Rabid

David Cronenberg seems to be one of the few remaining legitimate horror directors. In fact you can't call him anything but a horror director because his films are rarely even suspenseful, but they are horrifying. Rabid, being his second feature as a director makes an appropriate counterpart to his first film, Shivers. I'm going to try to explain this, but you'll just have to ignore the lapses in scientific logic, and understand that to watch a Cronenberg film is to enter a world of one man's unusual fears and obsessions. After a motorcycle crash, a young woman is given an experimental, internal skin graft under her arm. Soon, she wakes up from a coma with a vagina like opening under her arm and a phallic-shaped (creature?) -- which resemebles the inner-mouth of the Alien -- that protrudes from it and stabs people to suck their blood. She becomes this pseudo-sexual vampire thing that turns her victims into rabid zombie creature which feed on flesh before dying. Soon the city of Montreal is overrun by these zombies and martial law is called in. Cronenberg's moral sense is dubious at best, but as I said, it is his unique body-centric fears that fascinate his audience. I'm not sure if he's trying to equate sexuality with vampirism, but as with most of his films, he's clearly trying to make a philosophical and psychological point with his films. It's clumsily directed at times and lacks the polish of his pre-The Brood films. He is clearly the reigning auteur of the horror film, but I'm not sure his world is the one I'd like to live in.