| LET US NOW PRAISE GUT FAUNA : David Cronenberg's 'Shivers' (1975) [7/10] |
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| Monday, 26 September 2005 | |
With Cronenberg's astonishing A History of Violence currently garnering near-uniform (and fully-justified) rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, this is an ideal time to delve back into the fascinating filmography of this visionary director. Admirers of History keen to explore the Cronenberg catalogue should probably begin with The Dead Zone (1983): another grippingly low-key literary adaptation filmed in rural Ontario and populated by recognisable human beings. Most of Cronenberg's films, however, do not fulfil those last two criteria: 'body-horror' in dehumanised city/suburban settings is his usual m.o., and Shivers represents one of the earliest and most audaciously extreme examples. Strictly speaking, this is Cronenberg's third feature as writer-director - but the 65-minute pair Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) have never been properly released and remain difficult to catch. Shivers - aka Frissons (in Quebec), They Came From Within (in the USA) and The Parasite Murders - was thus in effect his "debut", instantly making his name on both sides of the 49th parallel, both sides of the Atlantic, and far beyond. A gruesome philosophical horror studded with moments of wild comedy - some intentional (the opening deadpan-droll slideshow narration), others inadvertent - it's the story of how the residents of an ultramodern housing facility ('the Starliner') on an island near Montreal are infected by man-made, mood-altering parasites. Crafted as a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease (by a loopy mad-scientist convinced that mankind has become over-rational) the parasites lurk (visibly) in the stomachs of their hosts until going on messy "walkabout". Inside the body, they have a powerful loosening effect upon inhibitions: violence often results, but the main effect is a heightened, frenzied sex-drive. This means that the Starliner residents - including horror legend Barbara Steele as a wine-quaffing lesbian - abruptly switch from tired/neurotic/depressed sad-sacks into vibrant, lustful hedonists. Although routinely described by critics as a metaphor for venereal disease (specifically syphillis), Cronenberg's allegory seems also at least partly socio-political: in straight-laced, famously "antiseptic" Canada the renegade spirit has always been present, and Shivers explodes this impulse into a lurid pantomime of excess and free-love "perversion" (the sixties took a little while to reach so far north), with all prudery/decency/repression swept away on a tide of gleeful swingerish libido. Cronenberg's films are typically as intriguing to analyse as they are exciting and surprising to watch - and Shivers, though originally aimed at the "exploitation" market, is no exception. Indeed, it perhaps now functions more successfully on the intellectual level than as a simple movie-going experience: the special effects and acting are patchy and often rudimentary, with several bits that are as likely to produce guffaws and shudders from any audience. His use of slow-motion has dated, apart from one still-disturbing moment in which a child kisses an adult sensuously upon the lips. This was the first film in which Cronenberg deployed "synch sound" - Stereo and Crimes of the Future both relied on post-production voice-over - and he hasn't quite got a handle on it yet: in many scenes the dialogue is too quiet, the music ('supervised' by the film's producer, and future Ghostbusters auteur, Ivan Reitman) too loud. Then again, not all of the dialogue is really worth listening to - especially in the second half when the pace becomes more frenetic and Starliner dishy-doctor Roger St Luc (noted songwriter Paul Hampton, a blond-thatched precursor of Owen Wilson) is struggling to make sense of it all. There are passages where Cronenberg even seems to be paying campy tribute to the clunkier examples of the sci-fi genre from the 1950s and 1960s: his original title was, after all, Orgy of the Blood Parasites. Then again, it's quite appropriate that Shivers should in some way "lose its mind" - as if Cronenberg himself had been taken over by some impish, Bunuelian parasite of his own. And, as the final shots make explicitly clear, such a "contamination" might actually be the best result for all concerned... Neil Young 26th September, 2005 SHIVERS : [7/10] : aka The Parasite Murders / They Came From Within : Canada 1975 : David CRONENBERG : 87 mins seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (UK), 25th September 2005 - public show  |
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