while the car is enveloped in steamy soap. At night Catherine is covered with bruises and like in a trance while James makes love to her at home. James accompanies Gabrielle to a car dealer where she tries a new car, while exposing as much as possible of her crunt to the salesperson. James and Gabrielle make love in the car, despite the devices at her legs. Later, Vaughan and James make love in the convertible, with James fascinated by Vaughan's steering wheel tattoo. The "sex" continues when the two are in two separate cars and Vaughan hits James' car over and over again. The two couples drive recklessly until the car with Vaughan and Gabrielle crashes down a bridge (Catherine is almost having an orgasm). Helen and Gabrielle visit the wrecked car of Vaughan and make love in it. James chases Catherine. The woman's car crashes. James lies next to her, who is fatally wounded, and makes love to her under the wreckage. Existenz (1999), or eXistenZ, is an apocalyptic film about virtual reality. Like Crash, the film is laden with sexual innuendos. The theme is half way between Kate Bigelow's Strange Days and The Matrix. And the film is as loaded with special effects. The ending redeems the rest of the film. The many twists and turns are not only confusing but also badly realized. The ending, however, makes sense of everything. At the motel where they hide she discovers that he does not have a "bio-port" (a hole in the spine) to download games into his body (he is still a virgin: he has never played any game). Unfortunately, the only way to determine whether the game is still functioning is to play it: Ted must get a bio-port. They drive to a gas station and ask the owner, who recognizes Allegra and gets on his knees in adoration, to perform an illegal operation on Ted, while someone is spying on them. Strange animals wonder around the gas station. As soon as Ted's bio-port is ready, Allegra plugs her unit into Ted, but the bio-port causes a short and the unit gets damaged: Allegra is very upset because it contains the only complete copy of eXistenZ. She blames the short on Ted's nervousness, but the owner of the gas station shows up with a gun (is this already part of the game? still part of the previous game?) and declares his intention to kill her because there is a bounty on her head. It is crucial to repair the unit in order to rescue the original copy of the game. Allegra and Ted seek out an expert, Kiri, who lives alone in the woods, where more of those strange amphibians live. Kiri operates (like a surgeon) on the unit (that looks like an internal organ) and finally Allegra and Ted can play the game together (or at they already playing it?), although it is not clear what the game is ("you have to play the game in order to find out why we are playing the game"). The scene changes suddenly to a video store. Ted feels like himself but his character takes over his personality (Allegra is explaining how the game works while they are playing it). One of the characters gives them the devices that let them enter the virtual reality. The effect of these devices is to make the holes disappear and make the bodies intact again. Suddenly, they feel a sexual urge. AS the orgasm is still going on, Ted finds himself transformed into a worker in a trout farm, where the units of the game are assembled out of frogs and fish organs. A collegue sends him to the Chinese restaurant and tells him to order the special. Ted finds Allegra in the farm and together they follow the others (who walk like zombies) to the Chinese restaurant. Ted orders the special. The other workers leave the restaurant, obviously not excited about the special. Ted asks to pause the game for a second and they return to the cabin where they are playing. But now Ted is no longer sure that this is reality: everything feels like a game and Allegra feels like a character to him. She kisses him and brings him back into the game. The special turns out to be a plate of disgusting organs. As Ted eats them, he finds the same weird gun that was used against Allegra and a bridge of teeth that fits perfectly inside the gun. He loads it and feels the urge to kill the waiter. The other waiters and guests briefly stop but then get back to their business. Another character explains to Ted why he had to kill the waiter: the trout farm belongs to a rival game firm. They are in the middle of an industrial espionage conspiracy. Another character tells them that the waiter was their contact and Ted was induced to kill him by a double agent (the previous character). When they find a diseased unit, Allegra feels the irresistible urge to plug into it. She starts shivering. Ted cuts her loose and she starts bleeding. The supposed double agent burns the diseased unit and saves Allegra's life. Instead of being grateful, Allegra stabs the man to dead. As the man drops dead, the fire spreads throughout the farm. (Note: if this is a video game, it is really a lousy one). Suddenly, Allegra and Ted are back to the cabin. They brought back the disease and the disease has now infected Allegra's precious, original unit. Ted's bio-port is badly infected: Kiri, obviously a double-crosser, planted the disease into him so he would spread it to Allegra's unit and destroy it. A bomb blows up the door of the cabin and a game character breaks in brandishing a machine gun. He shoots Allegra's unit, but Ted realizes that they must still be inside the game (the shooter is a game character, after all). Outside there a battle is raging, with grenades and machine guns. The game character leads them to safety but then points the gun to Allegra, determined to shoot the famous game designer. Before he can pull trigger, Kiri shoots him from behind. Allegra is not relieved at all: she has lost her game, as the original unit perished in the fire. But Kiri reveals that he had copied her game already: Existenz is safe in his laboratory. Kiri is defecting to the rival firm and begs Allegra to join them. Allegra grabs the machine gun and kills him. Now it's Ted's turn to grab the machine gun and point it against Allegra: he is one of "them" too (that's why he didn't have a bio-port) and has played along only to understand the character he has to kill. Now it's Allegra's turn to surprise him: Allegra knew all along he was paid to kill her and has planted a bomb in his bio-port, which she now detonates. Ted is dead, as the battle is still raging all around them. Allegra has won the game. Suddenly, we are back to the first scene: the twelve volunteers have completed the experiment successfully. The twelve volunteers were the twelve characters of the game (of this film). Allegra herself is