The venereal vampirism that decimated Shivers' apartment complex logically sprawls out into society in David Cronenberg's follow-up, his second feature film. Biker chick Marilyn Chambers is rushed to a nearby clinic after taking a nasty spill off the road and, after undergoing experimental plastic surgery, develops a fleshy sore under her armpit from which a sting thrusts out, and a craving for blood to go with it. Upon embrace, the spike springs, penetrates, and contaminates -- as result, Chambers' route to Montreal becomes littered with foaming, oozing maniacs snapping at each other. Critics looking for a paranoid-fascist reading of Cronenberg's work couldn't do better: superficially, the plot presents the sexualized virulence of Shivers without the lure of transgression, so that only the ominous disgust remains. (By contrast, George Romero's similar The Crazies offers a far less problematically progressive arc.) And yet, for a picture so supposedly obsessed with the monstrosity of female sexuality, Cronenberg projects a bewildered, helpless vulnerability onto Chambers, and many of the men she turns rabid (including the purveyors of science who foolishly try to reconstruct the body) are viewed with no less sympathy. For the director, the source of horror is not Woman but Sex itself, whose mysteries throw the body into physical instability with the mind (a phallic-vaginal-anal blend, the infecting prod is nothing if not omnisexual). Darkly cheeky (the most scientific warning an officer can offer panicky viewers is, "Don't get bitten!"), Cronenberg cannily orchestrates Chambers' porn-queen iconography, particularly when, looking for victims, she sneaks into a stag theater and sits next to a stroker who can't believe his luck. (As in Behind the Green Door, Chambers' tantalizing quality lies in her spoilable blankness.) With Frank More, Joe Silver, and Howard Ryshpan.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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