Canada/UK | 2019 | Directed by Jen & Sylvia Soska
Logline: Following an accident that leaves her with horrific injuries a woman has experimental surgery that enhances her life experience, but also gives her an insatiable thirst for blood.
Rose (Laura Vandervoort) is a wallflower seamstress working for Karl Lagerfeld-esque fashion design guru Gunter (Mackenzie Gray), who treats her poorly, as do the other employees, except model Chelsea (Hanneke Talbot) who’s a few sequins short of a full dress. Chelsea wants to bring Rose out of her shell, so sets her up, but Rose ends up humiliated, and in trying to flee she is involved in a horrendous motorcycle accident.
Rose awakens in hospital with massive facial and abdominal injuries. She is inconsolable. She is given refuge at Chelsea’s pad, but she is desperate for a solution to her physical, psychological, and emotional suffering. She seeks out Dr. William Burroughs (yes, that’s right) at his advanced clinic (why on earth would a plastic surgery clinic have massive and grotesque paintings of mutated bodies adorning their walls?!) where he performs experimental stem-cell regenerative surgery. The results are radical. Rose is transformed into a creature even more beautiful and alive than she was before the accident.
But Rose has become a beast inside, as a side effect of Burroughs’ work has left Rose with a deep-rooted hunger for human blood. Something is growing within her, and in her blackouts she succumbs to an animalistic savagery, a bloodlust she cannot control, for she is riddled with a disease that is highly contagious, a potentially apocalyptic contagion that we can only understand as some kind of super-rabies.
For their third feature The Twisted Twins take on David Cronenberg’s 1977 second feature which starred adult star Marilyn Chambers. It’s not really a remake, more of a re-imagining, as it starts quite removed from Cronenberg’s story, and continues to veer further and further away from the original narrative, eventually culminating in an ending more akin to the absurd OTT stylistics of another contemporary body-horror director, Joe Begos, than the downbeat, nihilistic tone of Cronenberg’s.
The Soska sisters have designed their version to reflect various elements of the contemporary social climate and the influence of popular and underground culture. Rose has low self-esteem and is subjected to ridicule, but after her appalling injuries are miraculously healed, she is transformed – transmogrified – into a kind of superhuman, certainly a superwoman; beautiful, glamorous, smart, powerful, successful. That’s not to say she didn’t have some of these qualities and abilities before her accident, but certainly the side effects of her medical treatment have enhanced her being, given her extra-ordinary strength and influence.
The irony is that the most significant side effect is a parasitic growth within her that initiates a severe thirst for blood that leads to catastrophic consequences. This growth begins in Rose’s mouth, sprouting from her gums, and later erupts from her armpit, like some kind of hideous eel-tendril. But the mutation – a perverse trans-humanism – is never properly explained, seemingly out of nowhere.
It is this mutation sub-plot and subsequent bizarre denouement that confuses and threatens to scuttle what has been a surprisingly plausible horror-thriller in terms of narrative. Yes, okay it is far-fetched, but it’s presented in a realistic way. Rabid could’ve been a more frightening and powerful horror movie if it had stuck more closely to Cronenberg’s suggested apocalypse - and one which he continued with in wider scope with Shivers. As it is, and similarly to the sisters’ previous movie, American Mary, Rabid is a horror that begins and develops in compelling fashion, but loses its way and is ultimately undone in its third act.