The Brood (1979)

by Steve Habrat

Leave it to Canadian horror director David Cronenberg, the man called the “King of Venereal Horror”, to make a film about freakish asexual dwarfs who attack and kill people. Cronenberg, who is most known for the Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis mutation gross-out The Fly, is basically an auteur of highbrow exploitation and body horror that eventually made transition into simply highbrow territory. The Brood is one of those highbrow body horror exploitation forays. The Brood is critical and certainly unkind to psychology and experimental science in the vilest ways possible. Cronenberg could be considered the ringleader of body horror, as he is a big fan of placing awful deformities on his actors, usually sexually suggestive in some way, shape, or form, an addition that usually sets his work apart from the rest of the horror pack. For those who are familiar with Cronenberg, The Brood is a bloody doom and gloom flick with a dark ending and a dead serious gaze that never breaks into a smile to laugh at itself.

Dr. Hal Raglan (Played by Oliver Reed) is an experimental psychotherapist who has created a technique called “psychoplasmics” which manifests traumatic memories on a patient’s body in the form of physiological changes. The changes depend on how severe the memories are. Raglan’s star patient is Nola Carveth (Played by Samantha Eggar), who is currently going through a messy separation from her husband Frank Carveth (Played by Art Hindle). Frank and Nola are also tangled up in a messy custody battle over their young daughter Candice (Played by Cindy Hinds). As Raglan treats Nola, he begins to discover how severely disturbed she is and as treatment goes on, her inner anger and rage manifests in small, dwarfish creatures that attack and kill those close to her. As Frank launches his own investigation into the mysterious deaths surrounding him, he learns how the creatures are being created and he discovers that Candice’s life is in danger if the experimental treatment is not stopped.

Blending horror and science fiction, Cronenberg makes a slow building and icky creep-out that is not for the squeamish. Cronenberg has an eye for truly repugnant deformities, a talent I would have never thought I would be praising but Cronenberg does it better than anyone else. Even though The Brood is basically an exploitation film, it understands that there should be a brain in this grotesque creation. Though Cronenberg never outright suggests it, I’ve always found the architecture in his films, usually scientific institutions contrasting in a cold, natural settings to be a subtle commentary. The wooded setting usually engulfs these institutions, a subtle suggestion that perhaps a natural treatment is the answer to scientific gambles. I have noticed this in Scanners and Rabid but it seemed incredibly heavy-handed in The Brood. This choice also adds a surreal apocalyptic touch, always suggesting isolation and no true safe place to hide from the evil that has been unleashed. It’s this visual cue that separates The Brood from the rest of the exploitation horror pack. Cronenberg encourages us to work through our inner turmoil on our own without the help of an outside third party.

The Brood is not ashamed to feature expert acting from its leads. Everyone is convincing, a rarity in films of this sort and another reason why The Brood is much better than most films of this kind. The final showdown between Frank and Nola is hypnotic, a battle of words and pleas with just enough gore to satisfy those watching The Brood simply for that reason. You won’t be able to pull yourself away from the exchange and you’ll be frustrated when Cronenberg’s camera cuts to other scenes of action. The film also contains a restrained performance from Oliver Reed who never goes full baddie and adds a few layers of regret both in his scientific work and himself for what he has unleashed in Nola. Reed’s performance parallels the direction from Cronenberg himself who is never in a hurry to show us everything. I admire the way he makes the audience wait for the pay-off and, I admit, I never mind waiting for the freak show to emerge when I’m watching a Cronenberg film. He usually crams his frames full of gratifying acting from his leads and fascinating story lines.

The Brood features a wallop of a final shot that will majorly freak you out and that, my dear readers, is a promise from this horror buff. This is an otherworldly horror flick that won’t scare you right off the bat but rather have you thinking back to it long after you have seen it (I just love films like that if you can’t tell). I rank The Brood as one of Cronenberg’s finest cinematic efforts, sitting comfortably next to Rabid, Scanners, The Fly, and Eastern Promises. The film lacks a huge price tag, which I think adds to Cronenberg’s own temperance and actually aids the film in its rise to a crescendo of terror in the final frames. With a premise and monsters that could have been laughed off the screen in the first attack sequence, The Brood miraculously keeps its cool and shrouds itself in grotesque horror and perplexing mystery, revealing plot points at just the right time and meticulously planning its next move. To those on the prowl for a good horror film you have never seen, you can do much worse than The Brood.

