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Okay, this marks the last of my "horror movie" outings for the time being as the festival I was seeing them at concluded today. Apart from a second theatrical viewing of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead last night (which I already wrote up and since nothing has changed, I won't bother writing any more), the last film I managed to see was...
SHIVERS
David Cronenberg, 1975
I managed to see three of the four Cronenberg films that showed at this festival (the exception being The Brood, which I missed out on in favour of Halloween). After catching Videodrome and The Fly, which I liked and disliked respectively, I got to see Cronenberg's feature-length debut, Shivers.
Shivers is set in an upper-class apartment complex in Montreal. A series of strange occurrences (a fight that leads to murder-suicide, several men heading to the doctor with odd lumps in their stomachs, etc) all build up to revealing something dangerous - a mad scientist's creation of bizarre slug-like parasites that infect ordinary people and transform them into animalistic sex fiends. Not only do people end up being infected by the parasites themselves, but they also infect each other through sexual contact.
The film works on a very similar basis to a zombie or body-snatcher film, except it's given an interesting twist by Cronenberg's trademark "sex is dangerous" theme. Whereas with a typical horror film, the obvious danger is that the threat presented in the film will wipe out humanity (or at the very least the cast of the film in question) by killing or assimilating them into something inhuman, the strange thing about the parasites/infected people in Shivers is that they don't actually do either of them, but rather just "simplify" humanity down to only ever acting out of a basic desire for sex. Cronenberg goes all-out in his depiction of sexual desire gone wild, and some of it can be confronting - to various degrees, the film touches on homosexuality, pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism and more. It can often be as funny as it is disturbing, often at the same time. The funny thing is that most of the people who end up dying in the film do so at the hands of the ostensible hero (with the exception being an accidental death caused by trying to stop the hero leaving), and while the instinct-driven behaviour of the infected results in the total breakdown of modern society (both in the complex and, as the ending implies, in the outside world as well), I almost got the impression that it's a happy ending, as everyone forgets the hassles of everyday life and descends into a massive orgy.
Being a Cronenberg film, Shivers is a particularly decent satire and I have to admit, I found it particularly scary during the first third of the film or so. I find it interesting that I managed to be more disturbed/anxious as a result of the simplistic special effects used to make the parasite (which resembles a small, reddish-brown chunk of octopus tentacle and leaves bloody trails wherever it goes) than by any of the mutations in The Fly, but that's just me I guess. I also find that Shivers is also, like a lot of these films, full to the brim of various funny moments. Whether it's the hero punching his newly-infected love interest in the face (an act which got riotous laughter and applause for its sheer inanity) or the lunacy of some of the infected people and their behaviour, it's damned funny. I remember seeing most of John Waters' A Dirty Shame, which shares a roughly similar premise (where ordinary people end up developing bizarre sexual urges after getting concussions), but I don't remember it being as laugh-out-loud hilarious as this, an admittedly more serious and less trashy take on the topic.
I know that, as with virtually every film in Cronenberg's filmography, Shivers is definitely not for everyone. It's disturbing, blackly comic yet potent, and it was an interesting film to end this horror festival with.
GRADE: B
SHIVERS
David Cronenberg, 1975
I managed to see three of the four Cronenberg films that showed at this festival (the exception being The Brood, which I missed out on in favour of Halloween). After catching Videodrome and The Fly, which I liked and disliked respectively, I got to see Cronenberg's feature-length debut, Shivers.
Shivers is set in an upper-class apartment complex in Montreal. A series of strange occurrences (a fight that leads to murder-suicide, several men heading to the doctor with odd lumps in their stomachs, etc) all build up to revealing something dangerous - a mad scientist's creation of bizarre slug-like parasites that infect ordinary people and transform them into animalistic sex fiends. Not only do people end up being infected by the parasites themselves, but they also infect each other through sexual contact.
The film works on a very similar basis to a zombie or body-snatcher film, except it's given an interesting twist by Cronenberg's trademark "sex is dangerous" theme. Whereas with a typical horror film, the obvious danger is that the threat presented in the film will wipe out humanity (or at the very least the cast of the film in question) by killing or assimilating them into something inhuman, the strange thing about the parasites/infected people in Shivers is that they don't actually do either of them, but rather just "simplify" humanity down to only ever acting out of a basic desire for sex. Cronenberg goes all-out in his depiction of sexual desire gone wild, and some of it can be confronting - to various degrees, the film touches on homosexuality, pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism and more. It can often be as funny as it is disturbing, often at the same time. The funny thing is that most of the people who end up dying in the film do so at the hands of the ostensible hero (with the exception being an accidental death caused by trying to stop the hero leaving), and while the instinct-driven behaviour of the infected results in the total breakdown of modern society (both in the complex and, as the ending implies, in the outside world as well), I almost got the impression that it's a happy ending, as everyone forgets the hassles of everyday life and descends into a massive orgy.
Being a Cronenberg film, Shivers is a particularly decent satire and I have to admit, I found it particularly scary during the first third of the film or so. I find it interesting that I managed to be more disturbed/anxious as a result of the simplistic special effects used to make the parasite (which resembles a small, reddish-brown chunk of octopus tentacle and leaves bloody trails wherever it goes) than by any of the mutations in The Fly, but that's just me I guess. I also find that Shivers is also, like a lot of these films, full to the brim of various funny moments. Whether it's the hero punching his newly-infected love interest in the face (an act which got riotous laughter and applause for its sheer inanity) or the lunacy of some of the infected people and their behaviour, it's damned funny. I remember seeing most of John Waters' A Dirty Shame, which shares a roughly similar premise (where ordinary people end up developing bizarre sexual urges after getting concussions), but I don't remember it being as laugh-out-loud hilarious as this, an admittedly more serious and less trashy take on the topic.
I know that, as with virtually every film in Cronenberg's filmography, Shivers is definitely not for everyone. It's disturbing, blackly comic yet potent, and it was an interesting film to end this horror festival with.
GRADE: B