SHIVERS - Back to horror basics with David Cronenberg's first non-experimental feature. I think it must have made a very strong statement at the time of its release, and imo remains a disturbing and vivid piece of cinema to this day. In fact, on seeing it now, I find a far more potent and disconcerting work than did my 16 year old self, who felt short changed on watching it for the first time back in the early nineties. Of course, back then I was expecting a load of sci-fi blood and guts... now I'm sufficiently evolved and well adapted to be enthralled by an orgy of sexual terror! Erm, well on a 'serious' note this takes on the issue of libidinal economy like few B-movies of its time and seems to offer a vision of socio-sexual dystopia a la a kind of inverted Norman O Brown. It's difficult to read its sexual politics - Cronenberg has been lambasted by both left and right, particularly for his early stuff - but the final image, with the swingers cruising into town with all the placid, smug contentment of their previously sexless, caged up alienation, is more grim in its irony than anything else in the movie. And there IS plenty of grim, with some sequences that even now must seem unassimalable from the perspective of mainstream cinema. This is well up there with Cronenberg's best stuff at leat in terms of ideas, impact and imagery, and is the first of his to embody that Brundlefly fusion of B-movie exploitation and dead serious quasi-art film that marked those early works, which still seem so unique in tone and atmosphere.
 |