Shivers

Rating:
Summary: Slugs and sex
Review: For those of you that like Cronenberg movies, you won't be disappointed. This is an earlier film by this director. It has the usuals that you would expect from this director: lots of sexually oriented material and wierdness. I did enjoy this movie, but mostly because it was silly and easy to laugh at. The acting is poor, and the plot is your usual Cronenberg wierdness. It has the feel of many of the zombie movies, altough with sex instead of explicit gore (ie. Zombie, Day of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, etc). If you like Cronenberg movies, this is a must see. If you don't know how you feel about him, move on to something else.

Rating:
Summary: shivers of unease
Review: From the start the film assaults you and all your social values, nicely intercutting scenes of horrid violence with scenes of domestic tranquility, underlying from the start the nature of the tower block deathtrap, its all about facades, the facades of human morality over our true animal nature. All played out in chilling metaphor of modern existence.

Rating:
Summary: not worth the price of the DVD
Review: I am not reviewing the movie itself (though it is not one of Cronenberg's better films) but the DVD media. I am so disappointed in the quality of this DVD. The picture is lame and the sound is just awful. I have great equipment (TV, stereo surround, etc.) and then I see this! I know the movie is from 1970 and low-budget, but there should have been some "bump-up" in sound quality, at the very least, for the DVD release.

Rating:
Summary: Not My Favorite...
Review: I became a big fan of Cronenberg after renting Naked Lunch and Videodrome, and I started buying his movies. Then I bought this movie, and I wish I hadn't. The problem may have been that I expected Shivers to be an extremely high quality movie like the two aforementioned movies, but it is not. It is, in my opinion, a run of the mill B horror movie. It is bloody, and has Cronenberg's characteristic sexual content but after watching it once I knew that I wasn't going to be watching it again for a LONG time. I found myself laughing at it more than anything. If you are one who finds these movies amusing for comic relief, you'll probably like this movie more than I did. It is worth seeing once, but I wish I would have just rented this movie instead of buying it.

Rating:
Summary: Yes, Slugs = Sex
Review: I bumped into this on cable tonight and was very impressed. This is ideal deadtime viewing. I'm no horror groupie, and those few I've enjoyed seem to be quite slow-moving with the viewer not on man or the monster's side, but rather bewteen the two, quietly uring on the the camera's dark fancy (Dawn of the Dead, Nosferatu). I was curious to see who directed it and wasn't surprised to see Cronenberg's name in the credits (the blonde slavic looker must have been sculpted from an identical mould to that of James Spader's spouse in Crash). I thought he made very nice use of what felt like a standard style of horror cinematography (as well a hint of Tarkovsky and Solaris), mixing into this formula a twist in the standard attacking parasite that drew a striking case for the erotic underpinnings of tension and sensuality that underline the allure of blood and death and the occasional flesh eating slug.

I haven't got a clue what the dvd of this is like, but I'm tempted to say go with vhs on this one. The visuals don't exactly call out for the most refined quality of picture. No need to take my advice, but why pass up the chance to get it on a format destined for a history of whose charms we will probably recognize as quite in keeping with those of movies like Shivers. This one also has a better cover so no excuse really.

Rating:
Summary: Early Cronenberg shows lots of promise
Review: I had read a review of this movie and decided to buy it because it sounded very original. It is original and pretty disturbing to me, but it only marks the beginning of David Cronenberg's strange visions. In case you don't know what this is about, here it is in a sentence. A scientist created a parasite that would inhabit humans in order to replace missing organs, but it makes its recipients sex maniacs who can pass the parasite by way of kissing and having sex. There are other details, but I'll let you discover them when, or should I say if, you see it.
To call this movie strange isn't completely accurate because it definitely isn't as strange, or demented as his other work. In some ways he seems like he's going for a more conventional horror movie here rather than doing a scary social commentary like his other films. At the end of the widescreen VHS version of this movie, which I have, Cronenberg talks about how he was just starting to become a visual director during the making of this film and that should be obvious to anyone familiar with his work because there's less sophisticated frame composition in this movie. Quite simply put, this film has a documentary cinematography style except for some slow motion effects. If you put all of that aside it's still a good and scary vision even though it's also an obviously dated movie. I believed that the best moment was watching the infected little girl kiss the adult in the mouth in order to infect him. If you enjoy strange and dated horror, you'll probably like this.

