RABID / PANIC IN THE STREETS

Dir. David Cronenberg CANADA 1977

Dir. Elia Kazan USA 1950


Thanks (as always) to Netflix, I stumbled on a pretty interesting pairing here. It ties in well with the mild David Cronenberg kick I've been on over the past few months and resulted in one really good and one pretty good viewing experience.

Rabid was shot and set in and around Montreal and begins with a motorcycle accident outside the city. A young girl named Rose is rushed to the nearest hospital, which just happens to be a cutting edge (for the late 70's) plastic surgery spa. Through a series of experimental (and highly improbable; the word morphogenetic gets thrown around a bunch) skin grafts, the doctors are able to save her life. She awakens from a coma a month later, only to find that she is unable to sustain herself on normal food. She quickly comes to realize that she requires human blood in order to survive. Cronenberg, never one to settle for the norm, devises a blood-drinking process that is unique, disgusting and disturbingly sexual. I won't spoil it here. After escaping from the hospital, Rose attempts to hitch-hike back to her boyfriend in Montreal, feeding along the way. She is unaware, however, that her "bites" transmit a lethal strain of rabies that transforms its victims into bloodthirsty animals mere hours after infection.

So yeah, this movie packs a lot into 90 minutes and feels very ambitious despite its schlocky subject matter and cast (more on that below). Cronenberg was still relatively unknown outside Canada when the film was made but he brings every cent of what must have been a small budget to bear, effectively depicting a city in chaos in the last act of the film, complete with military vs. zombie action and desolate, post-apocalyptic city streets.

In terms of the story, the film effectively tackles both vampire and zombie mythology, blending them well into a single narrative. The vampire aspect is particularly well done, combining a new take on the material (Rose possesses no vampiric 'powers' beyond the infection she spreads and her need for blood; also the manner in which she bites is, as I mentioned, unique) with a surprising lack of wangst generally found in vampire stories (Rose isn't exactly thrilled with her new situation, but ends up being fairly practical and ruthless rather than spending the whole movie crying about it).

The zombie half of the film, despite being similar to all that we've seen since then, probably seemed fairly ground-breaking at the time. Released a whole year before Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Rabid actually feels closer to Romero's lesser known 1973 film The Crazies, underlining similar themes of paranoia and militarism, while providing much more effective action and horror sequences (although I though the 2010 remake of The Crazies with Timothy Olyphant did a good job of updating Romero's vision). Also, Rabid may be the earliest example of fast zombies I've ever seen. Austin Trunick, my former roommate and all-around zombie movie expert could only cite the Italian film, City of the Walking Dead as a possibly earlier example, but according to Wikipedia, but that came out in 1980. You could also draw a pretty clear line from Rabid to the 28 Days Later films. In fact, Rabid was released abroad under the title Rage. Probably not a coincidence.

Lastly, I wanted to mention the star of the film, Marilyn Chambers. I was fairly surprised (OK, not that surprised, given that she never wears a bra during the film and spends a good amount of time topless) to learn after watching the movie that she was a fairly popular porn star during the early 70's and Rabid was her (less than successful) attempt at crossing over to a legitimate film career. The film left me wondering why she wasn't more successful, since she's actually very effective at playing a pretty wide range, from fearful to seductive to somewhat villainous. Her overall look is certainly more natural than the porn stars of today, none of whom seem like they'd have as good a shot at crossing over into regular film. Shame it didn't work out for her.



Panic In The Streets is an odd little movie. Although Elia Kazan was notable for directing several earlier films, it is the last one he made before launching himself into film history with a string of classics in the early to mid-50's (A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, East Of Eden). Although my sister could speak more authoritatively on his work, I've seen enough to know that Kazan's tropes of realism and social awareness are in full force here.

The film begins at a card game in the run-down wharf area of New Orleans where a sickly Eastern European immigrant is murdered by a trio of gangsters following an argument over a card game. His body is dumped in the river and recovered the next day by the police. When the coroner discovers strange anomalies in the man's blood, the US Public Health Department dispatches Clint Reed to investigate. Reed discovers that the man (who was found without any kind of identification), was sick with pneumonic plague, an extremely lethal respiratory infection. Reed and the New Orleans police have 48 hours to locate the now infected murderers in order to stop a major outbreak of the disease from devastating the city.

Panic In The Streets was released in 1950, so you won't be finding any graphic depictions of sick people (dizziness and being really sweaty are pretty much the only symptoms shown) and, like many films of the post-war, pre-New Hollywood era (1945 to 1967, in case you're curious), the darkness of the film's subject matter is at odds with what they were and weren't allowed to show on screen. However, the film is briskly paced and well-shot, combining a basic police procedural with a socially conscious race against the clock. Kazan strives for realism wherever he can find it (much of the film seems to have been shot on location, if not actually in New Orleans), depicting the squalor of ghetto tenement buildings and rough-looking union halls with a clear eye for detail. His choice of casting for the gangsters (an extremely sinister, then unknown Jack Palance in his first film role and the hilariously named comedian Zero Mostel, who I've seen in other films of the time, always playing a blustery, easily cowed criminal) is pretty spot-on as well.

Oddly, Richard Widmark seems a bit miscast as Clint Reed (manly name non-withstanding). I've always enjoyed him in his usual roles as low-rent criminals and stone-cold killers, so the scenes of him living an idyllic 1950's suburban life with a pretty wife and scrappy little kid seemed a bit jarring. He does a fine job, but I found it much easier to see him in the Jack Palance role as I was watching the film.

In the end, the film spends a bit too much time on the procedural aspect of the case (pairing Widmark up with a police captain with a chip on his shoulder seemed both unnecessary and underdeveloped) and throws in too many scenes of bureaucrats and officials not listening to reason for me to say that it was a favorite, but it was interesting to see a film from 1950 deal with a viral outbreak, even if the threat of zombies was never imminent.

UP NEXT: Zombies! Diary Of The Dead is on deck for review and possibly TV reviews as the new fall season kicks off. Stay tuned.