User Reviews

In Camelford, while swinging his van across a narrow road to make a u- turn, a driver stalls the vehicle that does not restart. Hart Read (Frank Moore) is driving his motorcycle with his girlfriend Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and he drives off the road to avoid the collision. Hart suffers minor injuries while Rosie is injured and burned by the flames when the motorcycle explodes. The ambulance from the nearby Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery brings the couple and Rose, who is in coma, is submitted to an emergency surgery and to an experimental plastic-surgery technique by Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) to retrieve her skin in the chest and abdomen. Hart is discharged but Rose stays in coma in the intensive care unit (ICU) to recover. Out of the blue, Rose awakens from her coma one month later and screams. A nurse helps her but is wounded by her and then he cannot remember what has happened to him. He is sent to a hospital in Montreal while Rose realizes that she needs to feed with blood. However her victims become zombie-like creatures. Rose flees from the clinic to Montreal to meet her friend Mindy Kent (Susan Roman) spreading her infection in the big city. Meanwhile Hart is seeking for her.

"Rabid" is a horror film by David Cronenberg that becomes better with time. In the present days, with so many news and unknown worldwide diseases, the idea of an infection that spreads in a geometric progression turning people into zombie-like creatures is totally feasible. Marilyn Chambers, from the cult adult film "Behind the Green Door", surprises with a good performance. The conclusion is deceptive and could be better, maybe due to lack of budget. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Enraivecida na Fúria do Sexo" ("Rabid in the Fury of Sex")

Rabid is set in Canada & starts as Hart Read (Hart Moore) & his girlfriend Rose (Marilyn Chambers) are riding a motorbike along a country road when they spin off the road & crash as Hart looses control of the bike while trying to avoid hitting a broken down camper van. The accident is seen by patients at the nearby Keloid Clinic who raise the alarm, with the nearest hospital miles away Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) decides to operate at his private clinic but uses new experimental skin grafts on Rose who has been badly injured in the crash. Rose makes a full recovery but the skin grafts have an unexpected & unwanted side-effect as a mutant growth under Rose's arm has developed & drinks human blood to survive. Rose now needs human blood to live although anyone that she drinks from then becomes infected with a rabies like disease that makes the carrier go crazy & seek human blood themselves. As the disease spreads the military place Montréal under martial law...

Also known under the title Rage this Canadian production was written & directed by David Cronenberg & Rabid was his second full length feature film after the successful yet controversial Shivers (1975), while not one of his best films Rabid is still a pretty good horror film with that added depth that Cronenberg likes to bring to his films. The sexual metaphors that Cronenberg was fond of putting into his films are clearly here with Rose seducing & enticing her victims like lovers, the round bodily orifice that the predatory organ shoots out of looks like an anus & maybe Cronenberg was thinking about the spread of sexual disease as the imagery & themes all fit together, however Rabid isn't as deep or shocking or relevant as many of his other films & the ideas that are brought up are never really explored with the same sort of perverse fascination that he does in some of his other films. Rabid just feels a bit empty as a Cronenberg film & the dialogue is also a bit dull at times & without purpose or biting social commentary that Cronenberg can excel in even though it's still probably better than many films out there. At 90 odd minutes the pace is a little slow at times but the build-up & spread of the disease is well handled which eventually leads to mass panic & martial law during the last half an hour, I also have to mention the very bleak, sudden & downbeat ending which I thought fitted the tone & style of the film perfectly as Rose was tossed away like a piece of trash. I liked Rabid, I didn't love it or think it was great Cronenberg but his films are never less than interesting.

Shot on a fairly low budget Rabid looks quite gritty & raw at times which helps the tone & feel of the film & suits the story. There's not much gore here, there are a few bites, a guy is gorily gunned down, someone gets a pneumatic drill in his leg, a doctor cuts a nurses finger off, a strip of skin is sliced from a leg & there's some blood splatter. There's a pretty cool car crash as a big lorry smashes into a car that has just fallen off a bridge & the scenes of a panic stricken city are reasonably convincing although budget issues clearly had an effect here.