Rating:
Summary: The Day I Found David
Review: I knew Cronenberg had a great future the day I walked into SHIVERS in 1976. Friends thought I was bats, but it was so obvious this director had a unique take on human behavior and some issues about life, death and biology that were eating, ha, away at him (actually he had watched his dear father die a horrible death from cancer). SHIVERS is serious and wack at once, contains some wonderfully subversive imagery, some camp moments (Barbara Steele cooing "kiss me, kiss me, kiss me"), and a very haunting score cobbled together from library cues(!). It's one of those treasures that stands up to many 'readings', and can be viewed as a psychic precurser to the AIDS tragedy, and/or the persistent quest of the yuppie to find the perfect home only to have his id come-a-knockin'.

Rating:
Summary: Terror-ific film but the DVD has problems
Review: I love this disturbing and entertaining film. I too, noticed the pixelization and artifacting on the DVD expecially in the beginning moments of the film. I'll get the LD for good measure. In respect, this is Cronenberg's champion starter. How scary the idea of parasites and disease and utter chaos relate to current events. Notice there is hardly any characters to "root for" apart from the bewieldered doctor on the premesis. This film cannot be called cliched, that's for sure. Interestingly, Cronenberg's open casting call (and subsequent hiring of non-professional actors) really compliments this film - they act like the tenants of any apartment building. Scary? It depends on what you find scary - of course, I'm absolutely terrified of any woman who comes pounding and scratching on my door with over-done make-up and lusting after food! Entertaining? You betcha. Most highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: It will make you shiver... with regret
Review: I will admit, ordinarily Cronenberg is a crazy genius. No I don't believe he's crazy, but that his genius is often so radical, there's nowhere else for his films to go but beyond criticism. He's one of those rare directors whose work mixes genres so diverse, so intensely, that he's formed his own genre. His stories are science fiction for our reality, the characters are typically average working Joes, the circumstances change heads from being commonplace to otherworldly. And it's that journey that makes his film resume so extraordinary and unique.

But this film is an early work. Mostly it suffers from low quality, bad production values. I'm including acting and whatever method was needed to pull off the work accomplished by actors that has been mistaken for acting. Because you need actors to go into production. The plot is definitely interesting, but the movie is worse than dull. It's actually hard to sit through. It's amateur night all the way through. This movie desperately needed some direction. Cronenberg did what he could, but as a learning experience, the audience should not have necessarily been taken along for the ride.

This plot involves an experiment by some kind of doctor/scientist who infected certain sexual partners with a virus/parasite that made the partners crazy and horny. For what reason remains unknown. And from there, we find out that the doctors' initial partner has been spreading the disease to other tenants of the luxury apartment building they both live in. It quickly gets out of hand, as each new infected host spreads the bug around to another person. Each man/woman/child sexually assaulting the next person to "pass it around".

I guess in the end, it's the dullness and the confusion of the story that tanks this debut. The FX are also pretty bad, none of the scare/attack moments are very memorable, and the movie's also not very entertaining or fun. Of note to some genre fans, scenes from this movie inspired Dan O'Bannon's "Alien".

Rating:
Summary: Liberal interpretation of the hippocratic oath
Review: Mr Cronenberg a thief? Well, I thought he might have 'borrowed' some ideas from Pasolini's SALO, but it appears they were released around the same time. If anyone's been light with their fingers over this movie then it's George A Romero.

Reprehensible use of minors in this picture cannot make this anything other than a one star, but see it for Paul Hampton as doctor Roger St Luc. His performance rocks!