Grade: B+

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

by Steve Habrat

What do you get when you throw LSD dropping devil worshippers, shotgun packing children and old men, rabid dogs, zombies, and heaping piles of severed limbs into a blender? You get the trashy I Drink Your Blood, a grind house picture with an ADD plot and bug eyed acting. This everything-and-the-kitchen-sink film is a fun flick to watch when you and your friends are looking for a good film to laugh at between sips of beer. Hell, getting a nice buzz may actually enhance the quality of I Drink Your Blood, a film that would be right at home on a double bill with Sugar Hill or Rabid. Made in 1970, the film follows the perspiring, claustrophobic, and granular aesthetic that was heavily popular during this specific era. At times it is reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre even though this came out way before Tobe Hooper’s nightmare was unleashed. And yet even though the film is absolutely awful, if you are like me and adore this strain of cinema, you will find yourself admitting that I Drink Your Blood is so bad it is almost, well, good!

A group of wacky Satanist hippies lead by the bloodthirsty Horace Bones (Played by Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) roll into what appears to be a fairly conservative and largely abandoned small town. After the gang captures a local girl Sylvia (Played by Iris Brooks), who was watching the group perform a satanic ritual in the woods, they proceed to rape the poor girl. The next day, Sylvia stumbles from the woods, bloodied and rough up. She is discovered by Mildred (Played by Elizabeth Marner-Brooks), a woman who runs a local meat pie bakery, and Sylvia’s younger brother Pete (Played by Riley Mills). Mildred and Pete take Sylvia home to her grandfather Banner (Played by Richard Bowler), who swears he will get revenge on the group for what they have done to his granddaughter. Armed with a double barrel shotgun, he goes out to find the group, who has taken up shelter in an abandoned and supposedly haunted house. The group soon discovers Banner sneaking up on them and consequently he is the beaten, tortured, and force-fed LSD. Pete follows his grandfather to the house where he tries to rescue his grandfather and the two barely escape. While Banner recovers, Pete takes his grandfather’s shotgun and kills a rabid dog, taking its blood with a syringe and proceeds to inject it into a batch of meat pies. Pete then offers the meat pies to the hippies and soon after eating them, members of the group begin changing into rabid, infected psychos who just want to dismember anyone in their path.

Vaguely evocative of the Manson Family and part cautionary tale about the side effects of LSD, I Drink Your Blood is a repulsive gross out film with very little aptitude. It is never insinuating, as at one particular moment, the young and naïve Pete asks about LSD and a whole background is given on the drug. It doesn’t help that it packs the most outrageous plotline ever conceived. Yet it achieves cult status much like films like Burial Grounds, Zombie, Cannibal Holocaust, and I Spit on Your Grave. It has to be seen to be believed. That is if you can stomach it. Filled with pointless sex scenes (The film stops part way through to deliver for the nudity craving viewers) and graphic gore (In one scene, a leg is hacked off and it is a bit too real), it is no wonder this film was slapped with an X rating upon its release.

I Drink Your Blood is a film of memorable scenes rather than a substantial work of art. You will never forget a hoard of construction workers flailing through a field looking for someone to hack up. How about the moment with cult movie starlet Lyn Lowry (Of The Crazies fame) sawing off someone’s hand and carrying it around and examining it? How about the pregnant Satanist stabbing her own bulging, pregnant stomach? Or a mouth foaming psycho carrying a severed head around showing it to terrified citizens? Pretty sick stuff, huh? There are moments that have been influential (I’m fairly certain that Rob Zombie was inspired by the final firefight and added a nod to it in The Devil’s Rejects. He also samples a bit of the synthy score in his song “Feel So Numb”) and some that are harrowing (The final shot of the film sticks with you).

Unable to evaluate the film on intellectual terms (The film sparks no intellectual thought at all), I Drink Your Blood knows its target audience and everyone else can go to Hell. It is a sour concoction that manages to offend in almost every way imaginable and I’m convinced that is the only reason it was made. If you are deeply disturbed by animal cruelty, I’d stay far away from this (And Cannibal Holocaust). I found myself chuckling at some of the lunacy but I suppose I take these films on their own turf and the more extreme they are, the more the burrow their way into the soft spot I have for them. Yet I would never consider I Drink Your Blood a good film or recommend it to anyone looking for a movie to watch on a Friday night. The craftsmanship is amateur, the score is repetitive, and the acting cartoonish, I Drink Your Blood is for fans of this genre only and especially ones who understand how to approach this material. If your mission is to seek out the most extreme forms of cinema and try to see as many of these films as you can, I Drink Your Blood will rank among some of the most twisted you will see. If there was ever a film that leaves the viewer thinking they need a shower, I Drink Your Blood is the one.

Grade: D+

Favorite Epidemic/Apocalyptic Thriller… GO!