Filmed in Canada the production values are a bit rough at times with library music but it's more than watchable & adds a certain grittiness to the film. The acting is alright, no-one is amazing but most of the actors here are at least competent.

Rabid is a good film, maybe a little disappointing & empty if you are familiar with Cronberg & his other films but still more than worth watching for a Vampire zombie thriller horror film.

Rabid or Rage ( do American's therefore not know what Rabid means ) begins and ends like Lawrence of Arabia: a motorcycle crash and a high body count. The similarity ends there.

Marilyn Chambers - the woman who occupies the dreams and fantasies of millions - seemingly recovers from this accident only to develop an appetite for blood.

Rabid is a modern, urban vampire film, and who better to direct it than Cronenberg.

In the hands of another, this film would be horrifically mediocre. The lonely country lane, the frozen body, the subway attack, the Santa shooting in the mall and the dark movie theatre - Cronenberg knows how to imbue a sense of emptiness and despair into each scene. The film is full of pathos and 70's paranoia. Fear of woman (especially such a sexual one - Eve and such like), fear of government and fear of those around us - Cronenberg feeds off such hysteria, just as Chambers feeds off her victims. The underarm worm is quite clearly a female penis.

I don't mean to make Rabid sound grand or profound. It isn't really. It's just Outbreak meets Vampire Circus. I do think, however, that Cronenberg always seeks to challenge Western values and boundaries by using hidden evils, distortions and deformed humanity.

Marilyn of course looks fantastic, and she is frequently topless. As an adolescent I was attracted and haunted by the idea of being attacked by such a woman. "No, no, don't go, it's freezing cold - hold me." You know that if you do, death will shortly follow, but who could resist?

David Cronenberg is undoubtedly on of the strangest success tales the world of film has ever witnessed. The creator of the 'Body Horror' sub-genre and producer of such titles as 'Shivers', 'Scanners', 'Videodrome', the remake of 'The Fly', 'Naked Lunch', 'Crash' and his final venture into fantastical horror 'Existenz' is now known and loved by audiences and critics for suspense thrillers and crime dramas such as 'A History Of Violence' and 'Eastern Promises.' From the beginning he was a brave writer and director that tackled the issues of sexual deviance and perversion, dangerous fetishes and the fear of bodily change, something which undoubtedly drew younger and more mature audiences to his works without truly understanding why. His works in horror were most openly and frankly sexual although often repugnant and were often the result of many nightmares and newfound phobias; a writer and director with the power to affect jaded horror audiences, yet tell a vitally moral and heartfelt tale about the lesser desired individuals within our societies.

'Rabid' was his second venture into film and was maybe a lesser moral tale although watched closely delivers many messages for the modern man and woman, the so-called liberated and free to choose.

The main character Rose was portrayed by then and now legendary porn star Marilyn Chambers whom Cronenberg placed great faith in as a relatively inexperienced actress and to everyone's surprise, she delivers on so many levels, giving the viewer an unbelievably beautiful but deadly, calculating but no doubt lost and scared Typhoid Mary who spreads a plague of mutated rabies across Canada.

Rose is involved in a motorcycle accident. Her boyfriend walks away relatively unscathed and is forced to pick up the pieces of his life as she lies in a coma after revolutionary surgery just about saves her life. The only side effect being that a mutation occurs and she becomes a vampire of sorts, sleepwalking her way from victim to victim within the confines of an isolated hospital for plastic surgeons.

But when Rose one night wanders off the beaten track into a farm and draws blood from an infected cow, she does not know that everyone she drains of blood from then on will contract a deadly disease that will turn them into raving, bloodthirsty lunatics.

So when Rose's boyfriend receives a distress call from her and rushes to her aid, he is dismayed to find her gone as her secret has been exposed and several patients found dead or infected. From there on, a cross country chase sees her go on to infect anyone who comes into contact with her as the blood-thirst becomes ever more uncontrollable.

