RABID rehashes SHIVERS' idea of infectious transformation, our super-spreader is a young woman called Rose (famed porn star Chambers' foray into mainstream acting), after a motorcycle accident, she is undergoing an innovative skin graft operation, claimed by Dr. Keloid (Ryshpan), whose name is such a wacky pun itself, to save her life (a plot device is not at all intelligible), anyway, when she awakes from her month-long coma (her skin recovers immaculately from the horrific burn as Chambers isn't the type who will refuse to bare it all in front of a camera), a small orifice is left below her armpit and inside grows a sentient jutting thingy, that is blood-thirst.
Consequentially, Rose starts a series of assaults on those she encounters (ranging from soft-headed milquetoasts, predatory horndogs, erotic cinema habitués, occasionally, just an average male or a nubile female), in the wake of which the victims turn into zombie- like, foam-oozing, flesh-biting assailants, before soon a pandemic spreads to Montreal, where martial law is imposed, and that becomes eerily relatable to earthling's current Corvid-19 disaster. At first the authority pronounces it is a new strain of rabies , but with the attacks escalate and rabies treatment proves unavailing, a shoot-to-kill policy is the last defense (even Santa Claus is succumbed to the rampant potshot). That is a too bleak and depressing worst-case scenario for us frail mortals .
The scale can go epic, but for a psychotronic gore-fest, Cronenberg sticks with Rose, the story begins and finishes with her, and all the set pieces are expediently arranged, though few could startle today's hardened genre spectators. As the sole carrier who can co-exists relatively normal with the unknown virus, Rose's final experiment is an inane decision, which reflects the auteur's fatalistic archness, deliberately nips the prospect of hope in the bud, Cronenberg's RABID is prescient, salacious, and a slap on the face of our society's macho depravity.
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