but one of the twelve volunteers, impersonating the game designer, who is in reality a brilliant young man. He congratulates the twelve volunteers for playing a great game, but is worried that the game was unusually violent against the designer. And, sure enough, Allegra and Ted turn out to be two anti-game terrorists who pull out their pistols and shoot him dead in order to avenge the suffering he has inflicted on mankind. As they are about to go on a killing spree, the Chinese who played the waiter asks them if they are still in a game... Spider (2002) A History of Violence (2005) is a liberal adaptation of John Wagner's and Vince Locke's graphic novel "A History of Violence" (1997). Cronenberg adds a perverted sexual element that doesn't quite fit, but also cunningly twists the old theme of the innocent naive man forced by circumstances to become a killer (except that in this case he is indeed a killer). Countless western movies had as protagonist a John Wayne or similar actor who had renounced violence and was forced to take up arms again for a good cause. In this case the good cause is simply to defend the second life that the protagonist built for himself. There is also a psychoanalytic element of doppelganger that harks back to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll. Another little girl, Sara, wakes up scared: she dremead of monsters. Her father Tom, her mother Evie and her older brother Jack come to reassure her that there are not monsters. Tom owns a diner in a small peaceful provincial town. Jack plays baseball with his high-school friends and happens to catch the ball that makes him team win. A bully playing for the other team confronts him in the gym but Jack refuses to fight. In the evening the wife picks Tom up and wants to have a romantic evening because the children is out. She dresses like a teenage cheerleader and they have sex. The next day Jack is smoking a cigarette with his girlfriend. The bully sees him while he is driving by and tries to steer the car towards him but almost hits the van in which the two psychos are entering town. One look is enough to convince him not to argue with them. The two are broke again. They walk into Tom's diner and order coffee even though Tom tells them that he is closing the restaurant. Sensing trouble, he tells the waitress to go home but one of the robbers grabs her and the other one orders him to rape her. Tom quickly hits the latter with the coffee kettle, grabs his gun and shoots both robbers dead. Tom is a well-respected family man and now also becomes a local hero. The media descend on the town to interview him but he shuns publicity. Nonetheless, the media post his face all over the country. At home Tom sees a black car driving by. One day a sinister man shows up at the restaurant, scarred gangster names Fogarty, who addresses Tom as "Joey" and tells him that they met in Philadelphia. Tom denies being Joey and ever been in Philadelphia. The mobster removes his sunglasses and shows Tom his disfigured eye: Joey tried to egg it out of his face years ealier. Tom still denies being Joey and asks him to leave the restaurant. Evie calls Sam the town's sheriff who follows the man's black car and pulls him over, and tells him not to show up again. Sam digs up that they this Fogarty is a dangerous mobster. Sam asks Tom if he is on a witness protection plan, which Tom vehemently denies. Tom sees the mobster's car again and runs after the car, thinking that they may be going to his house and calls his wife to be ready. His wife frantically loads the rifle but the only one to show up is Tom, panting. Tom is right to be worried because one day Fogarty follows Evie and her daughter into a mall. Evie suddenly realizes that her daughter is missing and runs out barefoot looking for her. She finds it with Fogarty who, again, tells her that her husband Tom is his Joey, and that this Joey scarred his face. At school the bully attacks Jack again and this time Jack ferociously beats him up. Tom gets very angry at him and Jack, who feels this is unfair, runs out of the house. Evie tells Tom that she saw the mobster at the mall. Just then Fogarty shows up with two henchmen and with Jack as a hostage, demanding that Joey follow them to Philadelphia. Tom kills the two henchemen with gangster-style dextery but Fogarty wounds him. Tom is lying on the floor and admits being Joey. Fogarty is about to finish him when Jack shoots him dead with the family's rifle, thus saving his father's life. Wounded, the father spends a few days at the hospital. Here he finally confesses to his wife who has seen him perform those develish moves and shoot with such accuracy: he is indeed Joey, a former gangster. She walks out crying and he cries too. Back home, Jack is hostile because he has learned that his father is a former mobster. Sam comes to talk to him again. He is now even more suspicious but, just when Tom is about to confess the truth, Evie wife surprisingly defends Tom, presumably to defend her children. After Sam leaves them alone, she slaps Tom and they fight, but the fight ends with wild sex on the stairs to the bedroom, as if she actually enjoyed the idea of making love with a maniac. In the middle of the night Tom receives a call from his brother Richie, who is still a mobster, and he too demands his return to Philadelphia. Tom drives in the dark and meets Richie in his big mansion. Richie remembers Tom being the craziest of all hitmen. Richie tells him that the mob punished him for Tom's actions. Richie tells him that the only way to make amend is to die and his henchman tries to strangle Tom right where he is sitting. Tom manages to free himself and kill all of Richie's henchman while Richie is shooting at him. Then Tom kills Richie in cold blood. It is now sunrise and he walks out wounded to a lake, throws the gun in the lake and washes the blood off his face. He drives back home and arrives in the evening where Evie and the children are eating dinner. His little girl adds a plate on the table for him, and his son passes him the food. Evie and Tom stare at each other in pain. Eastern Promises (2007) is a mediocre gangster thriller that is often implausible and is not well acted. It does offer a couple of shocking moments that should make it particularly gripping but in general fails to capitalize on them. A Dangerous Method (2011) is an adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play. Cosmopolis (2012) is an adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel. Maps to the Stars (2014) Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (2023) is a 4-minute short. |
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