David Cronenberg – Missile Test

October Horrorshow: Jason X

Jason X It’s Friday the 13^th! In October! Missile Test couldn’t possibly let the day go by without watching a Friday the 13^th flick, and this one is a doozy. By 2001, the original Friday the 13^th franchise was on its last legs. The producers, recognizing that the old formula had been ground into dust by overuse, decided to shake things up. And by shake things up, I mean they all contracted serious cases of the awfuckits and sent their franchise property into space. That’s right, no more summer camp and no more Crystal Lake. This film takes place in outer space…in the future. Hell yeah.

Jason X, from writer Todd Farmer and director James Isaac, is the tenth film in the Friday the 13^th franchise. It’s the second to ditch the Friday the 13^th moniker, after 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. When a film franchise forgoes using its title — the most significant brand that it has — a viewer can tell that things haven’t been going so well lately. The Friday the 13^th flicks were always moneymakers, but the return on investment had been going down with every film, and the franchise had earned an unsavory reputation for being cheap, exploitative schlock. Clearly the only thing to do was to double down. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Jason X”

October Horrorshow: Shivers

Shivers movie poster Has David Cronenberg ever made a movie that wasn’t about sex? On some level, probably not. There’s also nothing wrong with that, despite the prudish direction the moral majority has taken the United States in the last 35 years or so. Good thing for us that Cronenberg is a Canadian, right?

Shivers, from 1975, is Cronenberg’s first feature film, and it is all about sex. It’s not a fetish exploration like his later film, Crash, but sex is a central theme. In Shivers, a well-meaning but certifiably insane doctor named Hobbes (Fred Doederlein) has infected a resident of a new residential tower in Montreal with a parasite. The mad doctor told his financial backers and research partners that he was developing a new method to regrow organs, when in fact his true purpose was to return man to an animalistic state, a state where life would be one endless orgy. But, he screwed up, and the film opens with him trying to destroy the teenager whom he infected with the parasite. In the opening scenes, we see the doctor kill the girl and then himself, in a brutal but well done little introduction to the film that juxtaposes the modern living aspects of the apartment building with the brutal horror hidden within its walls. Even in his first film, Cronenberg starts off by showing he understands pace and storytelling. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Shivers”

October Horrorshow: The Fly (1986)

The Fly Teleportation is a fascinating subject. Most sci-fi fans have watched the transporters in Star Trek or elsewhere and thought how cool it would be to travel instantly from one place to another. But then science rears its ugly head. Sure, it’s a novel idea, and would change the way we live in ways that are hard to comprehend. For instance, if distance becomes meaningless, so does security and privacy. There’s no point in having locked doors if anyone at anytime can just teleport into your apartment and steal your stuff. There’s no point in living in cities if you can have cheap housing in the boonies and just teleport into midtown for work. Hungry for some Italian food? Forget the quaint little place that just opened in the old downtown, in the spot the shoe store used to be. Go to fucking Italy! Teleportation would be such a revolution in the way we think about distance that it would remake society in ways we can scarcely imagine. But there’s a dark side. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Fly (1986)”