Rabid (The Last Drive-In)

Film Year:  1977
Genre:  Horror
Director:  David Cronenberg
Starring:  Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silver, Howard Ryshpan

The Movie

I'm trying to think up an adequate way to give Rabid a synopsis, though putting these details into print makes the movie sound really dumb.  Rabid is the story of Rose, who is badly hurt in a motorcycle crash.  An experimental skin graft surgery saves her life, but it also mutates her into feasting on human blood, which she does so with a fang/worm appendage that comes out of her armpit.  Rose goes from person to person drinking their blood, but she leaves behind a trail of people who get a rabies-like (but totally not rabies) disease that turns them into zombie-like creatures that eat human flesh.

It's really hard to make an armpit worm that creates zombies sound cool.  The execution almost sells it, though.

Rabid was an early film directed by David Cronenberg, a popular director that I admit I'm not too familiar with.  I saw his remake of The Fly and didn't care for it (I by far prefer the original) and I saw A History of Violence years ago and remember next to nothing except Viggo Mortensen's ass humping Maria Bello on a staircase.  I'm not questioning the man's talent, it's just that I haven't been interested enough to explore it.  I found Rabid interesting, but not interesting enough to change that stance.

Rabid is a very well-made movie that feels like Cronenberg playing around with that age-old vampire tale and putting an bio-horror spin on it, infusing it with an STD metaphor as she creates a zombie epidemic as she seeks out "multiple partners."  I found myself sympathetic to Rose, as she's turned into something dangerous and in denial of it because she doesn't want it to be true.  Her final fate in the film is based on this denial, and it's a genuinely sad moment.  Meanwhile, the zombie outbreak is very well executed, and about as gruesome and gory as I think Cronenberg fans might hope.

I'm slightly held back because...this movie's fuckin' weird, aint it?  It's an armpit vampire movie.  And the armpit vampire is created by science, because that's just realistic.  But no amount of science used to explain it will change that it's an armpit vampire movie.  It's probably the best damn armpit vampire movie ever made, but I would think an armpit vampire would crave Old Spice instead of blood.

The Drive-In

Joe Bob gleefully talks about porn in this episode, as the film stars former adult film actress Marilyn Chambers, who does her fair share of nudity in this movie as well.  I think Joe Bob is thankful that he doesn't have to work around TNT's censors anymore, so now we get glorious nudity and his candid discussion relishes it.  But then he also brings up that Marilyn Chambers' real name was Marilyn Briggs, and he wonders if they're related (spoiler alert:  they're not.  Joe Bob's real name is John Bloom).

Sex is a big part of this episode, based on both the nature of the movie and the fact that is stars Chambers.  When the subject of Chambers comes up, Joe Bob immediately discusses her porn career, specifically Beyond the Green Door.  Speaking of porn, Joe Bob also analyzes the film's porno theater scene by going on a tangent that the movie they're watching wasn't real porn but "Maple Syrup Porn," of which his description of is hysterical.  He talks a lot about Cronenberg's style of "venereal horror" and his use of science to create the epidemic.

Darcy closes this episode out by giving Joe Bob a trick question from the viewers:  Who was the first actor other than Boris Karloff to play Frankenstein's Monster in a Universal production?  She stumps Joe Bob by bringing up an obscure 1941 comedy called Hellzapoppin', which featured the monster played by Dale Van Sickel, though unfortunately both of Joe Bob's guesses would have been wrong had this movie not have been in consideration.  Joe Bob first throws out Christopher Lee, who played the monster in Curse of Frankenstein (which wasn't a Universal production), and then settled on Glenn Strange, who started playing the monster in 1944's House of Frankenstein.  But before Glenn Strange played the monster, Lon Cheney Jr. (Ghost of Frankenstein) and Bela Lugosi (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man) both had a crack at him.  So Joe Bob was thoroughly stumped on that one, but switching from Cronenberg to Universal Frankenstein would probably throw anybody for a loop.  Especially when we're talking as much about armpit vampires and porn as we have been today.

Joe Bob's Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