Space 1979: The one where the brain slugs maybe have a point

 

Title: Shivers aka They Came From Within

What Year?: 1975

Classification: Prototype

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

One of the first and most difficult lessons of doing reviews is the matter of timing. It’s always tempting, especially early on, to watch a few more movies and then come back to the one that’s good for the review. In practice, that hardly ever works. To start with, if you backlog one movie, you’re going to end up with 5 or 10. What you really don’t know until you’ve tried it is that reviewing a movie more than a few days after a viewing is never the same, even if it’s an all-time favorite you’re sure you can remember by heart. The kick in the pants is that if you miss that window, then sooner or later, you’re going to have to go back and watch the whole damn thing again, and if you aren’t careful, you end up in a whole vicious cycle. This review is for one of those movies, a little film called Shivers from some guy named David Cronenberg.

Our story begins with a commercial for a luxury apartment complex called Starliner. Ile a cheerful young couple checks in, we see an older gentleman murder and dissect a girl before killing himself. After other residents begin acting strangely, we meet a concerned medical man who sets out to get to the bottom of it. He discovers that a deceased colleague created a slug-like parasite that removes inhibitions and self-restraint, which is now spreading through the swanky development. Meanwhile, we begin to see why this might not be a good thing as the infected become abusive, paranoid or flat-out insatiable. The doctor must search for a way to cure the condition or at least stop the spread, but his nurse/ girlfriend is already acting strange herself.

Shivers was the third feature film by Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, following Stereo and Crimes of the Future, and probably the first to see theatrical release in the US. The movie was produced by Ivan Reitman, who would go on to make Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters, with some government funding through Telefilm Canada. The cast included David Hampton as medical man Roger, Lynn Lowry of The Crazies as the nurse, and Joe Silver providing most of the exposition as Rollo. The film received negative reviews as well as controversy for its content and the role of government funding. The feature fell out of print after a 1998 DVD release, before re-appearing on Blu Ray and streaming in late 2020.

For my history, I first heard of this one when I looked up A Boy And His Dog. My immediate reaction from casual research was that it wouldn’t be suitable for this feature. Naturally, I still watched it when I found a way to get it on streaming, and I decided it was worth consideration, at least for its similarities to The Crazies and Night of the Creeps. As outlined above, I ended up watching it again the last few weeks, and finally gave it one more go while working on this review. My first and foremost impulse throughout has been trying to reconcile the movie with its reputation. By others’ accounts, this is either an early masterpiece from a gifted filmmaker, a horrific and shocking exercise in excess, or just an overdone piece of schlock. Alas, I cannot convince myself that any of those things are in evidence here. If Logan’s Run was an emperor with no clothes, this is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, living in its own shadow.

With all of that out of the way, it’s still difficult to describe what watching this film really is like. From the start, the overall feel is that of a domestic apocalypse, which has been done well before and since. The early scenes and shots highlight commercialism as much as the clinical “body horror” Cronenberg would be best known for. By comparison, the antics of the occasionally seen brain slugs and their hosts are oddly subdued, which if anything works in the film’s favor. The horror is all in the small details: A slug that squirms into the shrubbery, a businessman who sits in his office staring into space, a newly infected woman who steps out of a bathtub without reacting in any way to glass underfoot. In place of violence and cannibalism, we see subtle dysfunctionality that grows over time, then crosses over into joyous abandon in the surreal final scenes. The story doesn’t downplay the further ironic transformation of the doctor representing authority and reason, who spirals down to almost casual homicide.

For how and why the movie goes wrong, the best frame of reference I can offer is by comparison with The Crazies, a movie I have yet to find room to review. In that very odd film, George Romero turned the “zombie” genre he had started on its head by giving the infected something like a point of view (a nuance willfully ignored in the remake). This movie clearly tries to get there, but the already uncomfortable device of the slugs keeps turning on itself. The infected men are stereotypically aggressive and bestial, but only a handful of scenes suggest a comparable change in the women. The further possibility that uninfected partners might accept or even welcome a change in their love life is made all but taboo. It’s of further note that, while much is said about the infected being “violent”, there is always some kind of interruption before their behavior can escalate to outright assault. On one hand, this mercifully spares us the worst kind of “cringe” moments. On the other, it cements the feeling that this is a movie that goes “too far” but still not far enough to follow through with its premise.

For the “one scene”, the one that stood out to me every time is a phone call between Roger and Rollo. The senior man of learning delivers the closest thing we get to an explanation of the affair, with the aid of Silver, a veteran of radio as well as the screen known for his deep voice. He reveals that their deceased colleague was something like a “free love” radical, who believed the ills of humanity are caused by too much intellect and “not enough guts”. His solution was “a cross between an aphrodisiac and a venereal disease”, in the further hope that it would unite humanity in “one big, mindless orgy”. It’s all blatant nonsense, delivered hypnotically enough for the viewer to ask, just for the sake of argument, if this would be entirely a bad thing. Meanwhile, the nurse very nonchalantly gets out of her uniform and redresses in full view of the doctor. It’s the kind of scene that can make a “bad” movie great, which unfortunately makes the rest all the more disappointing.

This movie is the kind I probably would have ignored if I had known about it when I started this feature. As it is, I’m letting it in mainly because of Cronenberg’s participation, and because it still doesn’t pose nearly as many issues as his other works. In itself, it’s flawed if not wholly forgettable. In context, it’s a significant milestone, both for the filmmaker and for Canadian cinema. Without it, we might not have had The Fly, Heavy Metal, The Gate, or… The Shape of Things to Come? Okay, you can’t win them all.