"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Rabid

Maybe it’s sacrilege to remake a David Cronenberg movie, but if somebody’s gonna do it it’s fitting that it’s weird Canadian twins. I really liked Jen and Sylvia Soska’s extreme-surgery underworld tale AMERICAN MARY, and kind of liked their SEE NO EVIL 2. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Cronenberg’s 1977 RABID, so I don’t remember it well enough to have any specific expectations for a redo.

This RABID is about Rose (Laura Vandervoort, THE LOOKOUT, INTO THE BLUE 2: THE REEF), a lowly employee for a pretentious, obnoxious, and on-the-nose-German-accented fashion designer named Gunter (Mackenzie Gray, JOY RIDE 2: DEAD AHEAD, Legion, WARCRAFT, MAN OF STEEL, True Justice). In tribute to the original’s motorcycle she rides a scooter.

It’s one of those things where they cast an unusually beautiful TV star to play an awkward misfit who everybody picks on, the excuse I guess being that her co-workers are supposed to be mostly models. I had a hard time watching adults act out these teen movie tropes such as the ol’ ’getting mad when she finds out the cute boy only asked her out as a favor to someone who feels sorry for her’ and of course the ‘overhearing the mean girls talk shit about her when they don’t know she’s in the bathroom stall.’ Maybe it’s meant as a satirical statement about the fashion industry to make them this petty and childish, but it feels phony to me.

If you know the original movie, you know she’s gonna get something a little worse than rabies. They go for all the cliches about how turning into a monster will make her more aggressive and that will help her career and what not. (See also: WOLF.) Suddenly the asshole boss will notice her and use her designs. Since part of the affliction involves drinking blood, they do that old saw of making her start out as a vegetarian, information that gets shoehorned in in a conversation at work. I wouldn’t mind if not for the part where somebody asks what she eats instead of meat and she says, “Oh, you know… organics.”

What, you couldn’t come up with a specific food for her to enjoy?! Maybe that’s some kind of Canadian thing I don’t understand, but it seems to me like the Soskas hate the idea of vegetarians so much they put their foot down at meeting one or doing any research.

Luckily it gets more interesting and uncharted after Rose has her (awkwardly offscreen) scooter accident and has to try to go on living in a hipster loft with the charity and saintly non-freaked-outness of her friend/foster sister Chelsea (Hanneke Talbot, READY OR NOT). Rose’s toothy, scraped-off face is legitimately upsetting to look at even before she tries to suck blended food through a tube into her stapled jaw and can’t keep it down. So you gotta respect the Soskas for not fucking around here. They’re not gonna let us get off easy for watching this.

Rose becomes a patient at a weird exclusive clinic. I liked the crimson robes some of the staff wear that look more ritualistic than medical, seemed creepy and weird in a legit Cronenberg way, and then I realized that’s just because it’s a DEAD RINGERS reference. Oh well. The doctor performs an experimental stem cell manipulation technique – stem cells explain everything in sci-fi now, they’re the new nano-tech – that miraculously repairs her face. The only catch is the crippling bloodthirst, some tentacles, and starting an outbreak of zombie-like monsters across the city. Before long she’s attacking some vain muscle dude in the pool – I sort of like the idea that as a soap star he gets an invite to come here to regenerate his aging flesh, or something.

The love interest Brad (Ben Hollingsworth, JOY RIDE 3: ROADKILL, COLD PURSUIT) has the blandly handsome look and leather jacket of a motorcycle-riding cool guy in a Lifetime movie. But I thought it was interesting that even though they’d only had one brief, abruptly ended date he sincerely wanted to keep seeing her after her face was horribly mutilated in the accident. And they don’t turn it into a weird fetish thing or anything. I didn’t entirely buy it, but it’s a more interesting choice than the obvious “he pretends like he still cares but is scared off” option.

There are a few attempts at cleverness that are… maybe not all the way there? It opens with Gunter complaining about the same ideas being done over and over, an obvious meta-commentary about the fact that you’re watching a remake. Not the end of the world, but I don’t think it works on a level other than the ol’ “if you point it out yourself then they can’t criticize it anymore,” which is kinda old hat I think. But at least it works better than calling the clinic The Burroughs Institute and the mad doctor Dr. William Burroughs (Ted Atherton, MAX PAYNE). There’s just no suspension of disbelief on that reference. It’s like having a character called “Steve Spielberg” as a subtle little easter egg nodding to one of your cinematic influences. The only way to not be taken out of the movie by it is to be a person who’s never heard of Burroughs.

When Rose becomes rabid or whatever her eyesight improves and she doesn’t have to wear glasses anymore. That made me think of SPIDER-MAN, but I figure it’s also probly been in some werewolf movies or something. So I thought it was funny that in an Eye For Film interview they talk about all their references to Cronenberg movies but also Sylvia says, “There’s alot of SPIDER-MAN 2 in there and it almost starts the exact same way.”

