Rabid

As David Cronenberg's second distributed feature, RABID is a wonderfully textured and stylized testament of the seventies: one of the greatest manifestations of the decade by transposing all of the newly discovered realism into grungy settings. A free but actually useless protagonist on his motorcycle crashes when a family car gets in the way, sending his girlfriend into a coma. Futurist music glides over the steamed up streets and grungy malls of RABID and the girlfriend named Rose (porno actress Marilyn Chambers) gets an experimental skin graph at a doctor's clinic. She remains in a coma, but awakens sooner than the doctor's anticipated or know. Turns out the experimental procedure has rendered Rose a monster, a vampiric thirst for blood contrasted against her knowledge that what she does is wrong as she creates an epidemic of rabid, infectious creatures across town. Cronenberg keeps the monsters subdued though, looking more like fevered madmen than the easily describable zombies. But Cronenberg's aesthetic works wonderfully here, and the supposed hero of the film actually shows himself to be a weak loser, unable to do much and failing at every opprotunity. Instead, Rose is the complicated one who doesn't want to believe that she's created this disaster, and Chambers' rendition is perfectly directed, her curved lips making the perfect blood-thirsty femme fatale.

★★★ out of Five