Rabid (1977)

Dir: David Cronenberg

Inane and tedious shocker from Cronenberg's early years that fails to ignite in the way his previous effort (the claustrophobic and perverse "Shivers") did. Marilyn Chambers plays a girl who gets injured in a motorcycle accident and goes under the knife for an experimental skin graft. It goes wrong and (get ready for this), next thing you know, she has this weird, dripping red penis/vagina thing with a spike on the end growing out of her armpit. To makes things worse, it wants to go stabby-stabby on people and, when it does, they turn them into green-faced, foamy-mouthed pseudo-zombies who run around chewing on all and sundry. The government gets involved, men in white suits appear and, dear Lord, for a movie that's supposed to be about an epidemic, Cronenberg completely fails to generate any suspense or urgency out of this disastruous concept. To make it harder on the viewer, we have to suffer seemingly endless encounters between Chambers and various people whom she hugs to death (she has to hug them for her armpit pet to latch onto them) which is, frankly, too ludicrous for my poor eyes to bear. "Rabid" is by far the weakest of all Cronenberg's genre efforts and I'm struggling to think of a single nice thing to say about it. Thank God he went on to make "The Brood" straight afterwards. *