SHIVERS (1975)

Surgery

Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease

Intimacy

Title: Shivers
Year: 1975
Director: David Cronenberg
Format: Blu-ray
Label: Arrow Video

Notes:

I recently watched David Cronenberg's debut feature-length film (he previously made a couple of 60 minute amateur efforts) for the second time and comparing this pretty decent restoration with the low bit-rate pan-and-scan monstrosity I first saw on the Horror Channel was like night and day. Something to think about next time you see a dubious presentation on TV.

Obviously Cronenberg is still finding his juvenile feet in this sex-obsessed body horror and there's a fair bit of awkward acting from the oddball cast. However his directorial skills are clear to see and the film tells a good zombiefied horror yarn with plenty of gross out set pieces and a thrilling conclusion.

One interesting point to note, especially in the wake of Ben Wheatley's slightly disappointing adaption of J. G. Ballard's High Rise, is that SHIVERS actually seems to do a pretty good job of capturing the look and feel of Ballard's novel and as it's also set in a luxury residential building and was released in the same year as the novel, perhaps that's no surprise. The difference, of course, is that SHIVERS has a mutant monster. That monster was created by humans though...