Shivers

aka They Came from Within

Only minutes away from downtown Montreal, the Starliner Towers apartment complex has everything you could possibly need. Cable television in every room, an Olympic size swimming pool, onsite health care professionals, and parasites that send you into a sex crazed fury. Cronenberg's first commercial feature film, if you can call it that, proved to be both successful and controversial. Many critics balked at the film's combination of sex and violence. Some Canadian critics were especially upset that the film had received some of its funding from the federal government. The movie shares some similarities with Cronenberg's following film, Rabid, along with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Crazies. Personally, the thing that surprised me most about the film was a car crash stunt that seemed just a little too realistic.

Rating: 65%

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Dead Zone

 A school teacher gets coma'd by a car accident and when he wakes up five years later his daggum girlfriend has left him and is married with a kid. Also he's got the ability to see the future by touching a person, a common side effect. He uses said power for the usual - stopping needless deaths, solving a serial killing, and preventing a murderous populist presidential candidate from destroying the whole planet Earth. 

RATING: 74%

Night Breed

Hm I don't mean to quibble about what exactly makes a horror movie a horror movie, but this movie, where a cool dude dies and joins a cabal of cool undead monsters in a monster city seems more like a fantasy adventure? Although the monsters (who are good monsters) must unite to kill some bad cops and a serial killing David Cronenberg, and the latter is sorta horror I suppose. Anyway it's fun!

RATING: 65%

The Brood

Despite having seen and enjoyed David Cronenberg's The Brood, I'm having a hard time coming up with a competent synopsis for the film. It revolves, somewhat, around an unconventional psychotherapy practice called psychoplasmics, wherein a patient's negative emotions and traumatic memories can be channeled into physiological changes to their body. One patient somehow uses psychoplasmics to give birth to little demon faced children in snowsuits who beat people to death. While that's the plot of the film, more or less, it doesn't really tell the whole story. There's also a custody battle arc, some detective procedural elements, the classic Cronenberg body horror component, and killer children who are occasionally killed. And while I'm not sure I've made much of a case for this movie, it remains a worthy entry in Cronenberg's filmography and a uniquely original horror film.

Rating: A Bad Day At School%

(Image at impawards.com)

Jason X

In the future, 2008, Jason is captured by the government and held in a research facility. Unable to kill or transport him, Jason is placed into suspended animation. In the even futurer, 2455, Jason's body is found by some students among the debris littering Earth's abandoned surface (Wall-E was right). Jason wakes up on a spaceship and starts killing everyone. Some other stuff happens, but it's all so fucking terrible I don't even want to write about it. Ye gods, this movie sucks!

Rating: Face frozen in liquid nitrogen and smashed on counter%

(Image from impawards.com)

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A Month Of Halloweenie Reviews #16

Not a horror movie. Thanks for lying to me, every video store I've ever been in.

RATING: 71%
HORROR RATING: 23%

Videodrome

If you like movies that blur the line between sex and violence, then have I got a film for you! It's called Videodrome, in case you couldn't figure that out. It's also called every David Cronenberg movie ever made. Basically the plot is something about lots of guts and every day appliances (tvs and videotapes in this case) turned into sex organ looking things, which is also the plot of most David Cronenberg movies. Anyway, I guess it's neat, but it's not his best. In my opinion that is Crash (not the racist one).

RATING: 57%