The great Canadian maestro of the macabre, David Cronenberg, is returning with a new horror feature later this year dubbed “Crimes of the Future”. After nearly a decade since his last feature “Maps to the Stars”, the 78 year old genre-definer is back in the game, so let’s all hope to Christ this next one’s not a stinker!
With an almost 4 decade long stretch of weirdness under his belt I felt it was fitting to do a speed-run of his body of work, taking in as much gore, sexual allegory and creepy puppets as I could stomach. His career has been an interesting one, filled with peaks and troughs. He has seen highs and lows as a filmmaker, both in carving out his own disturbing style of horror, as well as taking risks and venturing away from audience expectations.
Shivers was Cronenberg’s debut feature, released in 1975. Set in a quasi-futuristic apartment building, complete with its own independent medical clinic, the movie focuses on a group of residents as sexual violence-inducing parasites invade their bodies and eventually take over the entire complex.
This movie is pure schlock and if you needed proof of this the original title was “Orgy of the Blood Parasites”. From start to finish it looks and feels like a filmmakers first movie and the budget was obviously peanuts, with the cast and crew living commune-style on set for the duration of production.
This movie, while fascinating to horror-porn nerds like me, really doesn’t hold up for the conventional audience of today. It has a wonderfully subdued dystopian ending and definitely hints at future Cronenbergian awesomeness to come, but even at 87 minutes it is dated as fuck and moves at a pace more befitting of a Victorian England kitchen-sink drama.
Regardless, “Shivers” is a charming little curio for people eager to see how Cronenberg got his start in movies. Without this his future efforts might never have come to pass, so by all means give it a viewing, but be patient; this shit’s nearly 50 years old.
