In Camelford, while swinging his van across a narrow road to make a u- turn, a driver stalls the vehicle that does not restart. Hart Read (Frank Moore) is driving his motorcycle with his girlfriend Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and he drives off the road to avoid the collision. Hart suffers minor injuries while Rosie is injured and burned by the flames when the motorcycle explodes. The ambulance from the nearby Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery brings the couple and Rose, who is in coma, is submitted to an emergency surgery and to an experimental plastic-surgery technique by Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) to retrieve her skin in the chest and abdomen. Hart is discharged but Rose stays in coma in the intensive care unit (ICU) to recover. Out of the blue, Rose awakens from her coma one month later and screams. A nurse helps her but is wounded by her and then he cannot remember what has happened to him. He is sent to a hospital in Montreal while Rose realizes that she needs to feed with blood. However her victims become zombie-like creatures. Rose flees from the clinic to Montreal to meet her friend Mindy Kent (Susan Roman) spreading her infection in the big city. Meanwhile Hart is seeking for her.

"Rabid" is a horror film by David Cronenberg that becomes better with time. In the present days, with so many news and unknown worldwide diseases, the idea of an infection that spreads in a geometric progression turning people into zombie-like creatures is totally feasible. Marilyn Chambers, from the cult adult film "Behind the Green Door", surprises with a good performance. The conclusion is deceptive and could be better, maybe due to lack of budget. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Enraivecida na Fúria do Sexo" ("Rabid in the Fury of Sex")

Rabid is set in Canada & starts as Hart Read (Hart Moore) & his girlfriend Rose (Marilyn Chambers) are riding a motorbike along a country road when they spin off the road & crash as Hart looses control of the bike while trying to avoid hitting a broken down camper van. The accident is seen by patients at the nearby Keloid Clinic who raise the alarm, with the nearest hospital miles away Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) decides to operate at his private clinic but uses new experimental skin grafts on Rose who has been badly injured in the crash. Rose makes a full recovery but the skin grafts have an unexpected & unwanted side-effect as a mutant growth under Rose's arm has developed & drinks human blood to survive. Rose now needs human blood to live although anyone that she drinks from then becomes infected with a rabies like disease that makes the carrier go crazy & seek human blood themselves. As the disease spreads the military place Montréal under martial law...

Also known under the title Rage this Canadian production was written & directed by David Cronenberg & Rabid was his second full length feature film after the successful yet controversial Shivers (1975),while not one of his best films Rabid is still a pretty good horror film with that added depth that Cronenberg likes to bring to his films. The sexual metaphors that Cronenberg was fond of putting into his films are clearly here with Rose seducing & enticing her victims like lovers, the round bodily orifice that the predatory organ shoots out of looks like an anus & maybe Cronenberg was thinking about the spread of sexual disease as the imagery & themes all fit together, however Rabid isn't as deep or shocking or relevant as many of his other films & the ideas that are brought up are never really explored with the same sort of perverse fascination that he does in some of his other films. Rabid just feels a bit empty as a Cronenberg film & the dialogue is also a bit dull at times & without purpose or biting social commentary that Cronenberg can excel in even though it's still probably better than many films out there. At 90 odd minutes the pace is a little slow at times but the build-up & spread of the disease is well handled which eventually leads to mass panic & martial law during the last half an hour, I also have to mention the very bleak, sudden & downbeat ending which I thought fitted the tone & style of the film perfectly as Rose was tossed away like a piece of trash. I liked Rabid, I didn't love it or think it was great Cronenberg but his films are never less than interesting.

Shot on a fairly low budget Rabid looks quite gritty & raw at times which helps the tone & feel of the film & suits the story. There's not much gore here, there are a few bites, a guy is gorily gunned down, someone gets a pneumatic drill in his leg, a doctor cuts a nurses finger off, a strip of skin is sliced from a leg & there's some blood splatter. There's a pretty cool car crash as a big lorry smashes into a car that has just fallen off a bridge & the scenes of a panic stricken city are reasonably convincing although budget issues clearly had an effect here.

Filmed in Canada the production values are a bit rough at times with library music but it's more than watchable & adds a certain grittiness to the film. The acting is alright, no-one is amazing but most of the actors here are at least competent.

Rabid is a good film, maybe a little disappointing & empty if you are familiar with Cronberg & his other films but still more than worth watching for a Vampire zombie thriller horror film.

If compiling a list of favourite directors, David Cronenberg if to be honest wouldn't be on it (having only properly started seeing his work fairly recently). If compiling though a list of the most fascinating and unique directors, he would almost certainly be on it and high up the more work seen of his. A vast majority of his films disturb in his use of imagery and make one feel uncomfortable with his tackling of challenging subjects, but as said in some of my other reviews for his films there is much more to his work than just full on horror as seen with him moving away from it in later years.

While nowhere near close to being one of his best (not one of his worst either, 'Cosmopolis' for me is a contender for that title) and do prefer 'Scanners' and 'The Brood' as far as his early/body horror films go, 'Rabid' is an interesting and more than decent effort. For so early on and with limited resources, for all its obvious faults, 'Rabid' impressed me and admired it for its ambitious premise (like with 'Shivers'). The rest of the films that are part of his filmography are far more refined visually, explore their themes/subject much deeper and are far better written and acted, but there is a good deal to like here.

Admittedly the low budget is obvious, with 'Rabid' making for one of Cronenberg's worst-looking films. It does look better and less amateurish than 'Shivers' though. The effects and make-up are well done and pretty freaky, but 'Rabid' does have a drab look and looks simplistic and unfocused, and like a low budget television film made by an experimenting student.

The script is also very clunky and too often vague with too many parts not going into anywhere near enough explanation. It did feel that a lot of time went into most other components and the script was left at the bottom of the pile.

Do think that the acting is quite a lot better in general than in 'Shivers', which only had two good performances while most of the performances were acceptable (if not always much more than that). But Frank Moore did have ropey moments from personal view.

'Rabid' has a lot of things worth praising. As said the special effects and make-up are freaky, surprising as one does expect for minimal budget for the effects to be the worst part when it comes to production values.

Cronenberg gave himself a lot to take on and does so admirably, even if his style had not fully formed yet. Yet his style can still be found all over 'Rabid', with the famous themes and ideas often re-visited in later films present but much deeper and with more subtlety later on. The story is interesting with the ambitious concept not wasted, with the pace being slicker than before.

Especially good here in 'Rabid' are two things. One being the atmosphere. The other being the horror. 'Shivers', 'Scanners' and 'The Brood' (which also all had the better scripts) to me were more disturbing and stomach churning, but that is not to say that 'Rabid' isn't either of those things, quite the contrary, with the violence still being shocking today. There are some genuine chills and shocks and the sense of dread is handled very suspensefully. The threat is scary too and the imagery does churn the stomach in typical Cronenberg fashion. Enough of the acting is acceptable, with Marilyn Chambers being a surprisingly good lead (was honestly expecting her to be a disaster).

Summarising, decent film. 7/10