Director: David Cronenberg
Rating: 6 out of 10
Here's a weird under-the-radar flick that, I'm assuming, most people don't really know. If you google the words "Cronenberg" and "horror" you'll probably get the majority of the results including The Fly and/or Videodrome, two movies I plan on viewing before the big holiday on Oct. 31st. But I've read a little bit about The Brood and was intrigued because, hey, it's David friggin' Cronenberg. And I think intrigueing is the right word for the film, as I'm having a hard time pinning down whether I truly enjoyed it or not. It's definitely different, as his films usually are, and weird, in a very melancholy kind of way.
The basic premise of the film involves the lives of a separated husband and wife as the wife undergoes highly experimental and unusual therapy called "Psychoplasmics" at the hands of one of the least happy psychiatrists of all time. But, that's a Cronenberg film: rarely happy and usually loaded with heavy ideas and thoughts. When the couple's daughter shows up with awful bruises and scratches on her back, the husband suspects his mentally ill wife physically abused the child during a routine visit. Of course, this is just the first in a long line of suspicious and weird things that start happening. When the wife's mother is brutally murdered in her home by a little disfigured dwarf creature the movie vaguely begins to take shape.
See, Cronenberg doesn't lay things out on the table under a bright light with a diagram explaining the details of the story. If you're paying attention and thinking, you'll pick up on it as the film goes on. I don't think today's audiences would really appreciate that form of storytelling, and I would be totally disgusted if they decided to remake this one. Not because it's in a unflinching classic, but because I know what the studio system would do to a story like this: leave out the ambiguousness and have the killer dwarves popping out of everywhere with a loud musical chord highlighting each moment. They don't understand a slow-build kind of horror film.
Now, there is a line between slow-building and just plain slow and boring, and this film teeters on that line until the last 10 or 15 minutes. That's when Cronenberg pulls the curtain back and shows you what the hell has been going on, and it's pretty strange, to say the least. The moment where the wife reveals what's beneath her gown to her mortified husband is vile and freaky, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Cronenberg's remake of The Fly.
The film starts unhappy, continues it's unhappiness, and ends unhappily. It's a pretty good horror flick, it just isn't a shred of fun for the viewer.
Next: Trick 'r' Treat
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