Director: David Cronenberg
Year Released: 1977
Rating: 3.0
The young girl getting (another) nose job at her father's request is sporting a copy of Freud, and tells the nurse something like 'I hate to know what this means' - this is Cronenberg's little intellectual tip-off to everybody that there's a purpose to all the chaos. The casting of a porn star (Marilyn Chambers) as the 'heroine' was no mistake - Rabid is as much about phallic empowerment and promiscuity as it is about gore and violence. After she's involved in a motorcycle accident that leads to doctors using a groundbreaking skin grafting technique on her (read: man tinkering absent-mindedly with science), she develops a hole under her armpit that contains a penis-like organ with a needle on the end of it that can give people an incurable form of rabies (it sounds funny, but is unsettling to look at) - eventually, the disease spreads, and people begin going mad, passing it on to one another. It does not possess the level of manic energy Cronenberg's first film, Shivers, did (although it bears more than a few similarities to that picture), but is still a shining star in the Canadian director's filmography.