What results is a national crisis, Rose slowly becoming aware that she is the cause and cannot escape her urges or her guilt and the streets filling up with contagious madmen.

Cronenberg uses past familiar faces over famous ones, which works in his favour as only everyday people can portray the everyday people look and feel. Only Chambers provides that stand-out stunning beauty that is essential to the telling of this tale in a seedy time where the sexual liberation of the '60's had only resulted in the incessant gratifications of a nation left perverted and never able to feel satisfied. In perhaps what can be seen as a fateful twist, Chambers goes on to pick out her victims from the shadows of porn theatres, pick up men off the street looking for a danger thrill and learns to use her feminine sexual power to her advantage; the literal deadly siren calling a sinking ship towards its doom by mesmerising her lustful victims.

The horror scenes are singled out in isolated incidents throughout, so to give the film a rhythm to work to as it escalates to full-on chaos and those scenes are sometimes comic, sometimes grimly trashy but then hideously dark and uncompromising and like George Romero's offerings at the time such as 'The Crazies' and 'Dawn of the Dead' it helps to affect the audience by leading them into the false security of a film that doesn't take itself too seriously before shocking the unwitting crowds. Cronenberg's sense of humour lies within his gift for freaking out his audiences with surreal moments we do not think can get any stranger before they do and in that sense, this film is golden.

Watch it on a cold rainy night when you have nothing to distract you and appreciate the horror genius of a mind that will never be equalled!

The word " auteur " is readily made for the Canadian film maker David Cronenberg and his brand of what is known as " body horror " . RABID is an early example of this and isn't unfortunately considered one of his best films . It lacks the laugh out loud funny twisted humour of SHIVERS , the mind bending cerebral prophecy of VIDEODROME , the polished mainstream feel of THE FLY , and the ready made controversy of CRASH

In its favour RABID is a fondly remembered film by people of a certain age when video recorders were becoming accessible in the early 1980s . It was one of these films that always heavily trailed when ever you hired an exploitation movie in that period. It contains gore and female nudity so what more does a teenage boy need from a film . Let's not be too low brow because it contains all the hallmarks of Cronberg's style and of heavy Fraudian symbolism . Effectively the premise revolves around nature being changed where a woman suddenly spouts a penis and has the instinct to use it at every opportunity whether the victim of her desire is willing or not

What drags the film down to a slight extent is that it's pretty obvious that the budget is limited . The director does the best he can but you're left feeling that he wants to create the sort of high budget scenario seen later in a film like 28 WEEKS LATER where literally hundreds of extras run a round infecting one another . There's also an aspect that this austerity extends to the gore itself and it could even more graphic but this is not a criticism since it contains a scene where a character goes in to his home to find his new born baby has been devoured by his wife . The fact that it's not spelled out is what makes it so shocking . As a footnote because of the low budget much of the score comes from a musical library and if you've seen a bleak depressing documentary in the last 35 years you'll recognise the track being continually played throughout this film involving a few bars on the piano

RABID probably isn't a horror masterpiece but it's made with enough care and intelligence to lift it above the vast majority of films that teenage boys watched on video recorders away back in nineteen eighty something . It certainly doesn't deserve to be dismissed as exploitation cinema but at the same time it's rather flat and conventional storyline combined with its low budget really stops it from being a classic horror from the 1970s

David Cronenberg's 1977 sci-fi/horror film stars Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore and Joe Silver. This begins with woman, Rose (Chambers) riding a motorcycle with her boyfriend, Hart (Moore). They get into an accident and Rose goes into a coma, but needs immediate surgery. A month later, she awakens with a lethal appendage craving blood. When she starts feeding on strangers, an infectious, epidemic spreads. The late, Silver plays Hart's friend, Murray. This isn't bad, the late, Chambers was good in this and there's gruesome make-up effects. I'd give this a try.