Cinema

Sick sex

Ian Cameron

In search of something more promising than the week's official menu of press shows, I have been trying my luck with the double bill of Canadian horror movies which is currently at the Classic, Piccadilly Circus. Shivers and Cannibal Girls (both 'X' certificate) are related in parentage—Ivan Reitman, the director and executive producer of Cannibal Girls, is the producer and music supervisor of Shivers. However, they operate on very different levels.

The only surprise that Cannibal Girls has to offer is its setting—not the tropics, but a small Canadian town in the depths of winter. Into this glum little place stray a stereotyped rock musician and his inane girlfriend. Somehow the town is under the influence of a formally attired young man who runs a restaurant staffed by a one-eyed hunchback and three girl cannibals whose taste is for male flesh.

The story is the film's biggest liability, though the dialogue, 'developed by the cast' doesn't help. Having equipped himself with a story that he clearly feels is silly, Reitman makes a half-hearted stab at a humorous approach which yields no more than two or three chuckles and a general lack of conviction. The very few shocks are defused by a warning buzzer grafted on the soundtrack by American distributors. The Friday night audience was audibly fed til). It is possible to conceive of the general outline being used for a film that was terrifying or hilarious or both. The fatal

weakness is not in the premise itself—after all, remarkable films (and plays and books)

have been constructed around plots that in summary seem demonstrably foolish. The failure here is in the director's response to his material.

Shivers, which is written and directed bY David Cronenberg, demonstrates that while an interesting plot idea may not he essential to a horror film, it certainly helps. Ultimately, it is that old favourite, the scientific experiment which gets out of hand. The wizard wheeze this time is to supersede transplant surgery by breeding parasites that are also useful and take over bodily functions, so that you can have a perfectly good parasite where you used to

have a rotten kidney. The scheme goes

astray because its deviser, who has a penchant for conducting breast cancer examinations on very young girls, produces a creature which is 'a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease' with the aim of turning the world into one big orgY• The recent wave of disaster films uses a standard form which was to be found

twenty years ago in the more modest format

of the monster movie: the difference is that it is now nature or real technology rather

than fantasy science that gets out of control. Cronenberg plays on the similarity hY setting his horror movie in a luxurioUs

tower block, and handling it as a disaster film, taking as his narrative the attempts of the block's resident physician to escape and

raise the alarm. The worrying lack of anY sense of internal geography, a by-product of the architecture, is used to great effect. The disaster is that the creatures do 001 just spread joy. They have nasty side-effects and a strikingly revolting appearai1ce.

brown, slimy and the same shape as the gherkins that one of the film's doctors likes to eat, they combine strong phallic and faecal connotations. They are nimble and aggressive, finding their way through drains and ventilators and leaping out of washing

machines. But they grow in humans. In the film's most riveting sequence, a man lies on his bed looking with obviously sexual excitement at the creatures swelling LIP under the hirsute skin of his abdomen' They emerge from their hosts by erupting through the skin or by being vomited. A gutsy piece of work aimed at rather robust audiences, Shivers founders in the end on its own lack of definition. It see'ns unsure of what it wants to present as. repellent: the creatures certainly are, hut there is much ambivalence towards sc'!' Sex under the influence of the creatures.! usually, but not always, shown distaste, and there are hints thatOf distaste could spread to sex in general' Having set up his situation, Cronenberg

not devised a way of resolving it except hY allowing the parasites to take over evell_ one, including finally the doctor. After a

mass frisk in the apartment block's swimming pool, the characters set out looking carefree to rampage through Toronto. Perhaps the parasites are not such an affliction, after all. The film's apparent inability to make up its mind could stem from the snag of being an exploitation movie, needing to have its cake even if only to condemn it.