During the 1970s Porno Chic era, there was a belief that the line separating pornographic films from mainstream cinema would eventually disappear. Marilyn Chambers, one of the first porn stars, actually attempted to become a genuine Hollywood star. The closest she got to that goal was a starring role in Rabid, a 1977 Canadian horror film directed by David Cronenberg.
The plot takes place in Quebec. The protagonist, played by Chambers, is Rose, a young woman who suffers terrible injuries while riding a motorcycle with her boyfriend Hart Reed (played by Frank Moore). She is brought to a nearby clinic where Doctor Keloid (played by Howard Ryshpan) treats her with experimental skin-grafting procedures. One of the side effects is a mutation that becomes apparent when Rose awakens from a coma one month later with a small orifice under her armpit and an insatiable thirst for blood. The orifice hides a small, stinger-like organ which allows Rose to feed on her victims, who ultimately develop a rabies-like disease and quickly turn into frenzied, cannibalistic zombies. Rose leaves the hospital while the infection spreads to Montreal, forcing the government to bring in martial law and authorise police to shoot any infected person on sight. As Hart, Doctor Keloid and his assistant Murray Cypher (played by Joe Silver) desperately try to locate Rose, she remains completely unaware of being the source of the infection.
Rabid, like Cronenberg’s debut film Shivers, belongs to the subgenre of body horror that would characterise his early works. The basic premise of an unstoppable infection making people lose their sanity is expanded from a single apartment complex to an entire country, but the film nevertheless betrays its relatively low budget. Cronenberg puts those resources to good use, creating a couple of ingenious and sometimes very disturbing scenes of violence while convincingly depicting the collapse of society and the government’s heavy-handed approach to solving the crisis. Cronenberg’s style, on the other hand, is still developing, and the film looks raw, while the script rather unconvincingly mixes elements of vampirism with zombie apocalypse—clearly placing Rabid in the realm of low-budget exploitation cinema. Chambers performs her role well, although it often seems exploitative, as in the scene where Rose goes to a porn cinema to seek new victims. Rabid is a short film that provides solid entertainment for fans of the genre, and its bleak ending is quite memorable.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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