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Every David Cronenberg Movie, Ranked
The master of body horror is constantly reinventing himself.
Though something of a bona fide gearhead (he’d convert his love of cars into controversy a couple decades later with the icy-kinky Crash), Cronenberg is firmly in work-for-hire mode with the story of an aging driver (venerated stuntman William Smith) fending off retirement with the help of a ragtag pit crew of fellow rapscallions. But if Rabid was a major formal leap forward for the director, it also plays like a sillier, less unsettling retread of his earlier Shivers, which had the good sense to confine its eroticized gloss on Night of the Living Dead to a single besieged apartment complex instead of opening it up to all of Quebec. Yet Cronenberg aims for the heart as heartily as the gag reflex: Thanks to the star-making chemistry between Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum (the latter emoting richly under pounds of prosthetics to play the most sympathetic monster since Karloff’s), The Fly becomes a devastating meditation on terminal illness and the horror of watching a loved one waste away.
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