It’s a pretty good interview because there’s also a part where she also speaks the sentence, “I have a friend whos called Burns the Dragon and he’s a human transitioning into a dragon.”

The Soskas are wrestling fans, so they have two movies produced under the prestigious WWE Films Banner – SEE NO EVIL 2 and VENDETTA, a Dean Cain prison/revenge movie that I bought and watched and it was okay but I didn’t write anything down and now I would have to watch it again to review it. Anyway, this one has C.M. Punk in a small part as an asshole named Billy. I imagine he’s probly better in that other horror movie he had last year. The Soskas also give themselves their traditional cameo, but it should actually be a bigger part because they’re coke-snorting assholes who are gratuitously cruel to Rose but they don’t ever get to get rabidded.

They don’t do much of the armpit genitalia thing I remember from the original, but there’s plenty of strange shit. You know how those stem cells are. For sure my favorite thing about the movie is its enthusiasm for weird makeup FX, including lots of squealing tentacles and faces bursting out of gooey skinpiles like something from a Freddy dream. There’s kind of a Screaming Mad George feel to some of it, which goes a long way toward making up for the stuff that doesn’t work.

I mean, like, there’s a part where a guy does this for some reason:

So I gotta kinda like it.

The Soskas wrote the script along with John Serge, who previously wrote one episode each of Push, Nevada and Veronica Mars, plus the sorority themed horror movie DEAD ON CAMPUS and five made-for-TV thrillers: MY MOTHER’S SECRET, A SISTER’S REVENGE, KILLER MOM and PERFECT SOULMATE. Congratulations to him for getting out of that template for a minute.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 11th, 2020 at 7:23 am and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

8 Responses to “Rabid”

  1. It’s pretty good, not great. The last half hour when it gets weird I liked and wish it were more like that.

  2. I hope the Soskas never made the mistake of asking Cronenberg for his blessing. He apparently really hates the thought of having his movies remade by anybody.

  3. It would have been a GREAT movie, but suffers from an slow start, and a very unclear narrative. It’s a B movie that is done pretty well with a weak script
    That being said, but by the end it was all blood-soaked mayhem. The effects are good though and the gore is plenty.

  4. Who’s Burroughs? Just kidding.

    So this finally came out? I didn’t even know Scream Factory put out the Blu-Ray. I thought I was on their list. It’s streaming for free on Hoopla so I can watch it. I do like the Soskas.

  5. Anybody listen to the commentary on this one? The Soskas are charming as hell and I’ll always come out for them, but man, are they convinced they put a lot more into this movie than ever appears onscreen. They say stuff like, “The love interest is clearly a sociopath. He has to put on his human suit before every scene” and I’m like, “Really? Because I thought the character was just blandly acted and written without clear motivation.” Or “All of the doctors use fake names. That’s why ‘William Burroughs’ is such an obvious pseudonym.” And we were supposed to know this how…? They say something like this in nearly every scene. I’m sure they thought about all these layers of meaning and subtext quite a bit, but it mostly feels like they’re doing head canon on their own film. Maybe they should discuss this stuff with someone with whom they don’t have a near-telepathic bond that renders verbal communication almost redundant so they can be clear how many of their ideas are actually coming across. Maybe if they tried to communicate this stuff in English and not the secret language of twins then the rest of us would be able to share in it too.

    Anyway, it’s a decent movie. And I used to have a William S. Burroughs T-shirt so I should know.

  6. The Soskas are charming as hell

    Which is why they should have a Youtube show or something, perhaps talking about other people’s movies, because everything you go on to describe (talking about layers of depth that no doubt exist in their heads but otherwise is invisible onscreen) is sometimes referred to as “not real great at this filmmaking thing”

    Which… I’ve noticed is a nagging problem with their entirety of their output. Yet, they still put above-the-title “Another Twister Creation by the SOSKA SISTERS!” because well, they’re charming weird goth twins…

  7. They’re definitely not the greatest horror directors on the block, that’s for sure. I’ve never loved one of their movies (SEE NO EVIL 2 comes close) but there’s always something interesting about their point of view, even if they’re not always the best at getting that point of view across. I’ve watched the entire oeuvres of plenty of other directors for less than that, so I have no problem supporting their flawed but entertaining work.

  8. I agree with Majestyk…if I can enjoy William Castle or Charles Band I can appreciate the Soskas well enough. O mean the best part of William Castle’s movies we don’t get to even experience because it was all in the showmanship of the time, it ain’t in those movies.

    Never heard a commentary by the Soskas but they kind of sound like modern nerds…like the ones who think it’s awesome that the new Star Wars is full of holes because they can read three novelizations and ten comic books and eight tie-in games to get the rest of the story that no one thought was needed in the actual damn movie. It’s like they love detailed backstories and obscure canon that no one in their right mind would give two fucks about.

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